Page 26 of Of Monsters Of Kings

Oof. “Thank you.” I smoothed my outfit as I shifted from foot to foot in wait. I noticed my black-tulle skirt for the first time. I’d dressed in a panic, and the top I wore was transparent with a skull plastered on the front. I groaned. Kingsie would think that was on purpose.

At least I’d put on a bra and underwear.

Once the portcullis creaked high enough, I ducked under and raced through a courtyard bordered high on every side with stone towers.

I did my best to banish the screams in my mind as I climbed the stairs to Kingsie, but the stitches on my skin were the biggest impossibility yet. Is had seen the stitches too. He’d told me not to worry, and that he needed to think of his words before uttering them. He’d said Kingsie needed to see me, and not be told.

If there was another place to get answers for such things, I didn’t know of it.

I raced up the winding stairs, staying well away from the vicious railing, and ignoring the vast number of arched hallways branching off the stairwell that now spiraled from level to level. If Kingsie’s apartment changed each time I visited, then I couldn’t let that impossibility bother me. There were too many others demanding space in my head.

I stopped at the top landing and panted hard, hands on knees.

Wiping sweat from my brow, I took in my surroundings despite my best intentions.

Gone were the great torn scratches down each wall. Here now was an arched walkway mostly open to the outside through sculpted openings on the walls. The moon’s light illuminated alterations to the skull’s throne chamber at the end of the airy passageway.

How did I ever see a mere office space?

The stone chamber was dome-shaped and made more of holes than wall just like the walkway I stood in. The chamber reminded me of the climbing domes in the school playground, but made of stone and with every inch sculpted in exquisite, painstaking detail. Moonlight beamed upon the throne of bones and basked the man atop it.

And yet I couldn’t see the man, really. He was blurred, all colors of him smudged together like an out-of-focus oil painting.

“Kingsie?” I called. Only now did my fear of the man exceed the panic over my stitches.

He moved. Perhaps tilted his head, though everything about him was so blurred. “I find myself blind, and so it is the mistress named Patch. Why have you returned?”

I couldn’t step closer. “I… Sir Kingsie, I…”

“Speak now. It is an immortal fool who believes seconds don’t account to days, decades, and eons.”

I wanted to speak. I just couldn’t fathom how to achieve it. “Sir… I’m stitched together, and I’m not sure… I’m not sure.” My mind trembled before I forced the last word out. “Why.”

“You’re stitched together,” he repeated. “You are not usually stitched together?”

His acceptance of the impossible reassured. My words came easier. “No, sir. I wasn’t like this yesterday or three weeks ago. I’d hoped Is was in the building because he saw me like this earlier, and I had thought he might’ve come to tell you already.”

“My princes are away. I’m to hear that Is came to see you?”

“He kept me company as I sat by my mother’s grave. I was covered in dirt, you see.”

“No, I don’t see.”

I waited. “Of course you don’t. I blind you.”

“You do.”

“I am sorry for it.”

“That changes naught. Where did the princes drop you? Did your broken clavicle pain you after our last exchange? These are questions without answer.”

I supposed they were. But I better not say so to someone who didn’t suppose at all. “I could tell you the answer, if you like? I’m living at the hotel you closed down, and my collarbone healed overnight.”

A small sigh. “It fits better to know answers.”

“I can imagine. About Is. He didn’t tell me what he saw, but I discovered the issue a while after. I’m a stitched-together thing, sir.”

“With a name like Patch, I would say stitches were a certainty.”

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