American Queen Read online

  Grandpa Leo scooped me into his arms as he reached us, planting a big mustached kiss on my cheek as he did. “Isn’t my granddaughter something special, Merlin?” he asked, grinning at me. “What were you two talking about?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but Merlin cut in smoothly. “She was telling me how much she enjoys staying with you.”

  Grandpa looked pleased. “Yes. I love Oregon as much as anyone, but there’s nothing like New York City, is there, Greer?”

  I must have answered. There must have been more conversation after that, more words about politics and money and demographics, but all I could hear were Merlin’s words from earlier.

  I am sorry for your parents.

  In my overactive imagination, it wasn’t hard to conjure the worst. It was what always happened in the stories—tragedy, omens, heartache. What if my parents had been killed? What if their plane had crashed, their hotel caught on fire, their bodies beaten and robbed and left to die?

  I am sorry for your parents.

  It was all I could think of, all I could hear, and when Grandpa Leo tucked me into bed later that night, I burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” he asked, thick eyebrows drawn together in concern.

  I knew enough to know he wouldn’t believe me when I told him that Merlin was an enchanter, maybe a bad one, or that he could somehow sense my parents’ deaths before they happened. I knew enough to lie and say simply, “I miss Mommy and Daddy.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Grandpa Leo said. “We’ll call them right now, okay?”

  He pulled out his phone and dialed, and within a few seconds, I heard Mommy’s light voice and Daddy’s deep one coming through the speaker. They were in Bucharest, getting ready to board a train bound for Warsaw, and they were happy and safe and full of promises for when they returned home. For a short while, I believed them. I believed that they would come back. That there’d be more long forest hikes with my father, more tai chi in the evenings with my mother, more nights when I fell asleep to the sound of them reading poetry to each other with logs crackling in the fireplace nearby. That the warm sunshine and tree-green days of my childhood still stretched out before me, safe in the cozy nest of books and nature that my parents had built.

  But that night as I tried to fall asleep, Merlin’s words crept back into my mind along with the fear.

  I am sorry about your parents.

  I barely slept that night, jolting awake at every honk and siren on the Manhattan streets below Grandpa’s penthouse, shivering at every creak of the wind-buffeted windows. Dreams threaded my sleep, dreams of tree-covered mountains in a place I’d never seen, broad-shouldered men crawling through mud and dead pine needles, my parents dancing in the living room after they thought I was asleep. A train steaming across a bridge, and the bridge collapsing.

  My parents danced, the wind blew through the trees, men crawled through mud. The train plunged to the valley floor.

  Dance, trees, mud, death.

  Over and over again.

  Dance, trees, mud, death.

  And when I sat up in the weak sunlight of morning to see my grandfather standing in the doorway, his eyes blank with shock and horror, his phone dangling from his hand, I already knew what he was there to tell me.

  Like King Hezekiah, I turned my face to the wall and prayed.

  I prayed for God to kill me too.

  2

  Eleven Years Ago

  God, as he often does, chose not to answer my prayer. Or at the very least, chose not to answer yes.

  Instead, my life went on.

  My mother’s parents were aging and frail, and while I had an aunt and uncle in Boston, they already had a daughter my age and they made it quite clear that they weren’t willing to take on another child.

  But it hardly mattered. From the moment Grandpa Leo got the phone call, from the very second the reality settled over us, it was never in question that I would live with him. He was only in his fifties, healthy and energetic, with plenty of room in his house for another person. He was a busy man, busy with The Party and his thriving green energy empire, but Grandpa Leo was never the kind of man to say no to anything other than sleep. He moved my things into his penthouse, enrolled me in a small but academically rigorous private school in the Upper West Side, and folded me into his life as best a widowed grandfather could.

  I remember crying before and after the funeral, but not during. I remember hiding inside myself at the new school, so different from the airy Montessori classroom back in Oregon. I remember Grandpa Leo buying me stacks of books to cheer me up, and I remember reading late into the night. I remember missing my parents so much it felt like someone had scooped something vital out of my chest with a giant spoon. I remember hearing Merlin’s words about my parents.

  Merlin’s prophecy.

  If he’d been right about their deaths, was he also right about the other things? He’d told me to keep my kisses to myself—was it a warning I had to follow?

  I was certain it was. I was certain now that Merlin could see the future, that he could predict doom, and in my grief and terror, I promised myself at seven years old that, no matter what, I would never kiss a man or woman so long as I lived.

  Never, ever, ever.

  When I was fourteen, Grandpa Leo asked me whether I’d like to continue going to school in Manhattan or if I’d like to enroll in a boarding school overseas. My cousin Abilene was being sent there in the hopes that she would settle down and focus on her schoolwork, and Grandpa thought I might like to go as well. I was already an excellent student—there were no worries there—but I think Grandpa worried that I was too isolated living alone with him, only going to environmental fundraisers and party events, spending my evenings immersed in gossip and speculation about politicians and businessmen, and spending my weekends as Grandpa’s secret weapon, observing and reporting back to him.

  “You’re young,” he said, sitting at the dinner table as he handed me the booklet for the school. The pictures seemed almost calculated to lure me into saying yes—thick fog, old wooden doors, gold and green English summers. “You should see the world. Be around other young people. Get into a little bit of trouble.”

  Then he laughed. “Or at the very least, keep your cousin out of trouble.”

  And that was how Abilene and I ended up at the Cadbury Academy for Girls the autumn of my fourteenth year.

  Cadbury was an impressive place, a large and sprawling complex of stone and stained glass, with towers and multiple libraries and an honest-to-God Iron Age hill fort right in its backyard. I loved it immediately. Abilene loved only its proximity to the boys’ school a mile down the lane. Almost every night, she would crawl out of our ground-floor window and creep across the soft green lawn to the road. Almost every night, I would go with her, not because I wanted to see the boys, but because I felt protective of her. Protective of her safety, of her future at Cadbury, of her reputation.

  We crept into dorm rooms, met in the back gardens of pubs that didn’t bother to kick us out, joined illicit parties on the massive flat-topped hill where the Iron Age fort once stood. We weren’t the only girls most of the time, but Abilene was the constant, the leader, the instigator.

  By fifteen, she had the tall willowy body of a model, with soft budded breasts and long red hair. She was loud and vivacious and pretty, she drank more than the boys, played lacrosse like her life depended on it, and always, always had a circle of people around her.

  In contrast, I was a thing of shadows and corners. I spent most of my free time in the library, I often ate alone on the grounds with a book resting against my knees. I ignored sports but chose dance and creative writing as my extracurriculars instead. I was shorter than I wanted to be, my body lagging behind Abilene’s in the things boys liked to see, strong enough for dance but not quite slender enough to look good in the leotard. My chin had the slightest hint of a cleft, which Abilene and I would spend hours trying to hide with makeup, and I had a beauty mark on
my cheek that I loathed. My eyes were gray and felt flat compared to Abilene’s lively blue ones, and all of this would have been fine if I had even one ounce of the charisma Abilene so effortlessly exuded, but I didn’t. I was quiet and spacey and dreamy, terrified of conflict but sometimes thoughtless enough that I accidentally caused it, fascinated with things that my peers cared nothing for—American politics and old books and coral reef bleaching and wars fought so long ago that even their names had all but turned to dust.

  The one thing I liked about myself at that age was my hair. Long and thick and blond—golden in the winter and nearly white in the summer—it was the thing people noticed first about me, the way they described me to others, the thing my friends idly played with when we sat and watched TV in the common room. Abilene hated it, hated that there was any one thing about my appearance that showed her up, and I learned within a few weeks at Cadbury that her sharp tugs of my ponytail weren’t signs of affection but of barely controlled jealousy.

  Despite the hair, Abilene was still the monarch and I still the lady-in-waiting. She held court and I anxiously kept a lookout for teachers. She shirked her homework, and I stayed up late typing out assignments for her so she wouldn’t fail. She partied and I walked her home, balancing her on my shoulder and using my phone for light as we stumbled down from the hill, her hair smelling like spilled cider and cheap cologne.

  “You never kiss the boys,” she said one night when we were fifteen, as I guided her down the narrow lane back to the school.

  “Maybe it’s because I want to kiss girls,” I said, stepping over a patch of mud. “Ever think of that?”

  “I have,” Abilene drunkenly confirmed, “and I know that’s not it, because there’s lots of girls at Cadbury who would kiss you. And still you never kiss anyone.”

  Keep your kisses to yourself.

  Eight years later, and I could still see Merlin’s dark eyes, hear his cold, disapproving voice. Could still remember the eerie feeling of portent that came over me when he predicted the death of my parents. If he believed people would suffer if I kissed someone, surely there was a good reason.

  An important reason.

  And besides, it was such a small thing to give up. It’s not like I had boys knocking down my door to kiss me anyway.

  “I just don’t feel like kissing anyone,” I said firmly. “That’s the only reason there is.”

  Abilene lifted her head from my shoulder and hiccupped into the chilly night air. Somewhere nearby a sheep bleated. “Just you wait, Greer Galloway. One of these days, you’re going to be just as wild as me.”

  I guided her around a pile of sheep shit as she hiccupped again. “I doubt it.”

  “You’re wrong. When you finally cut loose, you’re going to be the kinkiest slut at Cadbury.”

  For some reason, this made me flush—and not with indignation, but with shame. How could she know the thoughts that flitted through my mind sometimes? The dreams where I woke up throbbing and clenching around nothing?

  No, she couldn’t know. I hadn’t breathed a word of those things to anyone, and I never would.

  Like my kisses, I would keep those things to myself. After all, I was happy like this. Happy to take care of Abilene and dream of college.

  Happy to pretend that this was enough.

  3

  The Present

  “And so if we turn back further than Geoffrey of Monmouth, back to the Annales Cambriae—that’s the Annals of Wales for those of you not up on your medieval Latin—we see the earliest mention of the Mordred figure, here called ‘Medraut.’”

  The clack of keys on laptop keyboards echoes through the small classroom as the students furiously type out notes. The bulk of the undergrads here are actually pre-med or poli-sci, only taking my Arthurian Lit course to fill out their humanities credits, but that doesn’t stop them from striving for the highest scores. Georgetown isn’t cheap, after all, and a lot of the students here need to keep their grades up to retain scholarships and grants. And I empathize completely; only a couple months into this lecturing gig, I can still vividly remember the late nights and coffee-fueled mornings as I finished up my Master’s in Medieval Literature at Cambridge. Sometimes it’s still hard to believe I’m actually done, actually back in the States, actually doing a grown-up job with a nice leather briefcase and everything.

  “Mordred is only mentioned as dying alongside King Arthur here,” I continue, moving from behind the podium over to the whiteboard, “and we are given no information as to his role in the battle, whether he was fighting against or alongside Arthur, whether he was Arthur’s son or nephew or simply just another warrior.”

  I uncap a dry erase marker and start editing the family tree we’ve been working on as a class throughout the fall semester, writing a question mark next to Mordred’s name.

  “The King Arthur legend is famous for many things—the Holy Grail and the Round Table, of course—but maybe it’s most famous for the epic love story between Lancelot and Guinevere.” I draw a heart between their two names on the board, and giggles ripple through the class. “But as we saw moving backward from Chretien de Troyes to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lancelot was a character invented by the French to satisfy their need for courtly romance. He’s not in the earliest mentions of the legends at all.”

  I cross out Lancelot’s name on the board, writing made up by the French above his name. More keys clacking.

  “But there is the hint of another romance, older than the Lancelot story and even more dangerous.” I draw a new heart, this time between Mordred and Guinevere. “After the Annals, the next mentions we get of Mordred almost always depict him kidnapping the queen or trying to marry her. This is usually pointed to as the source of the strife between him and King Arthur—who long before being depicted as Mordred’s father or uncle may have simply been a romantic rival.”

  I cap the marker and turn back to the podium. “I think Mordred, more than Lancelot, highlights the central problem of King Arthur’s court…which is that trust, love, and family don’t always come packaged together.”

  I can hear the old wall clock behind me tick over, and the students slowly begin closing laptops and opening bags, trying to appear attentive but their minds already out the door.

  “That’s all for today,” I announce. “Next week, we’ll start into the Welsh Triads. And don’t forget to submit your final project proposals!”

  They finish packing up as I walk back to my desk to pack up my own things. A few students stop by with questions and to pick up graded assignments, and then I’m alone in the room.

  For a few minutes after they’ve left, I stare out over the vacant seats, as if trying to remember something I’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten anything, of course, and nothing is wrong, but an empty restlessness chases after my mind all the same.

  You have everything you need, I remind myself. A good job, a nice house, a grandfather who loves you, a cousin who’s your best friend.

  I don’t need anything else. What I have is enough.

  But then why do I feel so lost all the time?

  My office at Georgetown is small and shared with two other lecturers, so it’s crammed with desks and file folders and books and stacks of neatly stapled handouts. I love it. I love it so much that I’ve been known to sleep here instead of my small townhouse near Dumbarton Park (which of course, I can only afford to live in because it belongs to Grandpa Leo and he refuses to hear anything about me paying rent.) It’s something about being in the old stone building, alone in the hallway of mostly empty offices, the darkness falling through the office window…it’s easier to remember why I sought out this life. A life of books instead of kisses. A life where Merlin’s warning doesn’t feel like a curse, but a choice.

  I’m used to working late into the night, to being the last one left in the English department, and tonight’s no different. I grade a few papers and then move on to the book I’m trying to write—a literary examination of kingship as chronicled through
the multiplicity of Arthurian legends throughout the ages.

  I know it sounds boring, but really, I promise it’s not. At least not to me. After all, I met a real wizard once, my very own Merlin…even though as an adult I can laugh down the idea of magic and tell myself that his warning was nothing more than nonsense.

  After all, I ignored it twice and nothing happened.

  Other than my heart breaking both times, nothing happened.

  I’m buried deep in my own mind, trying to recreate a line of thought I had last night about leadership in the Dark Ages, when the back of my neck prickles with awareness, as if someone is standing behind me.

  Someone is.

  I turn in my chair to see a man leaning against the doorway, arms crossed over a muscular chest, his bright blue suit stretching across his shoulders. Even with the jacket buttoned, I can see the way his tailored pants hug his hips and thighs, the way his white silk tie lies flat against the tight button-down underneath.

  I tilt my face up to his, swallowing.

  Ice-blue eyes and day-old stubble. High cheekbones and a straight nose, full lips and a tall aristocratic brow. A face made for brooding on a moor somewhere, a face made for Victorian novels or Regency period dramas, the face of the prototypical elitist stranger at a ball in a Jane Austen book.

  Except this man’s no stranger to me.

  Embry Moore.

  Vice President Embry Moore.

  I scramble to my feet. “Mr. Vice President,” I manage. “I didn’t—”

  His eyes crinkle at the edges. He’s actually a year younger than President Colchester, who took office only six months before turning thirty-six, but years of sunshine and four tours of duty have given him the tiniest lines around his eyes, visible only when he smiles.

  Like right now.

  I swallow again. “How can I help you, Mr. Vice President?”

  “Please don’t call me that.”