You get used to the amazing, that’s all. Mermaids and IMAX, giants and cell phones. If it’s in your world, you go with it. It’s wonderful, right? Only look at it another way, and it’s sort of awful. Think Gogmagog is scary? Our world is sitting on a potentially world-ending supply of nuclear weapons, and if that’s not black magic, I don’t know what is.
2
In Empis kings came and went. For all I knew, the preserved bodies of the Galliens were kept in one of the huge gray buildings Radar and I had passed as we followed Mr. Bowditch’s initials to the sundial. King Jan was anointed with the usual rituals. Bult claimed a sacred cup made of gold was involved.
Jackah insisted that Jan’s wife was Queen Clara, or maybe Kara, but most of the others insisted she had been Cora, and that she and Jan were third cousins or something. None of my fellows seemed to know how many children they’d had; some said four, some said eight, and Ammit swore there were ten. “Those two must have fucked like royal rabbits,” he said. According to what I knew from a certain princess’s horse, they were all wrong—there had been seven. Five girls and two boys. And this is where the story got interesting to me, you could even say relevant, although it remained maddeningly hazy.
King Jan fell ill. His son Robert, who’d always been the favored one as well as the older of the two boys, waited in the wings, ready to drink from the sacred cup. （I imagined engraved butterflies around the rim.） Elden, the younger brother, was pretty well forgotten… except by Leah, that was, who idolized him.
“By all accounts he was an ugly limping fuck,” Dommy said one night. “Not one clubfoot but both of them.”
“Warty, too, I heard,” Ocka said.
“Hump on his back,” Fremmy said.
“Heard it was a lump on his neck,” Stooks said.
It was interesting to me, even illuminating, that they talked about Elden—the ugly, limping, nearly forgotten prince—and the Flight Killer as two different people. Or like a caterpillar that morphs into a butterfly. At least part of the King’s Guard had also morphed, I believed. Into the night soldiers.
Elden was jealous of his brother and jealousy grew into hatred. All of them seemed to agree on this point, and why not? It was a classic story of sibling rivalry that would have been at home in any fairy tale. I knew good stories are not always true stories, or not completely true, but this one was plausible enough, human nature being what it is. Elden decided to take the kingship, either by force or by guile, and be revenged on his family. If Empis as a whole also suffered, so be it.
Did the gray come before or after Elden became the Flight Killer? Some of my fellows said before, but I think it was after. I think he brought it somehow. One thing I’m sure of is how he got his new name.
“The butterflies were everywhere in Empis,” Doc Freed said. “They darkened the skies.”
This was after the practice when he yanked Yanno’s shoulder back in place. We were returning to our dungeon keep, walking side by side. Doc was speaking low, almost whispering. It was easier to talk going down the stairs, and the pace was slow because we were tired out. What he said made me think of how passenger pigeons had once darkened the skies of the Midwest. Until they were hunted out of existence, that was. Only who would hunt monarch butterflies?
“Were they good to eat?” I asked. That was, after all, why the passenger pigeons went bye-bye; they were cheap food on the wing.
He snorted. “Monarchs are poisonous, Charlie. Eat one, you might only get an upset stomach. Eat a handful and you could die. They were everywhere, as I say, but they were especially thick in Lilimar and the suburbs that surround it.”
Did he say suburbs or smallies? It came to the same thing.
“People grew milkweed in their gardens for the larvae to eat, and flowers for the butterflies to drink nectar from when they emerged. They were considered the luck of the kingdom.”
I thought of all the defaced statues I’d seen—spread wings hammered to rubble.
“The story goes that once Elden’s family was killed and only he was left, he walked through the streets in a red robe with a snowy ermine collar, the golden crown of the Galliens on his head. The skies were dark with monarchs, as was typical. But each time Elden raised his hands, thousands fell dead from the skies. When the people fled the city—a few stayed, paid homage, swore allegiance—they ran through drifts of dead butterflies. It’s said that inside the city wall, those drifts were ten feet deep. Millions of dead monarchs with their bright colors fading to gray.”