Chapter 1

Chapter One

For twelve hundred years,

Kings pondered purpose.

I stood before the door of my hotel room, staring at the cracked, red paint. In truth, the cracked paint barely registered past the curtains veiling the square windows on either side of the door. When had that lace appeared, so delicate and fragile and fresh? The last I’d looked, yellowed and torn lace covered the dusty glass there.

Mother must have been busy with renovations. She spent far more time on them in death than she had in life.

I heaved a weary sigh that rattled the door on its hinges. Tonight, I much preferred the memory of yellowed and torn things.

Delicate and fragile and new curtains felt too much like I felt inside.

A monster strode out of my wardrobe. “You forgot something. Again.”

I glanced back to spot the garments closest to her reaching out their empty sleeves as if to pull the woman back into the room. Everything in that wardrobe loved her, all the hundreds of garments and buttons and embroidered details… the hundreds of garments that were all for me.

I stared at the door again.

Lace curtains were not the only difference to the hotel. This room was a far cry from the run-down hotel studio I used to clean. Now, this space was much more like a chamber. And Hotel Vitale, once the only hotel in this city, was more like a gated garden villa.

And I was less like a barely surviving nineteen-year-old carer of her invalid mother and more like a…

Valetise set the tarnished copper crown on my head. “There. You must be seen in this.”

She rounded my right side and studied me with an expert eye. “Hold still, please.”

She plucked a black hair from her head, and I watched it flood with the same white as my dress. She had dressed me in a gauzy garment for floating summers and picnic evenings—as if such things could exist after The End. I’d worn a great deal of white in the last week, and perhaps Valetise viewed this color as my queenly uniform. I didn’t care to ask.

The haberdashery monster drew the end of a tape measure out from her waist, quickly measured, and then let it snap back to coil inside her body. The newest dusk creature in Vitale was excellently and beautifully crafted for her purpose.

Ruffled lace around her neck bounced gently as Valetise assessed her handiwork. Clearly satisfied, she slipped the needle into the thick layers of calloused skin on one of her forearms.

I’d discovered how incredible and capable my own monster body was in recent times, but I couldn’t help but envy the completeness and surety of my valet extraordinaire.

I pushed the copper crown up as it slipped down my forehead. “For how long will I need to wear this?”

“Only you can know that, my queen.”

I inhaled and held my breath, then— oof— released it in a rush. “I am only quite ancient and newly a queen, and a queen without purpose at that.”

Perhaps I should have asked how long the crown would wear me .

“You are an exquisite creature, Queen Perantiqua, and there is no one in the world like you. There will never be another like you again,” Valetise murmured, and she had a way of murmuring unlike any other being. There was nothing demure or soft about it. Her murmur held steel somehow. How wondrous.

I accepted the wisdom of her words, yet tonight they didn’t resonate in my heart and mind as I wished them to. “Exquisite and unique and without a reason for being.”

“Is not being enough?”

“One week ago, it was,” I answered. “Tonight, this crown is a weight on my head and in my mind.”

Valetise lingered behind, and as sure and complete as she was, the newest monster in Vitale could not understand matters of kings and a queen.

I would sooner expect a prince to fathom them.

Or perhaps a pawn.

I wrenched opened the door and strode across the copper landing to the gold balustrade. The raised heels of my strappy shoes echoed on the landing, and this noise felt very confronting to my feelings as well. If only my hotel didn’t embody me so.

I peered into the courtyard below where twelve monsters had exited their ground-floor rooms to congregate.

Like every evening.

And like every evening, another three monsters walked through my wall of bars who had not stayed at my hotel last night—or ever.

Fifteen conventionally handsome men stood to attention on the cobblestones and tipped their gorgeous faces to view me. They were the embodiment of sculpted gods from mythologies. They were carved to perfection. They were designed to inspire trust and convince a mere human of immense power. Just a touch of otherworldliness. Just enough to lure—human minds were so limited about such matters after all. But here were men whom one might hope to catch on a warm summer day as they toiled in labor, clad without tunic. One might wait with bated breath to catch his eye across the room, while also writhing in fear that he might eat her whole.

I wrinkled my nose.

Where was dusk? I greatly preferred their true forms.

As I thought the thought, dusk stroked her fangs over their carved faces and tore away their conventional masks. The godlike shroud cloaking them from humans’ fragile minds was lifted to reveal the truth.

I locked gazes with fifteen monstrous princes.

My fifteen pawns. Apparently.

Fifteen pawns filled with my queenly will. They were any manner of blob and fang and mange and leathery skin. Hairless some of them, and too hairy others. Slimy, bulbous, disjointed, and in possession of extra limbs and eyes. Goodness. I sighed in relief to see them as they truly were. Magnificent, and so grotesquely equipped for everything they had to do.

The princely pawns stood in groups of three, and for good reason. Each trio had been warped by ancients to uphold the purpose of one of the five immortal kings.

“Lady Queen, what is your purpose?”

My gaze was dragged to Prince Sign, who was among the trio of princes I least wished to look upon. Their king had irritated me greatly with his insistence I owed him eternal servitude.

Though… this lean prince with gray and waxy leather skin who stood before me wasn’t to blame for his king’s actions. As I perused the rips in his skin and the extra arm he’d formed to better carry out his purpose, I took a moment to redirect my irritation to the king who had caused it.

“I am undecided on purpose this dusk,” I replied, then narrowed my eyes when Sign shared an exasperated look with his brother princes, Seal and Deliver. Perhaps he did deserve an iota of my irritation after all.

“Lady Queen, you did not have any purpose yesterday ,” Prince Toil informed me in a gentle tone that let me know he cared. Maybe he did care, but he’d also been ordered to care by his king.

King Bring would like nothing more than to steal my undergarments away and make me his daylight plaything.

Toil’s brother prince slapped his lowest blob on the cobblestones. His annoyance was too clear, and my brows drew together.

The cobblestones clunked and leaped. “ Careful what you are about, Prince Hex.”

His next sound was a soft squelch of apology, accompanied by the lightest wobbles of embarrassment from the rest of his trio. But Hex met my gaze. “The thing is, Lady Queen, am I Prince Hex tonight? Or Pawn Hex? Just Hex? What am I, and what shall I do? I am called here and there, to your will and the purpose of my king. I do not know where to be, nor what to do.”

How they were meant to juggle their king’s purpose and my will was anyone’s guess, so they should be glad that I had yet to discover any will at all.

“Are you our lady or our queen?” asked Prince Deliver.

Until now, they’d seemed content to call me both as Lady Queen.

Ancient surety creeped into me—the tiniest amount and not enough, really. “I am your queen. You are my princely pawns.”

The pawns were driven to their knees as usual, all of those that possessed knees. The werebeasts of King Change extended a manged foreleg and sank their saliva-moistened snout and fangs forward in a monstrous werewolf bow. The blobs dripped slime as they bowed.

“ I told you, ” someone said. Prince Sigil, I thought. “We’re princely pawns.”

Vassal muttered back. “What does that mean?”

Sigil retorted, “Why, that we’re… princes and pawns. Or superior pawns. Or… inferior princes?”

The princes fell into hushed squabbling. Belonging to five kings as they did, the monsters didn’t get along on the best night.

Each dusk had stalked the same path for the last week. The same irritating question about my purpose. A steely declaration of my queenship that drove pawns to their knees.

Repeat. Since the very dusk after I received a crown and fifteen pawns, monsters had pestered me for answers, answers, answers.

Immortal kings spent twelve hundred years refining their purpose, but apparently, a queen had to beg for anything more than twelve hours.

A rage rumbled in me, and the black hellebores covering Mother’s grave rustled in support of my indignation. The princely pawns closest to her resting place cast furtive looks at the hellebores, and I couldn’t blame them for treating them much as a human may treat a rattle snake. Mother had yawned many treasures away into her grave during my months as a monster. Recently, she’d yawned the princes away, too, only to spit them out in coppered livery. They might not wish to repeat that experience.

I should reassure them not to worry, for if Mother wished to yawn them away, there was nothing they could do to escape her. Best not to feel nervous about certainties.

The squabbling in the courtyard had expanded to include growls, snarls, snaps, hisses, and some very rude squelches.

As with every dusk since queendom, this seemed a good time to escape. “I have many queenly things to do.”

I swept along the second-floor landing in a swirl of white material. My heels echoed on the gem-studded copper floor, but the hollow booms didn’t block out the questions flung after me.

“Lady Queen!” cried Prince Gangrel. “A letter from my liege.”

I scoffed. A letter from King Take was bound to bind me up in knots. He wanted to toy with me indeed. Not in this fragile state, sir.

“Is now a good time to deliver a response to our liege about your eternal servitude?” inquired Prince Seal.

I’d visited King Raise in his kingdom and barely escaped. I would never return there—not free and not as a slave.

A howl. Prince Huckery. His words would be a jumbled, beastly mess to most of the other princes, but I’d become ancient enough to understand them.

“Our liege wants to remind you of his ire,” said the werebeast.

I rolled my eyes. King Change would be my best friend if I set my purpose to ruin and my best enemy if I chose to save the world instead.

Their shouted questions grew fainter as I climbed the sweeping stairs, careful not to tread on the hellebores encroaching on the steps.

The blooms had five petals, and never failed to remind me of five kings, so I directed my weary thoughts to them. “Dear hellebores, please tell me why one king wants to chain me and one wishes to snuff me out. Another wants to toy with my mind, then yet another wants to toy with my body. And the fifth? He wants to—” I stopped myself, just barely, from finishing that thought with “ love me .”

That was the exact opposite of what King See wanted to do, and this was a bitter point between us.

I amended, “ Two kings want to toy with my body.” One for power and the other for… uncomplicated pleasure.

The words didn’t feel exactly honest. “One king wants to toy with my body. One king wants me for princess, which would regrettably erase my purpose and will. He would like my intellectual and sexual companionship, but without any love.”

I exhaled. No wonder a queen had no answers.

“ Our liege wishes very much to know how your purpose might inform his, Queen Patch! ”

I wrenched to a halt at the top of the sweeping stairs at the faint shout from the prince of King See.

The king who wished for many things with me, but never love. His princes had not pestered me a single time in the last week. I had thought fondly of the orders of silence King See must have given them. Surely because he understood how uncentered and drowning I must feel upon becoming a queen.

But tonight his princes had joined the others in pestering me. Had King See’s understanding expired? And could I understand from his question that King See not only wished to know my purpose, but wished to know so that he might form his purpose at long last?

I refused to forsake my purpose to become See’s princess, and I shuddered at the idea of him forsaking his purpose for mine.

Yet King See believed I was the “missing part” to the saving or ruining of the world. He believed that I would make any number of things possible. He was ready to forsake his desires and ambitions for mine.

The feeling that inspired was monstrous. This didn’t seem a healthy start to what might still prove a long and meaningful relationship.

Didn’t he know that any monster could wear a crown? No one should give up their purpose for me… ever.

His question had sparked a hint of fury in me, and so I gathered my voice and called back, “You might tell him that if twelve hundred years of seeing the past, present, and future have not informed his purpose, then a queen of a mere week shall not either.”

My copper crown chose that moment to flop over my forehead, so I pushed up the ill-fitting thing and somewhat stomped into the conservatory.

Upon the sensory greeting of thyme underfoot, undereye, and undernose, I could only mourn the lack of peace that used to greet me when entering the conservatory, back when I was naught but a peasant monster.

Yet no matter that King See had sparked a small rage in me, and no matter that a queen was purposeless— and constantly pushing up this bothersome crown!— in one ambition I was determined.

I took care to avoid stepping on the glass panel entrance to King Raise’s underground stairway kingdom. I did not relish the idea of a topple down there again, and how inconvenient that the entrance sat in the exact middle of my conservatory.

I approached the mirror hanging on the far copper wall. Though dust and creeping thyme and tarnish otherwise shrouded many of the windows and walls of this place, the mirror was obscenely and brutally clean.

A person looking in the mirror could not help but see everything she was.

She had decided to do just that.

So she started at her toes.

Each toe was a different skin tone. I could tell that the fourth toe on my left foot had been broken—the top half leaned away from the third toe as if they’d had an argument. A few blonde hairs spiked out of my second toe on my left foot, while black streaked through my big toe on the same side in a way that made me wonder if that ancestor hadn’t eaten well for a time before she eventually withered.

Fifty ancestral mothers had made me, and as irritated and floundering as I felt as queen, my true form nearly always inspired awe in me. For seven nights, I had done this same thing—looked at myself in the mirror. For seven nights, curiosity had grown in me.

I wanted to know the mothers who had made me.

I wanted to know why I was made of so many stitches. Why all of them were different.

Mother had connected my pelvis to the rest of my monstrous body with neat and regular stitches. I trailed my fingertips over her stitches, feeling the bumps through my gauzy dress. In them I felt her love and her attentiveness and devotion.

But other stitches were ugly and others rushed. Some were complicated or a little too small. Whomever stitched my left forearm to my upper arm had missed the skin in a couple of places.

I lifted my gaze, and the moonlight streaming into the conservatory illuminated me from behind so that the outline of my body was evident through the white dress. I could see that my left leg was thicker than the other—I could feel that leg was stronger and more muscular. Indeed, this was the leg I tended to jump off if I didn’t wish to use the stairs to get here.

One arm was noticeably longer, and I smiled, for while I couldn’t reach the top shelves in the kitchen with my other arm, I always could with the right side.

How I longed for a picture of the mothers who’d withered to make me. The mothers who’d made a deal with King Raise twelve hundred years ago.

“How did you know to make a queen?” I whispered.

The thickest stitches of all slashed across the base of my neck. I hummed a wordless melody as I touched the monstrous sewing. I didn’t sense any ire or bitterness in the stitches.

I sensed function. I sensed that this mother had been determined my head would remain atop my shoulders. I could only feel grateful for her work.

What a great pity that fifty mothers were not here to guide me this dusk. Purpose wasn’t as easy as I had assumed before queendom.

The thing was, I wanted monsters to live. I wanted humans to live, as much as their convention concerned me. I could envision a world of fairy tales and myth thriving with animals bounding and lush meadows extending as far as the unblinking eye could see.

Once creatures had explored this world without fear of the inhospitable nothingness that existed outside of the seven hundred and thirteen walled cities—or pulses —as immortals liked to call them.

If the matter was as simple as declaring my purpose, then I would have happily declared my decision to help save the world. If I could even do such a thing.

But I was more certain that I couldn’t, and that fifty mothers had made a towering and catastrophic mistake in withering, just so I could walk into the toothed beast’s yawn and become queen.

And if I could?

If I figured out how to save the world by bumbling and fumbling through curiosities and challenges, then what about everything between now and then?

What of the king who would send his beasts to battle at my gates if I chose to save the world?

What of the king who would triple his efforts to concubine me? Would he also send the soldiers of his one-fifth kingdom to protect me from King Change?

I could not fathom that King See might protect me tonight, then abandon me tomorrow if our deal of pleasure went awry over months or decades, but I was young in the experience of immortality.

King Take would surely attempt to torment me along the way.

If I declared my purpose tonight, then what if King Raise’s claim of eternal servitude stood up to scrutiny tomorrow? I would have no need of purpose then, but a hasty declaration of purpose might have gained me enemies in the meantime.

If kings remained uncertain of my purpose, they might support me against Raise’s claim. Why would they not, when I might support their purpose in return?

No. I should not make kingly enemies too soon.

I blinked, realizing some time had passed as I’d gazed at my reflection. My blue eyes were as clear and unforgiving as this mirror, and they told me that I was out of my depth, but I had at least figured out a small way forward.

Of everything, only my eyes and hair remained when daily dusk arrived. Blonde hair curled over my shoulders and partway down my back. As conventional as those parts of me were, I enjoyed the contrast of them against my more magnificent stitches and mismatched patches.

I forced my lips to soften, noticing how they torsioned, the upper and lower lips not quite matching—no surprise when they’d belonged to different women. “You are ancient and filled with the dying purposes of fifty mothers. You will follow the instincts that have brought you here. They will take you to the beginning or end of the world.”

My thoughts had not been those of a nineteen-year-old in months, yet I could sense that immortality was a difficult concept for a newly ancient mind.

A week was a blink to me now.

But in that blink, I had unveiled a tiny answer.

I could not make kingly enemies tonight. All that remained, then, was that I should make kingly friends .

I smiled at my exquisite reflection, then blurred to the top of the stairs, jumping over the glass panel to Raise’s kingdom. I leaped off the gold balustrade and relished the slight terror of a hurtling descent before landing on the balls of my strappy shoes.

I strode across the courtyard to my wall of bars, filled with a sense of direction sorely missing in the last week.

Kingly friends was the agenda, and I would start with King Take, the unknown factor.

But as I reached the door, a dirty length of rope whipped upright to sway before me as a mythical snake might once have done.

I pushed up my crown. “Hello there.”

The muddy rope wiggled.

A memory niggled and gnawed. “My, but you are the rope that King See’s princes used to cordon off the hotel when they snuffed this space.”

The rope bobbed in a nod.

What an unexpected delight. This might be a new monster in the making. Valetise was once a suitcase, after all. “A pleasure to meet you, sir.”

Someone tapped on my shoulder. I glanced back to find the other end of the rope there with a letter.

“For me?” I asked, taking the letter.

The rope collapsed into a weary heap and could not answer. Goodness, how many princes had slimed and trodden over the rope in the last six months? I felt terrible at the possibility that I had done so too. I’d just never expected a rope to become alive, and that had been a foolish assumption.

“Princely pawns,” I called.

Only the princes of King Bring blobbed out in answer. The others must be attending to their kings.

“Yes, Lady Queen?” Hex asked, appearing very hopeful of hearing my purpose.

I withheld a sigh. “Please move this delightful rope to a more comfortable resting place where no one will accidentally tread upon it.”

The three princes peered at the dirty rope, perhaps looking for the delight I had witnessed.

Whether he found it or not, Hex soon folded one blob over another in a bow. “At once.”

I took care to step over the coiled rope as I exited the wall of bars.

Only then did I recall the letter in my hand. I leaned against the gate and turned over the letter. “Which king are you from?”

By now I had received letters from every king except King Raise, who preferred not to put his thoughts in writing.

I did not recognize the gold seal.

I whispered my thumb over the crescent moon tipped sideways to appear like an arch. A human might mistake the symbol for just that, unable to perceive that altering the moon in any way was a grotesquely monstrous deed.

Only one entity would dare to do so. “You are ancient.”

What did ancients have to put in a letter that they could not warp into ignorant being?

My heart thudded in a telling, doomy way, but alas, what could a queen do but open a letter?

Lady Perantiqua, aka self-proclaimed “Queen”,

You are hereby summoned to attend a kingly tribunal,

where the dispute of eternal servitude will be resolved.

Until morrow’s dawn and the boom

of the Ancient’s hammer.

Ever thirst for Thirst itself,

and on behalf of all kings,

King Take

The paper, so glossy and thick, nevertheless crumpled in my clench fist.

Self-proclaimed queen? Self- proclaimed? King Take hadn’t even bothered to call me Lady Queen Perantiqua like my pawns sometimes did.

Should I interpret, then, that kings rejected my queendom, or was King Take toying with my mind again?

Midnight blood pooled in my cheeks in a way telling of a rage.

They dared to summon me, like I was at their beck and call. I was a queen. Even if a new one and one filled with trepidation of declaring her purpose. Even if my bothersome crown kept falling down.

I shoved it back up, ripping out some blonde hair in the process.

How dare they.

I whirled, then stomped to the middle of the courtyard, glaring at the fifteen doorways on the ground level. Above each archway a prince’s name was carved.

“Kings,” I said scathingly. Their princes were now my pawns. That didn’t just happen to any monster. That happened to queens.

And what did they think about only having three princes each, while I had fifteen for the taking and considered them mere pawns? My lips torsioned in a smile. “I won’t point that out unless you are all determined to be unwelcoming.”

I smoothed the letter out to reread the contents. Fury leached away enough that my stomach lurched at the reason for the tribunal. The lurch drew away the remaining rage and then coldness was left behind.

You are hereby summoned to attend a kingly tribunal,

where the dispute of eternal servitude will be resolved.

King Take spoke on behalf of all kings, King See included.

“So did I anger him with my hasty reply at dusk?” I whispered. Perhaps I should not have dismissed his question so, but in my defense, I was a very pestered queen.

Any triumphant unraveling had been for naught, it seemed, for I’d had a week to make kingly friends, yet I’d set out to do so a week too late.

King See himself once said, It is an immortal fool who believes seconds don’t account to days, decades, and eons. I had learned something of immortality this night. I had already taken time for granted like a fool.

Though on one point I did feel sour indeed.

Five immortal kings had spent twelve hundred years pondering their purpose. They had spent twelve hundred years fortifying their kingdoms and subjects for war.

And what of a queen?

Well, she would have time for neither.