The Tangled Tree Read online

  But according to ancient gossip, Aidan had been a neglectful spouse during his reign because he’d been far too preoccupied with raising a kingdom in Tariel to have time for anyone else, even his children, who’d been raised predominantly by his duchess with little to no assistance from him. Like Elijah, he’d preferred to spend whatever free time he did have inside the harem with women he’d grown up with who had demanded nothing from him but his pleasure, so rumour had it that the king and duchess had probably only gone to bed together twice in all of those years- both times in order to procreate, and never for any other reason. The entire kingdom had felt sorry for her, and yet when the time had come for him to seriously consider marrying Cadence or releasing her, he’d opted to spend a few weeks getting to know her at last, and had shocked everyone by falling madly in love with her!

  Tariel had been an established kingdom by then thanks to all of his hard work, and their sons were turning thirty and twenty-one, so Aidan had abdicated to his eldest child, Raoul and then had released the women in his harem in order to spend the rest of his life as a devoted spouse rather than a king and eventually, a husband. Naturally this delay in their decision to take vows meant that Cadence would never get to be the queen (not in a way that was officially recognised seeing as how her husband’s reign was already over), but they had been happy together anyway, and the kingdom had been as in love with their story as I had first been to hear it. After so many years of playing it safe, a Barachiel King was finally going to commit to a woman in a way that could not be undone! How pleased God would be! How lucky she was!

  But sadly, their happiness was destined to be short-lived. To celebrate their love and mutual success, the couple had decided to take a honeymoon of sorts, and had sailed down to St Miguel, intending to tour this side of Calliel- especially Tariel- before marrying and before their sons could start giving them grandchildren. But unfortunately, their ship had been wrecked by a storm between St Miguel and Tariel and they’d both perished as a result- along with their entire crew.

  Well- it was presumed that a storm had wrecked the ship, but there were people that believed that pirates might have had something to do with it because back then, we’d had a few foreign vessels attempt to dock on our coastline and the waters were considered dangerous for most. But we’d never know the whole truth, because the coastline that the ship’s debris had washed up had been wild, so no witnesses had been present to see exactly what had happened that day- only settlers close enough in St Miguel to report the fact that the entire region had been inundated by a terrible storm a few days before, one that had could have been powerful enough to wreck an Arcadian ship, because it had damaged buildings and ships in St Miguel as well.

  Either way it had been a tragedy that had made it clear that seafaring was as dangerous then as it had been six hundred years before, which was why their youngest son Cole, then Duke of St Miguel, had started campaigning for a highway to be built between Arcadia and Tariel soon after. His brother the king, Raoul, had been a bit of a weak ruler (the only one to die young and without children or a spouse due to a few troubling incidents in his childhood) but Cole’s son Lloyd had inherited the throne when Cole had passed it over (he hadn’t wanted to leave St Miguel after having called it home for so long), and Lloyd had gotten the highway completed during his reign, earning the continent’s respect.

  Apparently, Calliel had felt very disjointed before Lloyd’s reign, but the building of that highway had made the entire continent feel safer and more united afterwards, and because Elijah’s own successful reign had followed it, bringing many more advances to our civilisation, the previous sixty years had been toted as being a true golden era. People had been sad about Cadence’s passing and the king’s too, but they’d rejoiced when her book had finally been printed shortly after her death, so even though she hadn’t broken through the Barachiel glass ceiling as far as love, marriage and monarchies went, she’d certainly made enough progress to inspire every little girl in Calliel into believing that maybe someday, people might find cause to celebrate her life too for being more than just a spouse or a wife- but as a success.

  It was an interesting story, but I didn’t understand why Satan had decided to give me a book penned by Cadence Verity to read now, especially seeing as how I’d not only read it, but had been forced to study it before. Still, being reminded of that woman’s success certainly hit a nerve (I should have been in the academic caste aspiring to nobility, Martya too!) and I was just about to toss it across the room when I opened the cover and realised that the book I was holding had not been printed using a press as my own copy had been-but written by hand!

  Oh wow! I thought, sitting up and flipping pages. Is this a first edition, or a first draft?

  To my delight, every single page had been filled in using cursive handwriting rather than typed print, and I’d only turned a few before I realised that the paper it had been written on was the handmade sort too- the kind that we hadn’t used since we’d built factories to recycle paper with.

  It is a draft- a mock up of what was eventually printed! What a neat little treasure! How foolish is Kohén to frost me with diamonds, when it is the scent of old paper that thrills me so?

  The book’s scent was indeed strong and old, but it wasn’t pungent, like most of the books that Kohl had excavated for me had been, proving that it had been stored somewhere dark and dry in order to preserve it, not buried away by accident. It was a history text, but one of our history and not the time before and so it had been mass-produced, not locked up in a museum somewhere. The fact that this was an original copy was thrilling to me, (I hadn’t lied when I’d told Elijah that I was drawn to rare things, not just rare things of monetary value) but I frowned as I turned page after page of painstakingly-illustrated family trees, knowing that this book had to be well over one hundred years old and irreplaceable... so how much trouble was I going to get in if it was found in my room? Was that Satan’s only intent- to agitate my situation?

  I should have been thinking of a way to hide it until I could entreat someone to smuggle it back into the Collection room or the library for me, but curiosity had me now and it wasn’t letting go. Satan had told me to read between the lines of this to prove my intellect, but what was it she wanted me to notice aside from what I already had? I did not know, but I hadn’t come this far to go on not knowing, and so I started reading.

  The book wasn’t nearly as interesting as an autobiography on Cadence’s life would have been, but it was full of information, and information was something else that I usually prized so I stuck with it. It was divided into sections, each titled with the surname of one of the twelve originals, followed by a series of family trees tracing their lineage. This was where I quickly noticed another difference- the second edition that I had contained information that had been updated to include the most recent twins’ births, whereas this one ended just over one hundred years ago, to when this project of Cadence’s would have been considered up to date. The first entry, of course, was Prince Elijah The First. The last was Prince Aidan, who was our current King Elijah’s great grandfather.

  So old… I mused, reading the names at the top of each page. Kohl would love to see this! I felt a pang in my heart then and remembered that there were a lot of things that Kohl would have loved to do, but a lot of things he’d never get to do- book-sniffing with me included. Groaning soundlessly, I paused and took another long sip of champagne to sedate my nerves with. Please, let Atticus keep his promise to make a general out of Kohl! Let him find a way to shine without my help or Kohén’s, but on his own merits!

  I turned page after page as I sipped my life away, my eyes blurring over the squiggly lines connected Barachiel to duchess, to Barachiel, struggling to find anything to focus on while under the influence of fermented peaches and nursing a sore head from drinking even more the day before... but try as I might, nothing snagged my interest because frankly, the book wasn’t that interesting. I knew quite a bit about the first
three Arcadian Kings (Miguel, Elijah and Elijah’s son, Michael) and a lot about the kings that had come after Aidan because that was the branch of family tree that I had grown up in the shadows of, but I knew very little about the sixteen kings that had reigned between both points because as far as I knew, they’d all led rather dull, predictable lives. Sure they had done their part to keep Arcadia growing and moving forward, but none of them had left much of a legacy or done anything to render them notorious, not the way that Aidan, Lloyd and Elijah had. After all, God had left the Barachiel’s in charge of keeping the human race happy, equal and safe- not thrilled, excited and rebellious, so unlike the history texts of the world before, there were no monsters between the pages or between the lines as far as I could tell. And thanks to how careful the Barachiel men had been about promising women they loved anything that they could not surely deliver (no more bloody tears!) there were no epic love stories or tragic back stories to these couplings either, at least not until you got to recent history and started looking hard into the duchess’s current predicament, or my own. I was sure there were more interesting stories when it came to analysing the prior kings, princes and their Companions, but those illicit stories would rarely have made it out of the harem, let alone into an important text.

  Hmm, maybe that’s what I should do! Research the whores before me and give it to Kohén for publication! I probably won’t get a royal title out of it, but I might get banished… I giggled at the idea of producing such an ‘important’ history and presenting it to Elijah, and bubbles of champagne went up my nose. I could name it: ‘He giveth Liberty, and then he taketh away!’

  After I’d recovered from my drunken giggle fit, I read on until my eyelids growing heavy and the lines on the page had begun to dance in front of my eyes. The pages concerning the other twelve originals were more interesting than the ones about the monarchs, and I lingered on the page about Rosa Fernandez, Miguel’s step-daughter longer than I did on any other, realizing suddenly that I knew next to nothing about her, which was strange because we knew a lot about the others- even the ones that hadn’t been named in the six books of creation. Had she been overshadowed by her infant brother’s ‘angelic’ conception and existence? That hardly seemed fair! Typical from a sexist standpoint, but not fair!

  Cadence’s book showed that Rosa had married one of the other original twelve, a young man named Jasper- a fact I’d already known-but her family tree had been smushed in next to Miguel and Gabriella’s, and only extended to include a branch for her daughter before it hit the bottom of the page. I turned the page over, remembering that Adeline had mentioned being related to Rosa and interested to see if her and Martya’s great-grandparents had made it into this book at some point, but to my surprise, the family tree on the next page was Amalie Sanchez’s, not a continuation of Rosa’s.

  I flipped back, re-reading the last name on Rosa’s tree- Luciana- and scratched my head, wondering if Luciana had died, therefore voiding any further history. But then I remembered that Jasper had been the teenage son of Carol, another widowed survivor and Korbin, the doctor that Miguel had saved during Armageddon (both two survivors of the original twelve) and so, there was a chance that Jasper and Rosa’s family tree had been embellished upon on their page instead, which made sense. But more quick page-turning proved that although Carol and Corbin’s tree showed their union, the child they’d had (Jasper’s half-brother) and all of the descendants that followed them- there was nothing else there to show what had become of Jasper and Rosa’s descendants after they’d had Luciana- merely a spike after Jasper and Rosa’s marriage that indicated to go back to the original Barachiel Tree on the first page, which I already knew was a dead-end as far as Rosa’s genealogy went. Why?

  We didn’t learn much about Rosa’s life during our education either… I mused, squinting as I stared at the bathroom door and into my memories. I knew that Rosa had taken an interest in gold-mining so she and her husband Jasper had been given land to excavate in Miner, but that was all I did know, and it made no sense. Why would this book go into detail about every generation of the original twelve up until one hundred years ago, but fail to elaborate on what had become of Miguel’s step-daughter’s line? How could the history of Gabriella’s firstborn child be dismissed as inconsequential? The girl had met God, for Heaven’s sake! Didn’t that warrant an autobiography or two? A painting? A public holiday?

  Intrigued now, I pulled out my notebook and tentatively marked Rosa’s name onto the page, followed by Jasper’s- and then waited nervously for Satan to smite me for putting lead to paper. But nothing happened (obviously she was only going to ‘get’ me if I tried writing stuff down about her) and so I quickly jotted down the twelve names that had a section in the book, until I had listed all twelve of the originals, and then traced their lines to their castes, trying to make sure that I knew where everyone was and that no pages were missing.

  Miguel and Gabriella had been the first nobles, Amalie Sanchez the first athlete, Cole the war veteran had had the Corps named in his honour (many, many years after his passing) Carol the widowed architect had married Korbin the doctor, and along with Maryah the scientist and Cohen the engineer, had had the academic caste founded after them... Raoul the homosexual had had no children but had had the Artisan caste created in his name... leaving Aura the nurse and Trojan the labourer to head up the first Blue Collar caste. Those people had married or joined with either one another or other survivors that had made their way to Arcadia after hearing God speak and their genealogy had been charted for centuries... and their names had be recycled time and time again to honour them (I’d always known that Karol had been named after Carol the female survivor, but I hadn’t known that Kohén had once been spelled Cohen) but even after going through every individual family tree, I realised that I could not find a link between Luciana, Rosa’s last named descendant and anyone else of note because there wasn’t one. So had Luciana perished? Had she been forgotten? Or had she simply lived out her life without having any children of her own?

  No that can’t be! Both Martya and Adeline have mentioned being related to her, so unless they’re like, six hundred years old and both secretly named Luciana, then they have to have ancestor’s somewhere, yeah? Ancestors that ought to be recorded here?

  The first option was possible, but I knew that a family linked to Miguel Barachiel’s (even if only by marriage) would have been encouraged- if not forced- to procreate for the good of mankind. After all, repopulating the earth had been Miguel Barachiel’s highest priority in the beginning, and it had stayed that way until about one hundred years ago, when Tariel’s limited natural resources had been strained by their initial settlement. They’d adopted the one-child only rule once they’d realised that repopulation could equal famine in their environment (gold they had, but arable land they had not), and Arcadia had adopted the practice soon after when hundreds had fled Tariel, hoping to be taken under Arcadia’s wing. So, after centuries of trying to plump up the population, we’d suddenly had exactly as many as we could sustain and swift action had been taken against it expanding much further- and that was yet another shadow that I’d grown up beneath during this supposed golden era.

  In fact, now that I thought about it, I realised that a lot of things had changed around that same time or just before then, but I had no idea exactly how or when, because it hadn’t been documented. But somewhere during those sixteen uneventful reigns, the Arcadian kings had decided that they could not take on the responsibility of ruling or marrying for love until they were thirty and had created first the Given caste and then the Corps caste and finally, the Companion one.

  Companions had been a ‘thing’ before the population cap, of course (it really was the world’s oldest trade) but it had been a strictly voluntary position that I knew had been started when two farmers had offered up their infertile daughters to the crown, so that the first crowned prince Elijah could ‘take care of them’ back in the very beginning- trading sexual favours an
d companionship for food, shelter and safety on the grounds that their fathers could not provide for them, or marry off girls that could not have babies to anyone else.

  Miguel had never married Gabriella, but he had been in love with her and faithful until the day he died, of course, and that we all knew for a fact. But it had been difficult for his son Elijah to find a girl that he could be as devoted to, because there simply hadn’t been many to choose from back then, given how many had died or had been taken up to Heaven or down to Hell during the apocalypse. Terrified of growing old alone, and suffering due to his powerful Nephilim urges, Elijah had taken on the responsibility of the two (for all intents and purposes) ‘smitten’ young women in exchange for the right to be intimate with them, so long as they understood that he could not make a commitment to them that would impede his chances of procreating with a fertile woman one day, and risk breaking anyone’s heart as Miguel had Satan’s. They’d agreed not to fall in love with him, and Elijah had been so satisfied with their company and the arrangement that he had not ended up joining with a fertile woman until he’d been in his mid-thirties… one that had allowed him to go on acting intimately with his whores, so long as it was understood that as soon as their child had been raised by them both, she would be free to return to the man that she loved, who had also been infertile due to radiation poisoning, which had been common back then.