Confessions of a Reluctant King
“We don’t all get to be what we want, or I’d be a penguin.” – Shade, Knot of Souls
Shade, that “Fae prince on the run” (from the blurb), doesn’t want to be king. It’s what’s expected of him, what he was raised to do, but the happiest moments of his life were spent in a huddle of Emperor penguins on the frozen continent of Antarctica. That’s where he learned about family.
That much is in the book.
What didn’t quite fit into the novel, at least not in its full form, was the reason he and his three siblings were raised apart, keeping each isolated and making Shade in particular feel very alone.
Fae are not born. They are not beings of flesh (at least, not as I have re-imagined them), but rather incorporeal beings of energy who traveled here from another world when their star died. The journey cost them much; at least half of them died. Earth isn’t entirely hospitable to them, either (too much iron), but it was never clear, in the wake of the Arrival, whether they were simply resting here or settling here. Most were too afraid to leave, which didn’t mean they embraced their new reality. These Fae ended up haunting the frozen continent of Antarctica, sharing old stories of Home and denigrating those who went out into the world. (This is how I’ve re-imagined the Winter Court.) Others chose to look to the future, to making Earth their home, and when they found they could possess the bodies of corporeal life forms (usually after the being had died and its spirit had gone), they chose to live in the world and plan for a future. (This is how I’ve re-imagined the Summer Court.)
And so, when four brand-new Fae were Sung into existence by the King and Queen, there was a deep divide, a schism., with each of the factions wanting to raise the newborns according to their own beliefs. Luckily (or there really might have been a war), four is divisible by two! And so Lily went to live among the wildlings, Brandon was placed inside the body of a newborn human so quickly he spent his first human life forgetting he was Fae, Astra was given to a radical faction that still wanted to leave the planet to find someplace more hospitable to live, and Shade alone grew up around his own parents. They weren’t really parents, though; they were too busy, so he was raised by ancient Fae who told him endless stories of some far-off origin planet he would never know.
Shade would often run away, circling the globe in search of something to break the loneliness of his upbringing. He found his own sister, Astra, who became his best friend and confidante. She alone knew he didn’t want to be king, which made them a good match. She didn’t want to be queen, either. But she really didn’t want to get in trouble.
Which brings me full-circle back to the Emperor Penguins, and an excerpt from Chapter 7, in Shade’s own words:
The first time I’d bound myself to flesh, I’d chosen a penguin. An emperor penguin, specifically, one of the regal flightless birds inhabiting the frozen continent the High Court called home. The creature had died after getting lost in an ice maze and being separated from the rest of his colony. A fierce storm had whipped up, reducing visibility to nearly zero, and while the others formed a huddle, the lone penguin was lost to the storm, finally succumbing to the elements a mere ten yards from the others.
Souls are compressed within the body so that when they emerge, they look impossibly large compared to the flesh in which they’d been imprisoned. A prison of flesh was the term one of my first teachers had used, and watching the emergence of a soul into rebirth, it was easy enough to believe. The penguin’s soul rejoiced as it was finally reunited with the Universal Spirit, a truly beautiful homecoming, yet, on that particular day, sad as well.
“Let’s be penguins for a while,” I sang to my sister, Astra, who needed cheering up after her longest-ever punishment from her mentor, Radella. Neither would say what Astra had done to deserve it, but I knew it must have been bad to land her on the far side of the moon for a whole month.
“We’re High Court, not wildlings,” she sang. “We’re better than flesh.”
I didn’t try to convince her, in part because the penguin’s soul was already drifting away and I had precious little time to act. I wanted to know more, even though I knew she was right as she sang after me, “You’ll get in trouble.”
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Excerpt Chapter 1
Joy
The first thing I realized, after I died, was that my body could walk and talk and no longer needed my help for any of it. I was in there, able to look through my eyes and hear through my ears, but even the simple task of aiming my gaze had slipped outside my control. I was a passenger inside my own mind, an observer along for the ride.
Kristen had been right, I thought numbly as I struggled to make sense of my new reality. Had it only been lunchtime today when she’d told me I’d never get ahead if I didn’t learn to assert myself? “Take control of your life,” she’d said, “or others will take it for you.”
She couldn’t have been thinking of anything quite so literal. Whatever was happening to me, it wasn’t because I’d failed to advocate for a promotion at work or refused to ask out a coworker.
Right?
My body reached my car and slid behind the wheel. A rattled thought—not my own—cursed as it tried to understand how the contraption worked. How much can cars have changed in only a century? Visions accompanied the thoughts, memories—again not my own—of a classic car, gleaming black and elegant, its top down, my bobbed hair whipping around my face as I laughed with glee, a white-faced young man at my side gripping the door, begging me to slow down. I did not.
Which brings me to the second thing I realized, after I died: I was no longer alone inside my own mind.
Whoever was in there didn’t seem to have noticed me yet. Fine. I slid into the smallest corner of my brain I could find, ignoring the intruder as they struggled to figure out how to work an automatic transmission. Maybe they’d get frustrated and give up and go find someone else’s body to possess.
Holy shit! I’ve been possessed by the ghost of someone who died in like 1930.
But why?
I tried to remember what had happened, but the images danced just out of reach. I recalled that the night had been unseasonably cold for October, the chill biting through my inadequate jacket as I hurried to my car, parked in a garage two blocks away from the shelter where I’d been volunteering. Hugging my arms around my torso for warmth, I took a shortcut through an alley and …
There was a noise. I’d startled, my heart pounding in my throat, already on edge because of the argument.
Wait. Back up. There’d been an argument. That seemed significant, but my scattered thoughts couldn’t piece it together as yet, not when a bodily intruder fumbled at the gearshift of my two-month-old Hyundai Accent with only fifty-eight “low monthly payments” left to go.
Low is such a relative word.
My beautiful new, inexpensive (also relative) car jerked suddenly backwards out of its parking spot as the voice in my head grew angrier and more frustrated and … afraid. I saw flashes, images I didn’t understand of multi-colored ghosts who seemed to be singing. The more they sang, the more desperate I felt as fear, my own and somehow not my own, made it hard to breathe.
We streaked across the nearly empty parking lot in reverse, almost colliding with the only other vehicle in the place—a red SUV with scratched paint and a dented front bumper suggesting it regularly attracted unwanted attention from other cars. I tried to scream, but didn’t have control of my voice. I tried to hit the brakes, but instead the possessing spirit shifted from reverse to drive without stopping. The grinding of gears made me want to weep, but we came to a stop, breathing heavily, muscles tensed as if in expectation of attack.
They destroyed her. They tore her apart.
I had no time to wonder what any of that meant before the thing possessing my body channeled its anger and grief into a force I’d never experienced or even known existed. One second, the battered red SUV was parked inches from my back bumper, the next, it flew through the air, smashing against a far wall, its frame crumpling like an accordion.
I tried to make myself even smaller, a nearly impossible feat, but I couldn’t let it know I was in here. If it could do that to an SUV, I didn’t want to think about what it might be able to do to me.
Now what?
For one, panic-filled moment, I thought I’d asked the question. Then I realized I wasn’t the only one trying to figure things out.
My car rolled forward again, its speed uneven, first too fast and then—I slammed on the brakes. Well, maybe I didn’t do it, maybe the thing inside me had the same idea as me, but the car skidded to a halt so it just kissed a large concrete pillar. At least it’s just the paint, I tried to tell myself, but rage welled up within me and my fist slammed into the center of the steering wheel, eliciting an angry honk.
An ominous crack formed in the concrete pillar, more evidence, in case I needed it, that the thing invading my body had powers beyond belief. Then came more rattled thoughts that were definitely not my own:
Who thought it was a good idea to build obstacle courses in the sky? Is there not enough room on the ground? Too damn many humans …
Once again, I drew away from the voice in my head. If I hadn’t lost all connection to my body, I’d be trembling, but even so, I felt the sort of cold that seeps through to the soul.
The third thing I realized, after I died, was that the thing possessing me wasn’t a ghost. Or at least, not the ghost of a human.
My car backed away from the concrete column and maneuvered around it to continue the winding path down … down … down to the exit.
Where was my body going and why? More importantly, what would happen if I made myself known and asked?
I reeled at the thought, mentally slinking all the way back to the homeless shelter where I’d been volunteering in the hours before my death. I’d had a crappy day and needed to channel that into a sharp reminder that plenty of people had it much, much worse. Their circumstances, their personalities, their trials and tribulations didn’t fit neatly in the lock box some tried to label and forget, but all of them struggled in some way. They needed help, and sometimes I needed to be needed; it helped me feel less alone.
Tonight, though … tonight there’d been a problem. I remembered having a nice chat with one of the regulars, Roger, big-hearted and with a certain excited energy about him. He’d found a job and was working hard to get back on his feet, but he still couldn’t find a place to rent after being evicted from his old apartment. Now, he lived in his car except when the nights grew too cold, and he was always there to lend a helping hand or just to listen. He had a way of getting people to open up, even me.
He’s the one who jumped in when Thomas started getting belligerent, ranting and raving about false witnesses and evil spirits. The whole thing was so sudden and confusing, I’m not even sure how it happened. One second I’m chatting with Roger about the crappy end to a crappy day—accidentally seeing porn on a coworker’s computer—the next Thomas is in my face, grabbing a fistful of my shirt as he accused me of being a liar, of being in league with the demon spirits, demanding I admit that I could see them too. I was off balance;, I don’t know what I said, I only know what I felt. There was a moment when I looked into his eyes and saw fear and desperation reflected back at me. Then he was being dragged away, thrown out of the shelter …
But he hadn’t been the one to sneak up behind me and kill me. I thought he was, at first. When I heard the noise in the alley, I jumped and looked around, sure it would be Thomas. But it was someone else.
No, not someone else, something else. The thing possessing me wasn’t the first nonhuman I’d encountered tonight. That honor belonged to a blur, a shadow, a … the only way I could think to describe it was as if a small child had found a gray crayon and colored over an otherwise human shape.
I knew I’d died. The bright light I’d only heard about—never believed in—had beckoned and I’d known it was over. Dead in a cold alley; would anyone notice before morning? Who would even mourn me? I had few friends and fewer attachments. No husband or kids, not even a boyfriend. My cat would probably find someone else to feed her. Some might say that was a blessing, not to leave anyone behind, but all I saw was lost potential. If only … the words that would follow me into my lonely grave.
Where had the light gone? I’d seen it, I’d hesitated, I’d wondered if there really was a god after all, and then …
… my body was walking and talking and thinking and acting and I was along for the ride.
My beautiful blue car, none the worse for wear, exited the garage without running into anything else and turned onto the empty city street. Fewer cars might mean lower odds of getting into another accident, although it was clear the thing in my body had little experience driving. It swerved left and right, unable to center itself in the lane, and braked suddenly at a flashing yellow stoplight, which bent backwards in reaction.
That’s when I reached the final—and belated—realization of the most bizarre night of my life. (Afterlife?) If I didn’t take over the driving of this vehicle, I’d die. Again.
