by K. Eason
Like the current whereabouts and disposition of the Crown Prince, for instance.
Rory squirmed a little higher on her chair, drew her legs up, and reached around her knees to reach the keyboard again. This was the tricky bit, the part where she discovered just how sophisticated the turing collective was—
She let her breath go all at once.
“You all right?” asked Grytt.
“Mm,” said Rory, which Grytt understood (correctly) to mean yes, everything is fine.
The collective was, in fact, very limited in its resources, which rendered it somewhat stupid. Her little hexed turing terminal was its smartest component, so far. It was also, she discovered, even more limited in its permissions. She poked along its base-code hexes, rendered in neat lines on the screen, discovering the borders of allowability. Poked a little harder in the aether, to see what sorts of locks and barriers the Ursan IT arithmancers had made against intruders.
She was not impressed. She hexed a layer of ingenuity into her turing. A double layer of caution. A smidge of paranoia. And, after a moment’s deliberation, a rather sophisticated set of hexes for breaking, entering, and retrieving the information she wanted. This sounds like a complicated procedure, but recall: Rory had been dabbling in security-hexes since childhood, and she had plenty of practice. The Vizier would have been both appalled and proud, had he seen her handiwork.
Then she sat back and set her turing loose and waited, while Cherno loomed outside the prosperity.
The turing terminal beeped.
“Good?” asked Grytt.
“Depends.” Rory unfolded her legs and leaned forward onto her elbows. Her reflection filled the monitor, ghosted insubstantial, partially eclipsed by text. “Ivar’s on military maneuvers. On . . .” She scrolled. Frowned. “On Beo.”
Rory had done a great deal of reading about Urse’s system, having thought it prudent to know as much about her new prison as possible. Beo was the third of Bielo’s seventeen moons, and one of the few which had the courtesy to be solid and warm enough to support a Tadeshi marine training base, while still being poisonous and cold enough to make survival a skill, rather than a guarantee.
“Nasty,” said Grytt, who had read the same materials.
“Perhaps Messer Rupert’s right about Ivar,” Rory said. “Perhaps he’s changed.”
“Or maybe he hasn’t.”
“Grytt, be fair. He’s with the marines.”
“Compulsory service is a rule in the Free Worlds.”
“Nothing’s compulsory for royalty.”
“The future King can’t get an exemption, even if he’s incompetent.”
“But that’s an elite base.” Rory tapped the screen, as if the impact of her finger on the glass made the facts more impressive. “Doesn’t that mean Ivar’s elite, too?”
“Might be Moss wants him dead in a training accident.”
“Grytt!”
“Moss has two boys of his own. Think on that.”
Rory did. She had just sent her little turing to investigate the service records of Vernor Moss’s sons when the door alert rang. It was not precisely a ringing sound. More of a raucous howling, as if a dozen tree-rats were trapped in the wires. Rory had not suffered the misfortune of hearing it before, and so she might be forgiven for leaping nearly a meter straight up and out of her chair. Grytt was no less startled. She tipped the table on its edge and had taken cover behind it, the ’slinger’s muzzle just peeking over the top.
The door shrieked again. This time, a voice followed, deep, male, and as expressive as new deckplate.
“Princess Rory? The Regent sends his regards. Please open the door.”
Grytt stepped carefully around the table, putting herself in front of Rory. She kept both eyes and her ’slinger pointed at the door. “Coincidence? Or did you trip an alert?”
“Coincidence,” Rory said, a little breathlessly. She leaned over and swiped the turing’s screen blank. “Better put that down before I open the door. Don’t want an incident.”
“Huh,” said Grytt, but she tucked the ’slinger down against her hip.
It was not Regent Moss himself at the door, of course. Instead, Rory found herself chest-level with a uniformed pair of armed men, on the larger side of human genetic variation, alike enough to be clones. The one on the right bowed at the waist, and offered on his gloved palm a little silver scroll stuffed with a roll of what appeared to be real paper, tied with a real ribbon. An extravagance, a statement about the wealth of Tadesh. A casual gesture of power, meant to intimidate—or, more charitably, a sign of respect, an acknowledgement of her worth.
Rory was not feeling charitable. She inclined her head at the guard and plucked the scroll from his palm.
“Please wait here,” she said. It was not exactly protocol, leaving the man outside, but she did not think Grytt would appreciate a pair of armed Tadeshi inside their quarters. For that matter, she would not appreciate it. Moss would not hurt her, she was (almost) certain; but the large and prominently displayed sidearms on his security did not inspire in her any sense of abiding confidence. These men were Moss’s, she was certain. Not inherited from Sergei Valenko, and thus not even a little bit Ivar’s.
The security bowed again, this time the pair of them, and settled into the professional waiting-on-the-important-people-to-finish-their-business stance.
Rory stepped back and closed the door. Then she locked it, for good measure, and leaned her back against the cool, smooth steel.
“I’ve got a message,” she said, and waved the scroll at Grytt.
“Eh.” Grytt tipped her blue eye at the scroll. Waited. Then: “Just paper. It’s safe to open.”
Rory stared at the scroll as if it had sprouted ten hairy legs and a pair of mandibles. “I didn’t even think of that possibility.”
“That’s why I’m here,” said Grytt. She had righted the table, and was in the process of replacing the things that had been innocently sitting upon it and were now scattered across the deck. “I messaged our people. Stary and Franko are standing by. Thorsdottir and Zhang are in reserve.”
“Good.” Rory shook the scroll out of its case. Her name, complete with title, was scripted and gilded and conspicuous in its solitude on the front flap. Grytt had not been included in the invitation, which was not a surprise. Neither had Messer Rupert, which was.
“He’s inviting me to his office. Moss.”
“About time.”
“Only me. Not Messer Rupert. Shouldn’t he also invite the Vizier to a formal, diplomatic meeting?”
“He should.” Grytt grimaced. “Tells you something, doesn’t it?”
Rory blinked. Frowned at the pretty, formal letters. They looked handwritten. They probably were.
“We should call Messer Rupert.”
Grytt’s grimace deepened and stretched, drawing her eyebrow and forehead into a vortex of disapproval. “And tell him what, Moss is trying to get you alone?”
“I doubt it’s like that,” Rory said reflexively. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was meant by that, or what that might entail, but she was certain Moss didn’t want it. “Maybe he’s trying to be courteous. By seeing me alone, he acknowledges me as an independent representative of Thorne, rather than as a minor under Messer Rupert’s escort.”
“Bah,” said Grytt. “He wants you alone and scared.”
“Scared? Why would I—”
“You’d be a fool to feel anything else.” Grytt gave the grimace one last twist before resetting her features. “You’re not a fool.”
Rory shrugged, one-shouldered. She had already decided that Moss’s real message concerned impressing upon his royal hostage who, exactly, was in charge of the station, and where she ranked in his estimation. Waiting three days. Sending a pair of his own security to fetch her.
“Grytt,” she said. “I’
m a minor, by Thorne law, and should not go unaccompanied among strangers.”
It was Grytt’s turn to blink. Then her mouth twisted in a different direction, peeling her lips off her teeth. “Just let me tidy up, Princess.”
The Tadeshi escort blinked, in unison, when Grytt followed Rory out, wearing her body-maid livery. They blinked a second time as they marked her half-chromed skull winking from beneath the velvet tam. They didn’t blink at all when Stary and Franko emerged from their quarters and took up their positions in the corridor, but their eyes narrowed a little.
“Stay here,” Rory told her security. “Grytt will accompany me.”
Rory drew herself up and lifted her chin, prepared to turn all objections, but none were forthcoming. The Tadeshi bowed, again in unison, and turned and led the way through the labyrinthine coils of Urse. Rory kept careful track of turns and steps. She had studied schematics of the station, and so she knew that they were not taking her by public route, which was the way she had come—past the stares of residents and shopkeepers and dockworkers—but rather by smaller, less-populated corridors that seemed to run through upper-class residential areas. The residents here moved aside politely and said nothing out loud, but their stares bored into her back like so many steel points.
There were a great many places a person might vanish, back here. Little alleys. Blank doors. Bulkheads with a paucity of portholes.
Rory looked straight ahead, and didn’t hurry, and wished she had brought her own security. She also wished she had dared to come armed. And she was also very, very glad of Grytt, who certainly had.
Urse had no palace, being a station, but the municipal complex, which spiked the entire height of the station off the primary deck, did a credible imitation. The complex was fronted in a frosted, extremely expensive, one-way hexed diamond compound that glittered in the station lights like an icicle, and its corridors—curved and tangled and not at all like the clean, predictable lines of the rest of Urse—seemed to Rory more like those of a museum than a government facility. Officials flitted the corridors, clustering in alcoves to whisper their business, prancing across the wider rooms to see and be seen. The monarch’s office looked over the docks on one side, and across three glass-sided levels of offices, meeting rooms, and lounges on the other. There were curtains drawn across the windows at the moment, of a purple more related to black than to violet, and of a fabric (probably velvet) that sucked the light like a singularity.
Moss had not built it—that extravagance was King Sergei’s grandsire’s doing—but he had made himself well at home in it. He sat in his padded
throne
executive administrator’s chair in his office for a full three beats after Rory entered the room before rising, which was just south of good protocol. At least two of those beats he spent studying Grytt, as if wishing an aetherlock would open up under her feet and remove her from his presence.
Rory listened to the whisper of the ventilation, a background noise on Urse that seemed, when it was the only sound present, like the quiet breathing of something large and invisible in the same room. She looked around the office: a first quick glance to mark the placement of furniture and other heavy objects (“Always look for cover”), and for any openings not as immediately apparent as the door. Monarchs, even those who lived in void, made a practice of having escape routes in case of emergency. Rory guessed there might be a trapdoor of some sort under the desk. The only other solid bulkhead, to the left of the desk, looked like the offspring of a library and a museum, studded with shelves of books and artwork representing all the planets, stations, and assorted colonies of the Free Worlds.
Then, the Regent having still said nothing, Rory took a second, longer look around the room, which ended, perhaps inevitably, on the Regent himself.
If one could wish the nemesis of all that was good and right in the universe to be possessed of unfortunate features in an unpleasing arrangement, or protruding teeth, or pervasive body odor, well, Rory had already been disappointed. She had seen enough holos and 2Ds of Moss to know that his straight nose and high cheekbones and sharp chin were counted handsome by most standards. In person, he smelled like pleasant, clean, manly nothing.
He was, Rory thought, damn (sorry, Messer Rupert) near perfect. He also had more cosmetic-hexes than she had ever seen on one person, and she wondered if he had performed them all himself (unlikely, but daunting if he had) or (more likely) had a small contingent of body-men to do it for him.
She considered, very briefly, testing her arithmancy against his cosmetics, and seeing if sweaty palms, big pores, or halitosis presented themselves. She discarded the notion in the next breath—not because of any fairy gifts of wisdom or prudence, but because Moss chose that moment to rise.
“Princess Rory.” His voice was pleasant, its Tadeshi accent musical. His mouth arranged itself into a charming smile, confined to the borders of his lips and the dimple on his left cheek. He tilted his chin down in the sort of greeting monarchs give each other, which does not require breaking eye contact or displaying the top of one’s head. “Please accept my welcome, on behalf of Prince Ivar and the Free Worlds of Tadesh, to Urse.”
Rory brought out the smile she had honed to perfection on courtiers since her twelfth birthday. She inclined her head, just a hair more shallowly than Moss. A proper Thorne greeting would have included a curtsy, but Rory was disinclined to bend her knee to Regent Moss, and besides, she was wearing the trousers favored by Kreshti women and Ursan residents of all sexes, which rendered curtseys impractical. Instead, she extended her hand, which she intended both as an offer and a challenge, a handshake being, among humans at least, a greeting between equals.
Moss reached for her hand, and for a heartbeat, Rory thought she might have to revise all her opinions of him. Before that little shiver of disappointment could settle into resignation, the Regent caught her fingertips as if they were live butterflies, tipped her hand palm-side down, and brought her knuckles to his lips. His skin was cool, smooth, like plastic. His lips were tepid. His breath, skating across the back of her hand, was hot and cool by turns, as he held onto it for several moments longer than the duration of the kiss.
“You are,” he said, smiling past her knuckles, “so very much like your mother.”
Rory, with a sense of relief, settled back into her prejudicial dislike like armor.
Grytt stirred, in Rory’s periphery. Moss’s gaze flicked that direction and settled just long enough that his smile shrank and hardened into what Rory thought must be the usual shape of his mouth. Thoughtful. A little cruel.
Then Moss blinked and returned his smile and attention to her. But not her hand, not yet, even as he straightened and drew her arm further over the expanse of the desk, forcing her onto her toes to keep balance. Rory was conscious of the broad expanse of imported wood, with its careful arrangement of tablets and scrolls and documents, a pair of turings, and trio of styluses, arranged by size beside the larger of the terminals. The Regent’s territory, and herself suspended over it, trusting her balance and dignity to the pressure of his fingers on hers.
He squeezed her hand gently. “I am so very pleased to
have you
make your acquaintance, your Highness, and to have you
keep you
here on my station.”
Rory marked Moss’s use of the personal possessive pronoun. Then she plucked her fingers out of his hand and thumped back on her heels. She had to retreat half a step to catch up to her balance, which both irritated (it looked like retreat) and relieved (oh good, another meter between us) her. Thus removed to a safer distance, Rory pressed her soles firmly into the textured deckplate and dropped her chin in a gesture Messer Rupert knew well. Had he been present, he would have stared warning at her with such force as to leave tiny holes in the side of her skull.
In another age, the thirteen fairies might have wished wisdom on the y
oung princess, as it is often a necessity to the happiness of princesses and queens, who must manage their male counterparts. And so the twelfth fairy had intended to grant Rory that gift. But with the thirteenth fairy’s modification on the traditional death-wish, the twelfth fairy had elected to ameliorate the curse with a counter-wish, and to let wisdom happen in its own time, a companion to age and experience. Perhaps she was herself unwise in her choice of counter-wishes, or perhaps she expected Rory’s elders to be forever at hand to guide the Princess through her youth, or perhaps she thought that, in the end, wisdom is wasted on youth. Who can say, with fairies?
Thus it was that Rory—superb harpist, fine singer, as kind as wishes could make her—was, by Moss’s contrivance, without her best and wisest advisor when her own wisdom failed her.
“Thank you,” she said, with the barest sincerity, and three measures too much briskness for proper etiquette. “But where is Prince Ivar? I had expected him here to greet me.”
There should have been at least one your Grace in that query. Her tone should certainly have been, if not demure, then at least respectful. Instead she sounded in that moment like the least fortunate amalgam of her father’s arrogance and her mother’s temper—in other words, entirely like a monarch.
Grytt cleared her throat. The tiniest cough, as if she’d mislaid a bit of air and had to snatch it up again. It was a Messer Rupert sort of noise, and it generally meant think carefully or you just said something stupid. Coming from Grytt, it probably meant shut up and check for cover.
Regent Moss never looked at Grytt. Not a flicker. Instead his Bielo-colored eyes rested on Rory until she fancied that she could see her breath smoke in the chill.
“Prince Ivar regrets he cannot be here,” the Regent said finally, softly, all the music of his accent sunk flat. “He is presently engaged in other activities.”