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

by K. Eason

  “I bloody well know that.”

  “So you were avoiding me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  His lips thinned. He cast a glance around the room, at heads bent to their particular exercise, at necks stiff with the strain of holding heads tilted just so, to catch every word. He leaned down, close enough that Rory could see the sweat of his interrupted exertions, collected in beads along his hairline. Close enough that she could smell him, skin and sweat, and not the chemical propriety of perfumes and soap.

  “You want something,” he said, in a tone that would have been intimate if it had not been so brittle. “And you want me to get it for you. So you can save your breath. I won’t help you.”

  “Won’t, or can’t?”

  He considered that. “Both.”

  Truth. Rory folded her arms, and noted that this time, Jaed’s eyes didn’t leave hers. It was a point in his favor.

  “Why not?”

  His lips pressed flat. The expression made him look older, pushing him into the grim twenties, out of the borderland of nineteen.

  “Because my father doesn’t take advice from me. He definitely doesn’t do favors for me. Whatever my father’s got on your Vizier, it’s worth more to him than I am.”

  Truth again, or at least he believed that it was. The bitterness was palpable.

  Rory’s eye caught movement in the mirror: Zhang, cutting a graceful path across the room, managing to look as if she weren’t at a near jog. Thorsdottir hovered near the door, wearing a grimace even Grytt could envy.

  Jaed noticed Rory’s distraction and turned to look. And so they were both watching, as Zhang arrived and inserted herself into their conference.

  “Perhaps this conversation would be better continued less publicly, your Highness. Or.” She paused and bowed slightly. “More quietly. Your Highness.”

  Rory nodded at her. “Thank you, Zhang. Will you walk with me, Jaed?”

  “No. Your Highness.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Not accustomed to hearing no, are you?”

  “And you’re not accustomed to being able to say it.”

  He shrugged. Temper flickered through his eyes, like heat lightning behind clouds. “I can’t help you. I said that.”

  “Your Highness. My lord,” said Zhang, a little desperately.

  Across the room, Thorsdottir closed her eyes, squared her shoulders and her jaw, and (having reopened her eyes) started across the room with a great deal less grace and a great deal more force than her partner. Jaed’s eyebrows rose. “Is she going to drag me away, Princess, or you?”

  “Possibly both of us.”

  His smirk battled gamely for possession of his lips against the flat line of real anger. “What did Merrick say, that made you desperate enough to try me?”

  “I haven’t talked to Merrick. Why? Would your father listen to him?”

  Jaed’s face went through contortions that seemed to indicate a mouthful of sour marbles or a live mouse. “He might. Why didn’t you talk to Merrick first?”

  “Because I knew where you’d be, and I knew you’d be alone.”

  Jaed laughed soundlessly. “Well then. I’m

  never anyone’s

  your first choice. What a surprise.”

  Rory’s stomach turned on itself. For the first time, she thought the thirteenth fairy might have cursed her, after all. She decided that the shreds of propriety were not worth preserving, nor was pride, and laid her hand on Jaed’s bare wrist. His skin was warm, damp, and a little sticky.

  “Please, Jaed. My lord. At least talk to me.”

  He stared at her hand. At Thorsdottir, incoming. Then he offered a small smile, wary and crooked, neither weapon nor armor. “Fine, then.

  already in trouble, make it count

  We’ll walk.”

  “Thank you.” Rory removed her hand, carefully and deliberately. Her palm tingled. She wanted to scrub it on her pants or make a fist of it. Instead, with the same care and deliberation, she permitted it to hang back at her side.

  She turned just as Thorsdottir arrived. “We’re going for a walk,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s going to interrupt your exercise.”

  “Your Highness,” said Thorsdottir, and bowed. The look she cast her partner was grim; the look she dropped on Jaed was of such severity and delivered from such proximity—they were of a height—that he let out his breath in a little surprised gust.

  And so they left together: the Princess of Thorne, her guards, and the Regent’s second son. Notes were made of the marching order (the larger guard first, the smaller last), how the Princess and Jaed walked abreast, how they looked at each other (not at all, while they walked), how the guards looked (unhappy), where they walked (out of the main room, and then out of the facility altogether), the Princess still carrying her rug and wearing her tum’mo kit, the Regent’s son bare-armed in a shirt whose hem was curled and frayed with age and abuse and damp with drying sweat.

  At least twenty illicit 2Ds were taken on personal communication devices, all of which appeared on the turing net within a quarter hour. Versions of the conversation—of which only snatches had been overheard, however public and obvious the expressions—found their way into personal correspondence and board postings, and at least one anonymous gossip column attached to the major media outlet on Urse.

  About these developments Rory knew nothing and would not for some time. She was, however, conscious that their perambulation was accreting attention in the same way an avalanche gathers snow.

  “Shall we go to the arboretum?” she asked. “It’s somewhat secluded.”

  “No,” Jaed said, rather too sharply. And added, under his breath. “I hate that place.”

  The fairy gift said otherwise. Rory tucked that contradiction away for later examination, carefully, mindful of the sharp edges.

  “Then where?”

  He looked down at her and shook his head. “Let’s just walk. It’s harder to listen in on a moving target.”

  Since her arrival on Urse, Rory had learned a great deal about the limits of ’bots, which, being stationary, had a fixed radius in which their surveillance was effective. For her, the knowledge was a matter of necessity, if not for survival, at least for privacy. She hadn’t expected Jaed to know it, or care about it . . . or need to care about it. Another bundle of knowledge, then, stashed for later.

  They passed, at that moment, in front of the observation porthole which overlooked the passenger terminal. The porthole itself was huge, easily a dozen meters long, a strip of transparent alloy, the production of which was a trade secret in the Free Worlds, as it was a major export, as well as a testament to the skill of its alchemists. Bielo hung blue and baleful in the upper corner, casting cerulean shadows across the ships tethered to the station, reaching cold fingers into the station itself. One of its moons—Beo, perhaps?—swung over the equator, a single dark dot marring the blue.

  Rory stared back at Bielo, and tried not to think about the vastness on the other side of the porthole and the great swaths of unbreathable, unbroken void between her and Thorne, with exactly as much success as one trying not to think of pink elephants when one is instructed not to do so. She drifted to a halt, her brain determining that, with no one to oversee the placement of her feet, it was better to simply stop.

  Jaed made note of the Princess’s expression. He would have smirked, a quarter hour ago, with the void-born’s contempt for the provinciality of the planet-born, and offered insincere (though sincerely delivered) platitudes: how awesome the view, how frightening, and oh no, you never got used to seeing that.

  Now he held his silence, and his smirk, and watched the Princess stare, unblinking, at Bielo’s icy curves. After a moment, he said, “You had no choice, coming here.”

  “No.”

&nbs
p; The silence returned, but this time it was a softer thing, and warmer. Rory looked past the planet, into the ghosts of herself and Jaed Moss in the portal. They appeared only as shapes, dim lines drawn on the black, with no eyes or discernible features. They might have been any two people, admiring (grimly facing) the view.

  But of course they were not just anyone.

  She shook her head, and blinked the planet away, and resumed walking. She expected Jaed would follow her, though she did not look back and check. She considered what she would do if he did not, if she would turn around and return to him.

  Then she felt him arrive at her shoulder: the movement of displaced air, the smell of his sweat, the sense of another person closer to her than most people could, or would, approach. A princess did not just go walking, did not take casual strolls with her friends, because a princess did not have friends. She had body-maids, guards, teachers, viziers.

  She had never thought of herself as alone, until now. It was a revelation.

  It was easy to imagine that Jaed Moss might share that same sense of isolation. The fairy gift hinted at it. That isolation might become a place of empathy, a shared condition of their rank. A patch of ground in which friendship might grow, if one were exceptionally optimistic or under the impression that the neat reality of stories is also true.

  But she did not like him, and although she had not tested her theory against the fairy gift, she thought he did not much like her, either.

  Well. Like was best confined to food, not politics.

  “My lord,” she said. “I did mean it. I do need your help.”

  “Jaed,” he said. “Call me Jaed. Princess—”

  “Rory. Please.”

  “Rory.” He inclined his head. “Assuming I can help you—and understand there’re limits to what I’m able to do—it won’t come free. I think we need to be clear about that.”

  Rory closed her eyes, trusting the invariance of the decking under her feet and Thorsdottir’s broad-shouldered presence on point to keep her walking straight. She forced breath past the cold weight in her chest, like a solid stone where her heart should have been.

  “Of course.”

  She would have been five kinds of fool, on whom all of Grytt’s pragmatism and Messer Rupert’s careful tutelage had been wasted, if she had come to this encounter without imagining—in her own mind, not sharing with Thorsdottir or Zhang—what Jaed Moss’s help might require, and what she would be willing to pay.

  At least Jaed was honest, saying that. A princess could do worse than honest.

  That she did not want to bargain with Jaed Moss (or any Tadeshi) was as true as the First Principles of Arithmancy. She wanted (wished!) to free Messer Rupert, and from there, to break her betrothal, to go home.

  But even a princess, or perhaps especially a princess, knows the futility of some wishes.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Keeping Faith

  Whole human religions are founded on the principle that the multiverse is, in whole or in parts, sentient, and interested in the well-being of its inhabitants. Sages and philosophers debate the soundness of those beliefs, and write elaborate treatises on their conclusions. Arithmancers and alchemists eschew all debate on the multiverse’s awareness or intention, and instead hold forth on its nature: regular, predictable, bound by rules. (Here we necessarily exclude the philosophies and religions of the various xenos—k’bal, vakari, tenju, alwar, mirri—as even a summary of their disparate faiths is beyond the scope of our work here, and whose opinions on multiversal sentience vary as widely as their biologies). Neither sages nor alchemists lay much stock in superstition, the definition of which includes whatever phenomena or conditions run counter to the popular theories of the day. Superstition, they say, is for the uneducated.

  It is unclear precisely where fairies fall in those classifications, and perhaps it is they, and not the multiverse, responsible for subsequent events involving Rory and Jaed. Whatever the case, the unfolding of those events seems to indicate a particular sense of the absurd and ironic, which would indicate that, if the multiverse is itself sentient, it has a peculiar sense of humor.

  * * *

  • • •

  Grytt typically returned from the detention center to the Thorne apartments at the first-shift supper hour, or a little later. She did this for two reasons. One, she found her presence unsettled the second shift security when they arrived to their posts and found her already waiting. And two, it allowed Rory ample time to prepare supper after completing her own self-imposed work day at the embassy. Rory had declared cooking to be relaxing and therapeutic, where most of the relaxation and therapy came from the swift violence of chopping and the sustained aggression of frying, boiling, and baking. Thorsdottir and Zhang had learned quickly that offers of help, while tolerated, were somewhat unwelcome, and that the Princess was best left alone in the kitchen, and approached only upon Grytt’s arrival.

  Given the stress of the day, Thorsdottir expected the Princess to prepare something elaborate, involving a great deal of mincing and slicing, and the application of high heat. But upon her return from her walk with Jaed, the Princess planted herself at the turing and remained there, unmoving, looking uncannily like the Vizier had on the afternoon before his arrest.

  Thorsdottir and Zhang had not actually seen the Vizier on that fateful day, but they both knew arithmancy at work when they saw it, and they surmised that Grytt would not be pleased to arrive home and discover the Princess engaged in dangerous activities from which her guards had not prevented her.

  “Though if Grytt wants to stop her,” Thorsdottir muttered to her partner, “she’s welcome to try. I’m not that brave.”

  Zhang, having exhausted the day’s conversational stores already, only nodded. She shared her partner’s concern. The Princess’s very public performance this afternoon had generated a great deal of traffic on the public networks, and at least two separate mentions on unrelated 2D broadcasts, including four minutes of amateur video of Rory and Jaed walking past the passenger terminal promenade and pausing at the porthole, while the program’s host commented with plastic intimacy about the significance of the romantic reconciliation after the tiff in the recreational facilities.

  When it was clear that Rory was engrossed in whatever arithmantic mischief she’d found, Thorsdottir—whose mother had tried, very hard, to raise a respectable daughter—pushed back her sleeves and began assembling a soup out of the remnants of earlier meals and the last bits of unused ingredients. It was, she reasoned, likely (inevitable) that Grytt would return in a temper, and even more likely that she would (correctly, in Thorsdottir’s reckoning) blame Rory’s guards for failing to protect the Princess from her own impatience. What exactly they could have done, she and Zhang, to prevent Rory’s actions, Thorsdottir would not have been able to articulate; but it was her professional experience that no one ever did ask the bodyguards, and besides, royalty’s task was to govern kingdoms and consortiums, not itself.

  So she was surprised when Grytt arrived and said, the split second the door had closed in her wake, “You realize that your little performance today has the turing net brimming with speculation about your affair with Jaed Moss?—Oh hell, tell me you’re not hexing that turing.”

  Rory, absorbed in exactly that, did not answer.

  Then, and only then, did Grytt round on Thorsdottir. “Tell me she’s not hexing that damn turing.”

  The partners looked at each other.

  “She is,” said Thorsdottir. “But she assured us it was safe.”

  Grytt folded her arms and planted herself in front of Rory’s desk, so that she stared down past the turing’s screen and directly at the Princess’s face.

  “Safe is the ground underfoot and a gun in the hand. Safe is not a damn turing in this place. Which you know, Rory Thorne.”

  The Princess did not remove her eyes from whatever held
their attention. But her mouth tightened, and she heaved out a sigh of excessive volume that one did not require a fairy gift to understand as I am busy, please shut up.

  Thorsdottir made herself very busy with the soup, lest her stillness attract Grytt’s ire. Idle soldiers, in Thorsdottir’s experience, were always a target.

  After the soup was well on its way to boiling, and Zhang had crowded into the narrow space to offer her own expertise (“I think maybe salt?”), and the pair of them had sprinkled and sniffed and stirred as much as they could—then, finally, Rory pushed her chair back from the desk, producing an unlovely squeal of metal on metal.

  She looked up at Grytt, who had not moved, for a long unblinking and unsmiling moment.

  “I do know,” she said. “And it is safe. And I am not having an affair with Jaed.”

  “Since when does something need to be true to have everyone believing it?” Grytt shook her head. “I’ll bet your new friend is getting an earful tonight from his father. Maybe his brother, too.”

  “Bah,” said Rory. “He’s not my new friend.”

  “Not what it says on the network.”

  Rory pulled the end of her braid around and examined it thoughtfully. She began to unravel the fastening, and, having done so, started to unweave the braid, combing the strands out between her fingers. Her voice climbed into a high, false innocence. “Since when does everyone saying a thing mean that it’s true?”

  Thorsdottir had grown up on a farm that, among other things, kept sheep, which were a particular favorite of the local bear-cats. To protect the sheep, therefore, any farmer with wits kept several of the large, thick-furred dogs bred especially for that purpose. Those dogs, when confronted with a bear-cat, made a sound very much like Grytt was making now.

  “Don’t you make a game out of this, Rory Thorne.”

  Thorsdottir wondered if her duties as bodyguard included protecting Rory from Grytt. Zhang’s expression, when she checked, suggested that Zhang shared her worry.