The Throne That Wasn't Mine

"A crown is not a gift. It is a debt, owed to every soul who kneels beneath it. And I have always paid my debts."

The guy in the third row finally put his phone down.

Finally.

He'd spent the whole first half of the scene lighting his own chin from underneath while I negotiated the survival of a fictional kingdom. I'd seriously considered delivering my next line straight at him. Our director had asked me, more than once, to stop improvising threats at the audience, and I had agreed to respect her artistic limitations.

For now, his attention would do.

School gymnasium. Floor wax, and the curry bread they were selling by the doors. A lighting rig buzzing over my head like it had opinions. Stage left, one of our painted mountains was quietly peeling off its backing.

Not an ideal setting for a coronation.

I had prepared for one anyway.

The costume committee had padded my narrow shoulders and combed my black hair back off my forehead. Somebody had drawn shadows under my cheekbones to supply the severity my seventeen-year-old face refused to grow on its own.

Three weeks of rehearsal. Three weeks of watching interviews and speeches and parliamentary hearings--anything with powerful people in it who weren't actively trying to look powerful. The shouting was never the interesting part. Anybody can shout. It was the man who reached for his water while somebody was still demanding an answer. The woman who let a hostile question finish, then made the asker wait.

I stole all of it.

King Solvane the Second of Aurelheim started as a name on a stapled script. I went through it with a pencil until the pages were grey, asking every line the same two questions. What does he want? What is he actually asking for? By final rehearsal he had a posture, a walk, and a very specific way of looking at people who had disappointed him.

That last one didn't take much research.

Across the stage, Miyata missed his mark. Again. Half a step too close to the throne, face out of the light. We'd fixed this yesterday. And the day before yesterday. I had put the strip of white tape down myself.

He glanced at the floor. Found it. Shuffled back.

Progress. He'd have it down by graduation.

"Speak," I said. "Your king is listening."

Miyata's mouth opened. Nothing came out. In the wings, our director did a tiny, desperate thing with her script.

I rested my hand on the arm of the throne. Slowly. The whole gym followed it.

"The eastern watch," I prompted. "You have come from the eastern watch."

"Y-yes, Your Majesty. The watch has--"

Light came up under my shoes.

First thought: somebody's triggered the coronation effect two scenes early.

Second thought: we don't have a coronation effect.

Gold lines spread across the plywood under the throne. They ran under the hem of my robe and came out the other side, curling into letters I couldn't read. The rented lights above us flickered.

Miyata looked down.

"That isn't--"

The microphone caught him. Somebody in the audience laughed. Somebody else clapped.

And for one really stupid second, I was actually offended that they thought we'd been hiding a bigger budget from them.

Then the circle rose.

It didn't flare. It lifted--up through the throne, through my knees, through the hand I had started to raise.

Miyata reached for me.

I remember that very clearly. He forgot his line. He missed his mark. And when something impossible opened under my feet, he reached for me.

I didn't reach him.

The gymnasium went away.

There's no useful way to describe it. No falling. Nothing to brace against. For a moment I was certain my hands were somewhere my arms couldn't possibly reach, and that something enormous was examining the arrangement without much interest in whether I approved.

White.

Pressure.

A smell like a struck match.

Then my fingers closed on stone.

I was sitting down.

The throne was wrong.

The armrest under my hand was black. Cold. Polished smooth along the edge, the way stone gets when a lot of hands have rested on it for a very long time. Small figures were carved down the side--a procession of long-limbed things carrying objects I couldn't name. Dust sat in the deepest grooves.

The last of the gold light was still fading around my feet. It ran along one of the carvings, and for a heartbeat the little figures looked like they had taken a step.

I did not look at them again. I had enough problems.

My throne had been plywood painted silver. The left arm wobbled. This one didn't.

Somebody spoke sharply. I lifted my head.

A hall. Grey stone, high narrow windows, banners hanging between pillars that went up into shadow and didn't come back. Resin smoke and wet wool. Men along the walls in armor that had actually been used--scratched around the buckles, straps gone dark, a dent hammered mostly flat.

In the middle of them, in an oak chair under a carved canopy, sat a man wearing a circlet. Iron-grey beard cut square to his jaw. Dark red coat, tight across the shoulders, fastened at the throat with gold.

His chair was below mine.

Three steps below, to be exact.

Even then--even with my heart trying to break something on its way out of my chest--I noticed that.

The circle under my throne had cut straight across an inlaid pattern in the floor. Gold light was still crawling along one edge of it. A woman in grey robes was staring at the stone beside my knee like it had said something rude.

"The seat," she said.

An older man caught her sleeve. Thin, pale, white hair combed flat above a collar so stiff with embroidery it could probably have stood up on its own.

Not my face. Not the crown.

The seat.

I wanted my phone.

The want hit so hard I almost reached for a pocket I didn't have. My phone was in my schoolbag behind the stage, next to a packet of safety pins and the lunch I hadn't finished.

My mother had said she'd get there before the third act.

A guard moved.

I stopped breathing.

The man in the circlet lifted two fingers, and the guard stopped at the foot of the steps.

That helped. Not enough to make any of this bearable. Enough to think.

They didn't know what to do with me.

The woman in grey looked frightened. The old man looked offended by something bigger than my arrival. And the king--because come on, what else was he--was studying the throne like a man who has recognized a problem and hasn't yet worked out how big it is.

I could stand up. I could tell them my age, ask where I was, explain the school festival.

The guard's hand was resting on his sword.

I stayed sitting.

Here's something I learned that day: sometimes courage is just failing to think of anything better.

My body knew exactly one useful arrangement. I gave it that. Shoulders loose. Chin level. Fingers resting, not gripping. Solvane received bad news as though the news ought to be embarrassed for bothering him.

I had practiced that face in the reflection of a train window. Now I was doing it above an actual foreign king.

He looked up at me. I looked down at him. The angle was doing work I couldn't afford to waste.

My mouth was so dry the first breath hurt. I swallowed once, slowly, and let irritation settle over my face like a costume.

"You have gone," I said, "to considerable trouble to bring me somewhere I never agreed to go."

My voice held. It went all the way to the back of the hall, farther than I'd sent it, and came back to me off the stone.

I had never been so grateful to anything.

"I am prepared to be reasonable about that."

One beat.

Another.

"Once."

The old man's fingers tightened on the woman's sleeve. The king did not look away.

Somewhere behind my calm expression, a boy in a school costume was waiting for an adult to tell him what had just happened.

Nobody did.

So I kept going.