Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia

“His Talent must have lost him,” Australia said, sighing. “There’s no telling where he might be.”

“Uh, hello?” Grandpa Smedry’s head popped out of the stairwell. “Jabbering Joneses, people! We’ve got a disaster to avert! Let’s get moving!”

“Yes, Lord Smedry,” Sing said, waddling over. “But where are we going?”

“Send for a crawly!” the elderly Oculator said. “We need to get to the Council of Kings!”

“But … they’re in session!”

“All the better,” Grandpa Smedry said, raising a hand dramatically. “Our entrance will be much more interesting that way!”

Chapter 3

Having royal blood is a really big pain. Trust me, I have some very good sources on this. They all agree: being a king stinks. Royally.

First off there are the hours. Kings work all of them. If there’s an emergency at night, be ready to get up because you’re king. Inconvenient war starting in the middle of the playoffs? Tough. Kings don’t get to have vacations, potty breaks, or weekends.

Instead they get something else: responsibility.

Of all the things in the world that come close to being crapaflapnasti, responsibility is the most terrible. It makes people eat salads instead of candy bars, and makes them go to bed early of their own free will. When you’re about to launch yourself into the air strapped to the back of a rocket-propelled penguin, it’s that blasted responsibility that warns you the flight might not be good for your insurance premiums.

I’m convinced that responsibility is some kind of psychological disease. What else but a brain malfunction would cause someone to go jogging? The problem is, kings have responsibility like nothing else. Kings are like deep, never-ending wells of responsibility—and if you don’t watch out, you may get tainted by them.

The Smedry clan, fortunately, realized this a number of years back. And so they did something about it.

“We did what?” I asked.

“Gave up our kingdom,” Grandpa Smedry said happily. “Poof. Gone. Abdicated.”

“Why did we do that?”

“For the good of candy bars everywhere,” Grandpa Smedry said, eyes twinkling. “They need to be eaten, you see.”

“Huh?” I asked. We stood on a large castle balcony, waiting for a “crawly,” whatever that was. Sing was with us, along with Bastille and her mother. Australia had stayed behind to run an errand for Grandpa Smedry, and my father had disappeared into his rooms. Apparently he couldn’t be bothered by something as simple as the impending fall of Mokia as a sovereign kingdom.

“Well, let me explain it this way,” Grandpa Smedry said, hands behind his back as he looked out over the city. “A number of centuries ago, the people realized that there were just too many kingdoms. Most were only the size of a city, and you could barely go for an afternoon stroll without passing through three or four of them!”

“I hear it was a real pain,” Sing agreed. “Every kingdom had its own rules, its own culture, its own laws.”

“Then the Librarians started conquering,” Grandpa Smedry explained. “The kings realized that they were too easy to pick off. So they began to band together, joining their kingdoms into one, making alliances.”

“Often that involved weddings of one sort or another,” Sing added.

“That was during the time of our ancestor King Leavenworth Smedry the Sixth,” Grandpa continued. “He decided that it would be better to combine our small kingdom of Smedrius with that of Nalhalla, leaving the Smedrys free of all that bothersome reigning so we could focus on things that were more important, like fighting the Librarians.”

I wasn’t sure how to react to that. I was the heir of the line. That meant if our ancestor hadn’t given up the kingdom, I’d have been directly in line for the throne. It was a little bit like discovering that your lottery ticket was one number away from winning.

“We gave it away,” I said. “All of it?”

“Well, not all of it,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Just the boring parts! We retained a seat on the Council of Kings so that we could still have a hand in politics, and as you can see we have a nice castle and a large fortune to keep us busy. Plus, we’re still nobility.”

“So what does that get us?”

“Oh, a number of perks,” Grandpa Smedry said. “Call-ahead seating at restaurants, access to the royal stables and the royal silimatic carrier fleet—I believe we’ve managed to wreck two of those in the last month. We’re also peerage—which is a fancy way of saying we can speak in civil disputes, perform marriage ceremonies, arrest criminals, that sort of thing.”

“Wait,” I said. “I can marry people?”

“Sure,” Grandpa Smedry said.

“But I’m only thirteen!”

“Well, you couldn’t marry yourself to anyone. But if somebody else asked you, you could perform the ceremony. It wouldn’t do for the king to have to do all of that himself, you know! Ah, here we are.”

I glanced over my shoulder, then jumped as I saw an enormous reptile crawling along the sides of the buildings toward us.

“Dragon!” I yelled, pointing.

“Brilliant observation, Smedry,” Bastille noted from beside me.