How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse--Book One of the Thorne Chronicles

by K. Eason

  “My aunt is Kreshti’s Prime. Her people come first. If Kreshti were not suffering drought, we might continue this war indefinitely, but that is now impossible. My aunt will have to accept the terms or break her alliance with Thorne. She can hate me if she wants. But you, Rupert. What do you think?”

  The Vizier was grateful that the mother did not share her daughter’s propensity for seeing through prevarication. He had the leisure to pick his way among words, to choose the most efficacious, to hide behind a vocabulary as stiff as any shield.

  “I think it is a bold move, your Grace, and Regent Moss favors bold moves. I am certain he will accept.”

  “You don’t approve,” she said. “I know. But the only approval I need is from the Council, first, and from Regent Moss, after that.” She paused, half a beat. Then, softly, intensely: “I will not sacrifice my daughter, Rupert. Not yet.”

  And so you sacrifice yourself, he did not say aloud. He understood, for some measure of the word. But he could not force himself to say it. Instead, he added another layer of polite armor to his tone.

  “I believe that I can revise this document into the appropriate language. I will also advocate personally for this proposal in private meetings with the other Council members. By the time it comes to table, we will have no difficulty passing it.” He found he could not look at her any longer. He watched his thumb, rubbing across the polished wood of the chair, as if it belonged to another man. “Then, upon its ratification, I will negotiate with Regent Moss personally, your Grace, to see its realization.”

  He did not look up as he said it, being entirely absorbed smearing his thumbprint in and out of existence in the wood’s polished finish. And so he did not see the Regent-Consort’s flinch. Nor did he see the tiniest branches on the fern nearest to him turn black, as if suddenly deprived of all air and warmth.

  “Thank you,” she said simply, and another frond turned black.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Vizier drafted the proposal in formal court language and brought it before the Council. His passionate arguments in its favor are credited with its near-unanimous ratification by the Council. Only the Minister of Commerce objected, and that was because she had married a second cousin of the Johnson-Thrymbe CEO.

  The terms of the treaty were as legally complex and tedious as is typical of the genre. The Vizier was proud of Rory, that she tried to wade through the document itself. But he could not risk a sixteen-year-old’s misunderstanding, not concerning matters this important. And so he visited her quarters one evening after supper, sat beside her at the table on which sat the remains of her meal, and Grytt’s, and took on the role of her tutor one last time.

  First, he explained, her mother was going to marry the former Minister of Energy and current Regent of the Free Worlds of Tadesh, although the actual governing of the realms would remain separate. Although Regencies were acting as royalty, this position was temporary. Therefore, their marriage would have the same force as a royal alliance, but for only so long as they were Regents. Which meant that when Jacen reached his majority, Samur would become Dowager-Consort to Jacen’s King. When Ivar assumed the Tadeshi throne, Regent Moss would become—well, probably not the Minister of Energy again, but perhaps something like a Vizier.

  Second, and far more difficult to say aloud, was that Rory’s betrothal to Prince Ivar of the Free Worlds of Tadesh would be formally recognized, and eventually realized in wedlock when Rory reached majority, to continue the peace begun by the Regencies. But, the Vizier added, that would happen only after Ivar ascended the throne.

  There was a chance, the Vizier told her, that Ivar might choose to break the betrothal. A king could do that. The Vizier meant to be comforting, and to be comforted, and to impress upon Rory that her mother was hoping—perhaps even counting—on Ivar’s objection to his arranged bride.

  “Wait,” said Rory, and lifted her hand in a gesture so reminiscent of Samur that the pieces of the Vizier’s heart ground together like glass. “Do you mean to tell me that I cannot break this engagement, but Ivar can?”

  “Er.” The Vizier felt as if he’d been dropped into a lightless room in which were traps—great steel toothy things, able to crush a man like a tomato—lying all about, waiting for an unwary step.

  “Yes.” He hoped he sounded forceful and certain.

  Rory leaned back in her seat—an overstuffed monstrosity of paisley patches, the overwhelming majority of which were incestuous versions of orange—and folded her arms. The effect might have been adorable, or disarming, or a dozen other benevolent adjectives, if her face had not been cold as all aetherless void.

  “And my mother is hoping he will decide otherwise, but if he doesn’t, I’m stuck? How is this better than me marrying either the Johnson-Thrymbe or Larish boy?”

  There was no good way to answer either of those questions, and so the Vizier did not. Instead, he chose a new approach, one he hoped was perhaps free of steel traps.

  “Your mother made the best decision she could, Princess.”

  Snap.

  “Hell she did. You don’t even believe that.”

  The swearing was Grytt’s fault. Damn her, the Vizier thought, oblivious to the irony. He wished for a Rory who could be scolded and lectured about keeping one’s composure in the face of supreme provocation. He wished he could give that lecture without hypocrisy. He wished Grytt—who appeared to be the only person Rory would listen to, anymore—would intervene.

  He cast a look at her, half appeal, half assessment. She was watching Rory, frowning with more intensity than was customary.

  “Rory,” she said.

  The Princess sat up in her absurd chair, gripping its arms to finger-whiteness. If she had heard Grytt, she gave no sign. “Mother made this alliance to end the war. I understand that. But she mostly did it so I wouldn’t have to marry Larish or Johnson-Thrymbe. I get that, too, although I wish she hadn’t. But then why chain me to Ivar?”

  “It was your father’s intention to wed you to Ivar. Your mother is only renewing that contract.”

  The Vizier was gratified at a moment’s silence from his adversary. Perhaps now she would see reason. His gratification was short-lived. He had forgotten that teenager trumps logic in most things.

  Rory’s chin came up, square and stubborn. “Father might’ve changed his mind.”

  “Unlikely, Princess. Particularly after Jacen’s birth. Your father would have seen this union as the best thing for the Thorne Consortium.”

  Another silence. The Vizier took advantage of the quiet, hoping to strike before Rory seized upon some other notion at which to take offense.

  “Your father and King Sergei thought that a union between their houses would be the best thing for peace in the sector.”

  “Best thing? Ivar was afraid of the koi! We’re fortunate he never saw a tree-rat. He might’ve died on the spot of sheer terror. He couldn’t keep peace in a graveyard.”

  The Vizier groped after the last wisps of his patience. “That was a great many years ago. Ivar may have changed. You have.”

  “He’s never going to rule his kingdom. At best he’ll be a mouthpiece for Moss. And there’s no way Moss will let me go if he gets me.” Rory’s lips tightened into a razor line. If there had been any ferns present, they would have turned an alarming crimson. As it was, two spots on her cheekbones bloomed exactly that color, as if someone had smudged paint on her skin with a thumb. “Would Ivar have been able to refuse the marriage if our fathers had lived?”

  “Not as a Prince, no. The King’s word, however, is final.”

  “And if he refuses me when he is King? What happens to the peace, then?”

  “Then the peace must fend for itself.”

  She snorted, an indelicate, Grytt-inspired noise. “And if I don’t agree to this marriage?”

  “Legally, your wishes have no f
orce.”

  “So what you’re saying is, Ivar’s character doesn’t matter because he’s prince, and since he’s going to be king, he can say what happens to me, and so can my mother, while I can’t say anything. That’s crap!”

  “Watch your language, Rory!”

  “I’m not five anymore!”

  In that moment, the Vizier saw both the mother and the daughter staring back at him, and his grip on his patience and composure slipped utterly.

  Grytt saw it. “Rupert,” she said, in exactly the same tone she had used previously on Rory, and to exactly the same effect.

  The Vizier matched Rory’s volume—indecorous, to be sure, but to hell with that. “Then stop acting like it! You are a Princess, and your life is not, nor has ever been, your own! It belongs to your people, to be arranged as the kingdom requires. Your preferences are of no consequence!”

  Rory plowed ahead with the same restraint shown by meteorological catastrophes and tectonic disasters.

  “But if I’d been born a boy, I would get a say. And that’s crap, Messer Rupert.”

  “Well, you were not born a boy. And do you know why?”

  “Rupert,” Grytt said a little more forcefully.

  Rory arched her brows. “Genetics?”

  “Rory!” Grytt’s voice climbed.

  The Vizier pitched his own tones even louder. “Because your mother wished otherwise, and the fairies listened. So thank her for your situation!”

  He had not meant to say it. He wished it unsaid in the same breath; but the wishes of a trained arithmancer-historian and political advisor do not carry the same weight with fairies as a mother’s wishes do.

  Rory surged to her feet. The Vizier noted, with a distant corner of his brain, that she had grown quite tall in the last year. Her eyes were nearly level with his.

  The color bled out of her cheeks: first the twin spots on her cheekbones, then all the rest, until even her lips were pallid. Then she spun, with startling speed, and snatched a mug off the table. She hurled it at the nearest wall with sufficient force that it shattered into powder and shards and flung the remnants of its contents—tea, it seemed, old enough to be cool—onto everything within a five foot radius.

  Not content with a single act of destruction, she reached for the next nearest item of crockery—a plate, this time, with the remnants of supper congealed on it.

  “Hell,” Grytt muttered, and crossed from her chair to the Princess in a blur that made Rory seem slow and told the Vizier that, whatever the elapsed time since her active service, Grytt retained her soldier’s reflexes. She clamped her hand around Rory’s arm, holding it, and the plate, steady a centimeter above the table’s surface.

  “Rory,” Grytt said, “That’s enough.”

  Rory tugged against Grytt’s hand for another moment. Then she released the plate and burst into tears.

  Grytt pulled the Princess into the circle of her arm. To the Vizier, she said nothing. But the look she cast over the Princess’s shaking shoulders was sufficiently eloquent.

  Pity. Sympathy. Empathy.

  The Vizier’s face felt wet. The tea, no doubt. He did not reach up and brush it away. Instead, he turned and walked out, and let the door shut softly behind him.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Vizier departed for Urse, to deliver the Regent-Consort’s proposal on the following morning, on an early shuttle whose departure neither the Regent-Consort nor Rory attended (although Grytt made an appearance). The Vizier found anger and regret to be poor traveling companions, and it was a very long journey.

  Kreshti’s Prime publicly ratified the treaty, which, among other things, granted the Free Worlds an exclusive contract for Kreshti mineral rights on the northern continent. This was seen as an act of wisdom and diplomacy, however odious; Kreshti could not break its membership in the Consortium now, after two years of famine and war, and still fend off a large, well-fed, bellicose neighbor. In private, among family, Samur’s aunt burned the name-scroll of her favorite niece three times, and declared that no daughter born to that house would ever again bear the name Samur.

  The Regent Vernor Moss, to no one’s surprise—these things having been settled long since by quantum-hex, which had the virtue of being as close to instantaneous as is permitted by physics, temporarily aligning as it did two fixed locations (unlike a tesser-hex, which, as the reader well knows, folds space to shorten a distance between two fixed points)—accepted the Regent-Consort’s proposal. And so the War ended, as many wars do, with a wedding.

  Which was, as it happened, the only outcome of the treaty to transpire as intended.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  And (Stale)Mate

  The Princess Rory Thorne received her first official invitation to a Council session, at long last, shortly after her mother’s marriage to Regent Moss of the Free Worlds of Tadesh. The wedding itself had taken place off-world, in a neutral location—a little waypost on the Larish shipping lanes, in orbit around a desultory white dwarf—observed by diplomatic representation from the Merchants League and every free planet, consortium, and kingdom worth the name. Battleships from both parties wove complex and polite patterns around each other, scrupulously avoiding any military incidents while at the same time attempting to intimidate the other side.

  The couple spent exactly one night together, to consummate both wedding and treaty, before returning to their respective territories to oversee the end of the War. Further negotiations and settlements took place via quantum-hex, over the course of seven weeks, as the War ended piece by decommissioned piece.

  One of the settlements was the dispensation of Thorne assets. It was decided—first by heated argument and then by cold logic—that the Princess Rory should, at the earliest convenience, relocate to Urse. There, the cold logic went, she would be best able to learn the ways of her future subjects, renew her acquaintance with Prince Ivar, and prepare for a smooth transition after Ivar’s assumption of the throne and their subsequent marriage.

  “You mean,” Rory said, when she heard the news, “I’m going to be a hostage.”

  “Not just you,” the Vizier snapped. Recent events had eroded his polished, political veneer. But where water wears stones soft and round, the War and the Wedding had scraped him into hard edges, brittle and jagged and prone to cut without warning.

  “Your mother is sending me, too, to be your advisor.”

  Rory frowned. Grytt frowned. The Vizier, who was already frowning, wished he understood what the look meant, that passed between them. He shrugged a little deeper into his robes, and told himself it was winter draft that made his bones ache.

  “The Council wants to see you, Rory, in this next session,” he added.

  Another look passed between Rory and Grytt.

  “Do they, now?” Rory murmured. “And why would that be? Not to ask my opinion, certainly.”

  “The official agenda is the composition of your household on Urse.”

  “My household? Myself, Grytt—and you?”

  “And me, as your advisor. There will also be four security personnel. The Regent-Consort has obtained permission”—it galled him to use that word—“to send along some of our house guard, for appearance. Although your residence, like our embassy, is considered Thorne sovereign territory, you will not live in the embassy compound. You are the princess, not a diplomat.”

  Grytt stirred and pointed her unmatched eyes at the Vizier, squinting past her nose as if she were sighting down a rifle’s barrel. “That’s a bit of a middle finger, isn’t it? We’re saying Rory’s not safe in Urse?”

  “No.” Rory looked thoughtful. “It’s about appearances. It’s about me looking like a sovereign representative instead of the hostage everyone knows I really am. It’s performance. Just like when Moss comes here with his matched set of muscle who answer to no one save him.”

 
“Political theatre, yes.” The Vizier folded his hands. He made note that Rory used the Regent’s surname, rather his title. Indicative of a not-so-secret disrespect, he thought, which might indicate an understandably unhappy sixteen-year-old, or might be symptomatic of a deeper rebellion. Something to monitor, particularly after they took up residence on Urse.

  “Presumably that’s why I’m suddenly welcome at the Council table, too.”

  The Vizier hesitated. “The Crown Prince Jacen specifically requested your presence.”

  “Oh.” Rory snorted in a most un-princesslike fashion. “We can’t disappoint Jacen, can we? At what, his first meeting? His second?—And where will my mother be?”

  The cold throbbed up through the Vizier’s bones. “I’m sure I don’t know, your Highness. She doesn’t keep me abreast of her schedule.”

  Anymore, he thought. And this time he needed no translation to understand the look that passed between Rory and Grytt.

  “Well,” said the Princess, after a moment. “That’s her loss, then. We’re glad to have you with us. Aren’t we, Grytt?”

  Grytt arched her remaining eyebrow. “We are indeed,” she said, with no trace whatsoever of her customary irony.

  The Vizier bowed, because that was proper; but he felt a little warmer, somewhere near the remnants of his heart, for the first time in months.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Vizier had expected the Council meeting to be somewhat perfunctory, Grytt already having assembled a short list of personnel she wanted for Urse, and having already discussed those choices with him at some length. The elder pair of guards, Stary and Franko, had been the old King’s personal guard, and brought useful experience; the younger pair, both women and very junior, would provide Rory at least two people close to her own age.

  It should have been a simple matter of securing the Minister of Defense’s signature on the transfer papers. And indeed, that part of the meeting went entirely as planned. But, as it happened, the Prince had his own ideas about the composition of his sister’s household.