Page 27 of Of Monsters Of Kings

Patch.

As I leaned on the wall behind, my brows furrowed. “Mother always called me Patch unless she was taken up by the medicine.”

“You have your answer then, mistress.”

“Fifty mothers and fifty gifts,” I whispered. “Twelve hundred years of them.”

His voice splintered through my vague thoughts. “What did you say?”

I looked up. Kingsie now stood. No balloon crushed against me, so I wondered if he faced away still. “That’s what my mother would say, sir. Fifty mothers and fifty gifts. She was the fiftieth mother in our line to wither and die. I am the fiftieth daughter. There are twelve hundred years of us since The End.”

Kingsie’s quiet chant floated to me.

“Five soldiers rode across the plains,

At a cave they arrived.

Green light shone from far within,

So sought it, the brave five.

A pulsing power, a stone half-buried,

Beckoned, taunted, coaxed.

’Til five brave men, in unison did,

Touch left hand to olden rock.

Each man awoke in icy darkness,

The stone eroded and dull.

Breaking free of the cave, no longer brave,

They stared at a new, foreign age.”

He trailed off, and I got the sense the haunting poem had more to it. What bothered me more was that my mother uttered most of that poem before she’d died.

“Did that happen twelve hundred years ago?” I asked in the lull.

Kingsie exhaled.

That seemed a yes.

“And,” I dared to ask, “is that a well-known poem?”

“To mortals, no. To five kings, yes.”

My mother hadn’t been a king, and she’d certainly been mortal. How had she known that poem? Chills swept over my stitched flesh.

Kingsie sat again, and I remained leaning on the wall, because I couldn’t do much else.

I was unsure what to say to a blurred man heavy with memory. “I just wondered, sir, if there was any explanation for why my skin is mismatched and why I’m stitched together. I wasn’t stitched together when I woke.”

Kingsie played with the hole in the skull under his left hand. “I would say the answer is simple.”

I blew out a breath. “I’m very glad of that.”

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