by K. Eason
To them, Rory felt a vague mixture of guilt and obligation. At least their grief was honest. There were others who went around in public with faces mottled and streaky with grief—men who had been to dinner with the King, whom he had called friend—who were not a bit sorry. Not quite pleased, exactly; but not grief-stricken, either.
And then there was her own mother, whose weeping—always private, on the other side of doors—held equal parts sorrow and a dark, fierce joy at a freedom she had never thought to feel again.
Even Rory, who had little patience for prevarication, and even less skill at executing it herself, knew that her mother’s mixed feelings must remain private. It did not take an adult to understand that. Still, she wished very much for Grytt’s advice. She wondered if she dared tell anyone—her mother, Messer Rupert, the koi in the pond—that she missed her father less than she missed Grytt, or if that, like her mother’s dark joy, must remain secret.
Lacking any other advisors, she asked the Rory in the mirror. And that girl—oh, a pretty thing now, true to the fairies’ gifts, beautiful dark eyes, even red-rimmed, warm bronze skin, hair like a swath of moonless, cloudy night—answered.
“You keep it quiet, Rory. That’s what you do.”
Rory thought that was something Grytt might have said. She nodded approval at her mirror self, who nodded back.
Then Rory pulled her hair back into a tail, and pressed her lips together, and put her silence on like armor.
She wore that armor for the next four days, as the palace turned itself inside out, preparing for a royal funeral. The contractors would not be finished with the formal entryway in time, and so preparations were made to convert one of the side entrances. More work-people swarmed the hallways. Rory wore her armor through interminable fittings, where maids and seamstresses considerably less contained than Rory herself—Deme Ethel sniffled and leaked the entire two hours—measured and cut and stitched and remeasured, while Rory stood very still and had staring contests with her reflection.
The day of the funeral dawned exactly as grim and dark as the weather-hexes could make it, which is to say, so dark the birds didn’t even know it was daylight. Nothing chirped. The tree-rats, who, unlike the birds, knew very well what time it was, hung themselves in the branches and watched as mourners from the city gathered at the fence the entire night. They watched as media crews passed through the guards’ checkpoint and crept up the roads to the palace to set up their cameras. They watched, beady-eyed, as the King’s coffin and its attendants marched out of the palace through the newly official side entrance. They watched as it marched down the road, toward the gates, past the lawns and forests, until it stopped in front of the gates. Then they listened to the wail rising out of the assembled citizens like the sun, higher and brighter until the whole world seemed painted with sound. And they watched the procession return, by the same route, and the crowd outside disperse. Then, and only then, did the tree-rats come down to scavenge, knowing that any crowd of that size will have members among it clever enough to bring their own food, and still others enterprising and unsentimental enough to set up carts to sell to those less well-prepared.
It was a good day for tree-rats, but not for princesses.
Rory was spared the procession—Messer Rupert oversaw that—but she was waiting when it returned to the palace. There, in the same great hall in which she had been Named, its walls hung with tapestries and screens to cover the unfinished repairs, the whole place smelling of fresh paint and sour incense, Rory stood and waited for her father’s coffin. And when it arrived, she stood beside it, through the long hours of speeches by politically important people and monotone rituals by the three official faiths of the Thorne Consortium.
Let us take a moment, then, to describe this coffin, on which so much attention was fixed. It was made of a brushed pewter alloy. Homeworld tradition called for stone, but Messer Rupert had lost his heart for arguing on tradition’s behalf. Still, the coffin bore traditional shape: a raised sculpture of the King lying atop it, hands crossed over his chest, his face relaxed as if he were asleep.
It was very lifelike, which made it very horrible and very beautiful. It also made the King seem much sterner and cleverer than he had been, with a geometric jaw and firm lips. It was meant to be comforting, and it was, therefore, exactly the sort of social illusion the thirteenth fairy had equipped Rory to notice. It was like a small rock in one’s shoe. Annoying at first, and then painful, and then intolerable.
Rory made a point not to look at her coffin-father’s face. She stared just past it, to the worn front edge of the dais. Exactly the spot, although she did not know it, from which the thirteenth fairy had scolded the King. She herself stood in exactly the same spot her father had stood, during that scolding.
It should have been the Regent-Consort’s place, but the Regent-Consort was not in attendance, a fact about which her political enemies made much, and which ended up undermining her reign before it had even begun because people will always believe the worst about someone if it’s more interesting than the truth, particularly if that person is the least bit different or foreign. It becomes the task of historians to correct those misperceptions with a cold application of fact.
And so: The Regent-Consort missed her husband’s funeral because she was busy with an event as inevitable as war and death, though significantly more rewarding. She birthed her second child, a son, eleven days following the explosion, at the precise moment that her firstborn, much-wished-for daughter stood on the dais and listened to the Bishop of Tres intoning dogma about wheels and rebirth.
Rory was not entirely alone on the dais. Messer Rupert stood on her right side, like a tall shadow cast by a rising—or setting—sun. Rory knew he wanted to put his hand on her shoulder, as he did sometimes when he wanted to reassure her. She knew he wanted to stand between her and the crowd and let her hide in his formal robes, as she had when she was very young. She knew he wouldn’t dare either gesture, which made her both glad and sorry; but she also knew he was right in his suspicion that she did not need his reassurance.
Because she had Grytt back. That was the best part of the whole horrid day, the joy of which filled Rory’s chest and made her heart ache as it tried to decide whether to be sad or happy and ended up just hurting. Deme Grytt had
bullied her way
gotten out of the medical wing to be here. She stood, raw and pink where she had kept her skin, dull brushed chrome where she hadn’t. One of her eyes was a tesla, now, blue and bright in a metal socket. It made a faint whirring noise as it moved. And it moved constantly. Rory watched the shivers and winces ripple across the faces of the attendees and back again as Grytt’s stare passed over them.
So Rory stood between Rupert and Grytt, wearing black crepe and silk in a formal style meant for someone much older. She looked a little bit like a baby crow caught in the rain. But her eyes were clear, and her lips were tightly pressed, and her chin didn’t wobble once.
Everyone agreed, afterward, that she had been very, very brave.
When, after eighteen hours in labor, still sweat-soaked and bloody, the Regent-Consort formally entered hostilities against the Free Worlds of Tadesh, and committed her kingdom-by-marriage to war, no one said anything at all about bravery.
Such are the peculiarities of history.
* * *
• • •
The Thorne Consortium had been officially at war for two days before Rory Thorne met her brother. There was no conspiracy on the part of the Regent-Consort to keep her children apart. It was simply an issue of time, availability, and the diligence (the less charitable might say mulishness) of the Prince’s nurse.
A monarch in the early stages of a war has much to do, and the Regent-Consort had to fit Jacen’s existence into an endless series of meetings and planning sessions. Wars, as it turned out, required a vast shifting of resources, both mechanical and organic; they also
required a great deal of funding. The Thorne Consortium was wealthy and well-endowed, so that was not (yet) a concern; but knowing which divisions and battalions and cruisers to put where was a matter of strategy and political argument and long consultation with people who had often conflicting advice.
The Regent-Consort was grateful, in those days, for two things: that she had grown up playing chess and that she had Deme Isabelle to look after the as-yet-unofficially Named Prince Jacen. A baby can be deferred with a bottle. However much their behavior may resemble an infant’s, politicians cannot.
Deme Isabelle had also been King Thorne’s nurse—an old woman, soft-bodied and sharp-tongued. She had never been Rory’s, to her chagrin. Then, the Regent-Consort had insisted on doing her own mothering duties and damn Thorne custom. But this time—with a war ongoing, and a kingdom to oversee—she yielded to tradition and necessity and consigned the Prince to his nurse for large swathes of the day.
Deme Isabelle had never forgiven the Regent-Consort for denying her oversight of the Princess and so, having acquired authority of this Thorne child, she was determined to keep it. Part of that authority meant controlling his environment. An infant, of course, does not have many visitors. Jacen had his mother, whom Deme Isabelle had to admit, whatever her grudges; but there were not, at this stage in the Prince’s life, a great many others interested in spending time with him. His sister, however, was interested, and here was where the conflict arose.
There were many, many things, in Deme Isabelle’s reckoning, that had been done wrong in the raising of Rory Thorne. Wild little thing, running about. It wasn’t proper. It wasn’t tradition. Of course, the real source of Deme Isabelle’s resentment was not Rory’s athletic habits. It was Grytt, to whom the young Princess had been entrusted once she was weaned and toddling, who infected the Princess with her Kreshti ways, allowing a girl-child to run and encouraging her to stick pins in the household staff who displeased her—by which she meant a single, unfortunate incident in which Rory had stuck a pin in the Vizier’s leg while he was engaged in attempting to teach her arithmantic hexes. The Vizier himself was usually much on the side of tradition for its own sake, and his relationship with Grytt was an evolving effort; that Grytt’s first reaction to the news of Rory’s trespass had been laughter, rather than horror, had not helped their relationship. But however inappropriate Grytt’s comportment, the Vizier knew that she had not encouraged the Princess to violence. It was just an unfortunately literal child-mind interpretation of the phrase stuffed shirt, which Rory should not have overheard and had and decided to test, as one does, with a straight pin.
Deme Isabelle, having drawn her own judgment once, refused to revise it, whatever the actual victim of the incident reported, and upon that belief based her decision to keep Rory Thorne well out of her brother’s nursery.
So when Rory knocked on the nursery door, fully expecting admittance, she was surprised when Deme Isabelle opened the door only half the width of her own body and peered down at Rory and said, “No, dear, I’m sorry,” before Rory even got out a word. Deme Isabelle’s whole face shone with a delighted malice. “This isn’t a good time. The baby’s asleep.”
Rory did not need the fairy’s gift to know that Jacen most certainly was not asleep. Babies do not shriek because of wet nappies while napping. Deme Isabelle wasn’t even trying to lie. She was just saying no, and daring Rory to do something about it. No. Not daring.
Rory squinted a little. There was something the nurse wanted to say. Something fluttering behind her squared-off smirk. She pulled out her best smile and pasted it across her lips.
“I am the Princess,” Rory said, in a tone so sweet butterflies would feed upon it, while teeth dissolved into cavities. “And I’m asking to see my brother.”
Deme Isabelle did not need the thirteenth fairy’s gift to hear order instead of ask. But perhaps she had been struck by some glamour, for instead of seeing seven-year-old Rory in front of her, she saw instead the Regent-Consort seven years earlier, holding an infant, and she heard the Regent-Consort say, “That will be all, thank you, but I don’t need your help.”
So it was as much to the mother’s memory, as to the daughter, that Deme Isabelle said, “And I’m telling you I’m sorry, but no. Princess.”
you’ll not be ordering me about, or anyone, now that we have a proper heir, just you wait
Her smile was wide, sharp, entirely sincere, and not a bit kind.
The fairies had given Rory kindness, beauty, and wits. They had neglected to include sweet, biddable disposition. Thus, we might forgive Rory if the temper she had inherited from her mother, which did not much love the word no when it was not attached to an explanation, flared up.
Rory looked at Deme Isabelle for a moment longer than was proper for child to look at an adult. It was a staring-down-the-help look, with a good bit of square-jawed stubborn thrown into the mix. In ten years, that stare would provoke results. But Rory’s stare was unripe, and Deme Isabelle unimpressed.
The nursery door was shut, harder than was entirely polite for servant to royalty (however young), separating sister and brother.
So.
Rory had become quite skilled at getting into places she should not be, in the past ten days since the attack, and though the nursery door was locked, we must add that it was not secured beyond Rory’s ability to hex. (That lesson in lock-picking was Messer Rupert’s fault, though unwitting: he had been trying to show a reluctant student the practical applications of theoretical arithmancy, in an effort to head off another pin incident.)
Rory stared at the door. The polished brass knob and keyhole were, like so many other things about the palace, remnants of homeworld tradition left purely for appearance. The actual locking mechanism was a panel on the door which was hexed to recognize, and admit, particular auras. Rory’s mother. Deme Isabelle. Baby Jacen.
It was indeed fortunate, Rory thought, that Messer Rupert had recently taught her how family members shared elements of their auras. It was even more fortunate that he had, upon seeing her interest (and rejoicing in it), showed her how her mother’s aura and hers, for instance, shared seven of ten frequencies and an unusual double-spiral pattern. It was all numbers, he assured her. The same dread numerals that made up arithmancy also described auras (and, he added, everything else in the multiverse).
She retreated down the corridor, and settled in a tiny alcove with a narrow slit window and a habit of utter neglect. But for this particular afternoon, as the bar of light from its window slanted toward evening and the sky outside deepened to an eggplanty-blue, it had the Princess in residence. She settled into a corner where the cobwebs were not too thick (there was a draft which made it uncomfortable for spiders, if not for young girls) and worked out her hexes with the arithmancy Messer Rupert had taught her, which involved holding her breath until she could see into that first, shallow layer of aether behind the one that everyone could breathe, where auras gleamed as bright as any rainbow. (We should note that holding one’s breath is not ideal arithmantic practice as it tends to lead to the arithmancer turning blue and passing out, which the Vizier made clear, and which we repeat here, lest our readers attempt to try this at home.)
Although an aura did have a propensity to particular hues and particular patterns, individual auras could, and did, shift their colors according to the mood and biochemical disposition of said individual. Rory was easily able to match her mother’s spiral pattern—only a little tweak to the angle between tangent and radial—but she was less sanguine about the matching of color.
She would eventually learn to identify colors by the numerical designations that governed hue, intensity, and value, which afforded a fine level of control; but the Vizier had started simply, and confined his explanation to a list of simple correspondences. Reds meant strong emotion, love or hate or anger. Oranges, agitation and distress. Yellow was fear or embarrassment; and the cooler shades, cooler e
motions (except green, which was generally regarded as unsavory in all its variations, indicating mendacity or hidden agendas). The Regent-Consort’s aura had, of late, been populated by more green than was typical, a tinge that diluted the usual blues and blackened the edges of violets. Rory thought her own copy was rather too ultramarine, but she thought it would work long enough to fool the hexes on the nursery door.
And she waited. The supper hour was coming. Eventually, Deme Isabelle would have to come out. Or fall asleep. Or—something. Rory hadn’t worked out her plans that far, and thinking about them now—after the time already spent on a hex that would get her past the door, and which she badly wanted to try out—only soured her mood even further. Rory was on the verge of attempting to create a new set of hexes, the kind that would give an old woman green spots or make her speak only the k’bal dialect that sounds like dyspeptic chickens, when fate—or luck—intervened.
Although a half dozen servants had walked by the alcove in the intervening hours, not one had looked sideways and noticed Rory. But a Regent-Consort, however preoccupied with meetings, however focused on her tablet and on the subvocalized conversation she was having via earpiece and mastoid mobile, will always notice her daughter sitting in a neglected corner of the palace. And she will read the brow-knit expression (correctly) as a forewarning of mischief, rather than a headache brought on by an excess of dust.
The Regent-Consort stopped. She matched her daughter’s frown with one of her own and terminated her conversation with a short pair of syllables. And then she said, out loud, “Rory. For the love of—what are you doing here? Does Messer Rupert know where you are? Does Grytt?”