The Book of Kings Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by Cynthia Voigt

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2015 by Iacopo Bruno

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhousekids.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Voigt, Cynthia.

  Mister Max : the book of kings / Cynthia Voigt ; illustrated by Iacopo Bruno. —First edition.

  p. cm

  Sequel to: Mister Max : the book of secrets.

  Summary: Solutioneer Max Starling travels to a fictional South American country to rescue his parents who have become embroiled in a political power grab.

  ISBN 978-0-307-97687-1 (trade) — ISBN 978-0-375-97125-9 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-307-97689-5 (ebook)

  [1. Problem solving—Fiction. 2. Self-reliance—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 5. Parents—Fiction.] I. Bruno, Iacopo, illustrator. II. Title. III. Title: Book of kings.

  PZ7.V874Mis 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014017699

  eBook ISBN 9780307976895

  The illustrations were created using pencil and ink on paper.

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: In which Max is irritated, frustrated, and thwarted

  Chapter 2: In which Sunny proves useful

  Chapter 3: The R Zilla Job, Acts I, II, and III

  Chapter 4: Pawn to King

  Chapter 5: King takes Pawn

  Chapter 6: In which the King acts, while Max adjusts, accommodates, and adapts

  Chapter 7: In which the Estrella sails

  Chapter 8: The journey

  Chapter 9: The arrival

  Chapter 10: Andesia

  Chapter 11: Balcor

  Chapter 12: The Rescue, Act I, scene 1—The Cue

  Chapter 13: The Rescue, Act I, scene 2—Max’s Plan

  Chapter 14: The Rescue, Act I, scene 3—Danger! Danger!

  Chapter 15: The Rescue, Act II, scene 1—The Play’s the Thing

  Chapter 16: The Rescue, Act II, scene 2—Balcor’s Plan

  Chapter 17: The Rescue, Act II, scene 3—The Defense Prepares

  Chapter 18: The Rescue, Act III, scene 1—The Trial

  Chapter 19: The Rescue, Act III, scene 2—Denouement

  Chapter 20: The Rest of Max’s Life, Act I

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  for Pete & Emily,

  the enlightened monarch & his true queen

  “The play’s the thing.”

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  PROLOGUE

  Early on a Wednesday morning in late July, a woman walked alone down a quiet street in the old city. It was usually a woman sent to do jobs like this. Everyone understood that a woman was not dangerous, not threatening, and probably not very intelligent. As long as she wasn’t beautiful and didn’t carry some other visible peculiarity, a woman would not be noticed. Especially if, like the woman who went along Thieves Alley, she was ripe in years and plump of body, and dressed in a blue-and-white-checked cotton dress and serviceable black boots like a rich man’s housekeeper on her half-day holiday. Even her narrow-brimmed felt hat was entirely unremarkable, with a plain blue grosgrain ribbon around its crown as the only decorative touch.

  In one gloved hand, the woman carried an envelope, in the other a furled umbrella. She approached number 5 and stopped, distracted by the wooden sign hung on the fence: MISTER MAX, SOLUTIONEER. She considered the writing on the front of the envelope, looked at the sign again, looked at the small house waiting quietly on its well-tended lawn, its gardens weeded and flowering, and made up her mind.

  She had her instructions.

  The woman pulled once, quickly, on the bell hanging beside the gate and let herself in.

  She had not even had time to knock before the door opened and she was faced with a rather tall, entirely ordinary young man. Or he might have been a boy. She couldn’t tell and what did it matter?

  “May I help you?” he asked, as correct as any butler blocking the entry to a great house.

  She was startled enough to look directly at him, even though she knew the dangers of that, and was startled all over again by the odd color of his eyes—like moldy hay rotting in the corners of the stalls she’d cleaned in her girlhood, before she had been recruited away from the farm to her present employment. She held out the envelope, using the words she had been given to speak: “This is Five Thieves Alley?”

  “It is,” he answered, and he waited for her to say more.

  “For you, then,” she said, and turned abruptly away. If he had called after her, she would have neither halted nor responded.

  In which Max is irritated, frustrated, and thwarted

  Max didn’t have to open the envelope to know what it contained. His fingers recognized the button shape, and a wave of bad feelings—mostly sadness and shame—washed over him.

  Max pocketed the button. He didn’t need any reminder. Since the April morning when his parents had disappeared—on a ship that didn’t exist—Max, along with his grandmother, had worried. At first they worried about what had happened to them, and then, when his parents reappeared in the unlikely roles of King and Queen of Andesia, a tiny South American country, they spent hours worrying about what they should do, and what they could do. Max didn’t know why his father kept sending these buttons, with the familiar three-peaked symbol stamped on them.

  They were as confusing as the few letters that had arrived from Andesia. Max had eventually decoded notes that cried Help and Trapped, but nothing telling him how to proceed. Even when he’d finally figured out the clues leading to a hidden fortune in gold coins, that had only raised more questions. Where had they come from? How had his father, who earned a good living but was by no means wealthy, gotten them? Why were they hidden away, like some guilty secret?

  No surprise, then, that Max could only guess at what the buttons were supposed to mean. Probably Where are you? Or maybe Where the devil are you? Whatever the precise message, what they hinted at was Max’s failure, and he was already sorry enough, every day, that he hadn’t yet been able to rescue his parents.

  It wasn’t as if he’d been sitting under a tree sipping lemonade and munching on cookies while he read adventure books. He’d been busy, figuring out how to earn a living and earning it. He’d become Mister Max, Solutioneer, solving problems for the Mayor, even. For William Starling’s information, that was what his son had been doing. Being independent. As ordered.

  On his way back through the kitchen, Max ripped up the envelope and dropped it into the trash. He didn’t plan to tell his grandmother about this one, just as he hadn’t told her about the previous two. He poured himself a glass of water and had a surprising and disturbing thought: the envelope had been delivered by hand. This
raised more questions. If his father had an ally in the city, why wouldn’t that person come directly to Max? Were these buttons a trap being set by General Balcor to lure Max to Andesia, and if so, what did the General plan to do once he had Max and his parents together? Who, besides Max and Grammie and their small circle of co-conspirators, knew about William and Mary Starling’s perilous position?

  Everything his former-schoolteacher, former-librarian grandmother had been able to find out about Andesia made them even more uneasy: The narrow country that lay along the high foothills of the Andes had been, since the discovery of veins of silver and copper in its mountains, conquered and reconquered by strong men, robber chieftains who styled themselves Kings of Andesia and were soon assassinated by the next conquering invader. Recently, not seven months back, when the downtrodden natives had rebelled against their masters, foreign armies had come to the aid of the King. The royal family had been spirited away to safety in a mountain fortress and order had been re-established, the rebellion put down, its leaders hanged in the public square, and a general left in charge. But despite General Balcor’s efforts (or perhaps because of them?), the royal family was discovered and murdered.

  Grammie could find out nothing about this General Balcor, other than the simplest facts—Andesian mother, Peruvian father, educated abroad in a suspicious number of different schools. They guessed that his was the shadowy figure in the newspaper photograph Grammie had sighted of the coronation of the new King and Queen of Andesia: William and Mary Starling. The royal couple was smiling down on a crowd gathered to greet them on the steps of the cathedral of Caracas, their hands clasped in a signal Max and Grammie recognized from seeing it as the Starlings took their bows at the end of a bad performance. Trouble, those clasped hands meant. Max and Grammie suspected that the trouble had to do with the barely discernible figure lurking close behind them, a high military shako on its head.

  The coronation photograph had appeared in June, more than a month after the disappearance, and it was now late July. Max had counted off the slow days and the long weeks, and he knew just how long a time it had been. He was doing the best he could, as fast as he could. There was no need for anyone, most likely William Starling, fake King of Andesia, to be firing buttons at him. He put his glass down on the counter beside the sink and set his feelings down beside it. He could be angry at his parents later, after he’d rescued them. Never mind those buttons, he had work to do.

  Max finally had a rescue plan, and it was a good one: to arrive in Andesia as a member of a visiting foreign embassy. Ari—Max’s tenant, math tutor, and the future Baron Barthold—would be the embassy’s head. Max would act as his private secretary. And Grammie would play the housekeeper. He knew that the plan’s best chance of success was if it was an official diplomatic embassy sent by King Teodor III, but he had no idea how to get into the presence of Teodor to even make the request. One thing in Max’s favor was that the royal family had arrived for their annual vacation weeks in the summer palace, so the King was nearby. That was, however, the only thing in his favor.

  The summer palace sat on a promontory overlooking the lake, easily visible but thoroughly guarded. During these lakeside holidays, King Teodor and his family could live almost like ordinary people—his children out on bicycles or flying kites, treating themselves to ice cream, going barefoot; he and his Queen out on the lake in a small sailboat, alone together; all of them at the city’s best restaurants, just for the pleasure of dining out together as a family. Max needed to think of a way to intrude on the King’s well-guarded holiday privacy, and if he could do that, to persuade him to give official standing—nothing more, Max would take care of all the rest—to a rescue party masquerading as a diplomatic embassy. Max had to speak to the King in person, and he hadn’t yet figured out how to do that.

  He needed to think hard, so he put on his red painter’s beret and took his easel out to the front garden, where Grammie would not see him and come pestering around. That morning, luckily, there was a paintable sky. White fluffy clouds floated through air of a color that only happened in July, a pale blue that seemed to include yellow heat. You looked at the sky and you knew it was going to be a hot day. But not—how could the color show this?—a hot and humid day. This was an interesting painting problem, and Max set to work. His hand would paint, his brain would think, and maybe he would have an idea.

  He was so deeply immersed in the delicate touches that would re-create the puffiness of the clouds that the bell roused him like an alarm in the night. At the sound, Max spun around. He hadn’t known that the little bell could clamor.

  A hat was at the gate. The hat was extraordinarily wide and extraordinarily tall and extraordinarily purple. It waved two extraordinarily long and extraordinarily yellow feathers in the air. The feathers were attached to it with the bright green splash of a Z.

  The hat was wearing a rather small woman.

  The woman—who, without being invited in, unlatched the gate and marched onto the path to the front door—was short and round. In a lavender summer dress with a narrow purple belt at the waist, her body was as round as a figure eight. Her face, too, was round and her eyes were round and her little red mouth was almost round. She was not young, not at all young, although she moved up the path and across the grass to where Max stood with the speed and energy of youth. “I expect that you are this Solutioneer person,” she said.

  Max nodded and bit at the insides of his cheeks, to keep from laughing.

  “You know who I am,” she told him.

  He thought that he might, although it was Pia Bendiff, his assistant, who had handled the correspondence. The woman must be R Zilla, the city’s most well-known milliner. He didn’t know which was more alarming, her hat or her presence.

  “You are not without skill,” the woman remarked, staring at his painting as closely as if he had asked for her opinion. “It’s hard to tell from this. Although”—eyes as round and streaky blue as marbles moved to the beret he wore—“you have no sense of style.”

  Max still couldn’t speak, for fear of laughing. There was so much hat to her…

  “Who is your teacher? To set you such an exercise, he must have a plan. It must be a man, I think. Who is it?”

  “Joachim,” Max answered in a choked voice. He had to gather himself together, he knew. He had to become the Solutioneer, the successful investigator, a professional. He hoped she wouldn’t ask him anything solutioneery until he had had a chance to become who she thought he was.

  “Joachim works in oils,” she told him, as if he did not already know. “I once purchased a painting of a branch in winter,” she announced, and turned her attention back to Max’s skyscape.

  He took a deep breath. While she studied his painting, she made little puffing sounds that emerged like timid kittens from under the purple brim of the hat. He took a second deep breath, and a third. He became Mister Max. He asked, “What is it you want of me?”

  “I see nothing of Joachim in this,” she announced. “A pity. Does he have a studio?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where would that be? I might be in the market for another of his pictures,” she informed him.

  Max was happy to give her the address. He was sending Joachim a buyer, just what the painter needed.

  “Ah, he’s in the New Town.” She nodded. “A better location than yours, here in the old city.”

  “He’s actually working in two styles now. There’s the old way—”

  “Fine details. Rich tones. Painted from life,” she told him.

  “—and a new one, quite different.”

  “I will prefer the old,” she declared.

  “He usually works in his garden,” Max said.

  He had no idea where this conversation was going. They stood side by side in front of his easel. Anyone in the lane would have thought they were discussing the painting on the easel in front of them.

  “I expect it’s his way of staying away from his family, who would in
terrupt his concentration,” R Zilla said.

  “He doesn’t have a family.”

  “I expect he is too young.”

  “No,” Max said.

  “Well,” she said then, and turned to look up into his face. “It’s about my niece, Tess Tardo,” she announced. “The girl has no gratitude. I taught her everything she knows, but she is a quarrelsome and stubborn girl. My youngest sister’s youngest child. I took her in. I could do no less, since she has a certain talent. She has acquired necessary skills in my workroom. I trained her,” R Zilla told him proudly, then announced, “The girl has gone off on her own.”

  Max did not need to be told that this displeased R Zilla. Her sharp, quick words did that, but what they didn’t tell him was what it all had to do with the Solutioneer.

  “Thankless child.” R Zilla glared up at him. Her expression changed. “You have very odd eyes,” she told him. “I’m not sure you can be trusted, with those eyes. They are almost the color of garden snakes,” she said. “Much too close to the color of garden snakes, if you ask me.”

  Max couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

  R Zilla did not like being laughed at. Her mouth pursed up into a wrinkled red prune.

  At least, Max thought, she wouldn’t bother him any more about some job.

  But he was to be disappointed in that hope. “When will you start on the job?” she demanded crossly.

  “What job?”

  “Finding her. Well, I know where she is to be found. I’m not a total dolt, whatever some people might think.” Her glance made it clear to Max just whom she was referring to. “I want you to find out about her. I need to know how to get her back. Tess was very good with the girls in the workroom. Which I am not,” R Zilla told him, as if this would come as a surprise.