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

by K. Eason

  She shoved her chair back, tipping it in the process, and lurched to her feet, spilling a little of herself in the process.

  “My lord,” she said. “Please excuse me.”

  “Princess?” The Regent looked sincerely surprised. He began to reach for her, registered what was happening, and leaned back as far as his own chair would permit. His face drained of the very substance dripping onto his carpet.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, sniffling past her fingers. “Station air is very dry. If you could direct me to a water closet, however—”

  “Of course, yes, out there.” He stabbed a finger at the doorway.

  Zhang was already beside her, hand under Rory’s elbow. She knew about Rory’s breakfast supplements.

  “Your Highness,” she said, and took a bruising grip. She steered Rory out of the office and promptly turned toward the main foyer, exactly away from the water-closet.

  Rory guessed their destination, and decided to give the order anyway.

  “Thorne embassy,” Rory whispered to Zhang. “Now.”

  “Yes.” Zhang propelled her forward at a pace which suggested she expected pursuit.

  So did Rory. She had startled the Regent, perhaps even frightened him, but he would recover. A man did not achieve his position otherwise. But she had learned that he did not adjust rapidly to surprises. He was a planner, a schemer, she’d known that; but he was not, as Grytt would have said, worth beans in the field.

  That had to be useful. Somehow.

  Rory let a breath go when they cleared the municipal complex’s doors with only shocked stares from the security, though two of them reached for their comms. This was an advantage of the Regent’s control; no one acted on his own initiative, and asking for orders took time.

  The fifty meters across the plaza between the Tadeshi municipal complex and the Thorne embassy were the longest of Rory’s life. She did not dare run. She walked briskly, pinching her nostrils together, thankful for the practical properties of her garments, into whose black fibers all manner of stains could be lost. She was less thankful for the stares and attention. They probably think someone hit me, she thought. And then: Wait. That could be useful.

  Rory let her hand drop a little further. Made a point of looking around, making eye contact with as many faces as possible. There were usually media personnel loitering in the vicinity, waiting for a story. Bleeding Thorne Princess Flees Tadeshi Municipal Offices sounded promising.

  The security at the Thorne Embassy were not the caliber of the royal guards, but they were Consortium military, and disinclined to let their Princess linger in apparent distress, whatever their orders to remain at their posts. A handful came out and met Rory and Zhang a little less than halfway across the plaza. They formed a breathing barrier around the Princess, though none quite dared Zhang’s white-knuckled familiarity.

  “Are you all right, Princess?” asked the duty sergeant.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Rory. “It’s just a nosebleed. You know. Dry station air.”

  “Of course,” said the sergeant. She looked dubious.

  “No one struck her.” Zhang’s voice rivaled the deckplate for cool, hard, and flat. “But the Regent may pursue. Let’s get the Princess inside.”

  They did, rapidly, sweeping Rory through the embassy doors past a growing throng of the curious.

  “No one appears to be following,” the sergeant said.

  “No,” said Rory. “And I don’t think anyone will.” Rory accepted a damp cloth from one of the secretaries and blotted her face carefully. “Thank you. The Regent believed me. He thinks I’m a victim. And he doesn’t know that we know about, ah.” Rory registered her audience, at that moment, and amended herself. “What we know about. It’s all right. Return to your posts. I’ll be in my office. Zhang?”

  “Princess.”

  “You can let go, now.”

  “Yes, Princess.”

  “Have you gotten any messages from Thorsdottir?”

  “No, Princess.”

  “All right. That’s probably a good sign. Let her know to come here. We’ll be waiting.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Twelfth Gift

  Since the invention of something to write with and something to write on, writers—and in this category, we include particularly historians, but also novelists, poets, and the odd journalist—have enumerated the qualities most admirable, and most reviled, in the human psyche. While there is some variance, there are some virtues which appear to transcend culture (and, in some cases, species).

  Among these so-called universal virtues, courage may be the most popular, for the sheer volume of words spent defining, refining, and offering examples of it. The ancient homeworld sage Aristotle posited that true bravery requires a man to be aware of the consequences of his actions: to whit, he must face threat of pain and death, knowing those are possible outcomes, and proceed anyway. Courage is neither instinct nor honorable obligation. It is a deliberate choice. While the Kreshti poet-philosopher Kahandir was not the first to note the limitations of Aristotle’s definition, she did, in her collection On Ashes, offer the most compelling argument that the form courage takes is a matter of circumstance, as much as of character: there are situations in which a woman simply cannot act, but instead must wait; and that waiting itself—patience—is itself a form of courage, as important as the moment when action becomes possible.

  It is ironic, then, that courage is a virtue most associated with adventurers—knights, princes, kings—and very rarely with princesses and queens, who are expected to be patient, but never brave. It has been noted that none of the fairies gave Rory patience, with no attempt at explanation (fairies defying that by their very nature); but it is perhaps telling (of what, we remain uncertain) that the twelfth fairy’s gift to the tiny princess was courage.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Vizier’s embassy office did not have a porthole. It had, in fact, very little decoration at all, except for the tastefully inoffensive artwork spaced at tastefully precise intervals to alleviate the otherwise distressingly blank bulkhead. With the exception of a small Kreshti fern (a sullen, disconsolate pea-green) on the desk, there were no personal items. An appallingly neat desk, with the turing at right angles to its access pad, and to the quantum-hex comm globe, and a bound copy of the treaty between the Consortium and the Free Worlds, with well-worn edges. Rory’s own face hung on the wall, flanked by her mother and brother. The official portrait had been taken during her fifteenth year. She noted the remnants of baby fat on her cheeks, and touched the bones in her face. She didn’t look like that now. A window—or a porthole—would have given her something else to look at. Even the ominous void, with the Brothers creeping past, towing their moons and flashing their poisonous atmospheres, would have been a comfort.

  She checked the chronometer for the twentieth time (in the past thirty minutes), and heaved a sigh that sent the fern into yellow stripes and lavender polka dots.

  Zhang eyed the fern, and her Princess, with equal alarm.

  “Fine,” said Rory. “Try Thorsdottir again.”

  Zhang nodded. She hesitated anyway, giving Rory a good looking over. Probably checking for nosebleeds, or other indications of brain hemorrhage or whatever it was Zhang imagined happened to foolish arithmancers.

  Then she looked at her pocket comm. “Nothing yet, Princess. No response.”

  “Thank you.” Rory stared at the fern. The edges of its bottom leaves turned bright yellow. As it happened, brain hemorrhage was a possible, even probable consequence of mixing alchemy and arithmancy, a little more than halfway up the scale of catastrophe. At the mild end, headaches. At the other, the explosive rupture of ophthalmic tissue.

  Rory elected to keep that knowledge to herself.

  Despair sloshed against the back of her throat. She had exhausted her options. She h
ad no Vizier, no Grytt. She had avoided arrest and incarceration, for the moment, although the Regent could decide to take her into protective custody. She was a minor under Thorne law, and the treaty stated her marriage must wait until eighteen, but she guessed the Regent would lobby for an earlier date, in light of recent circumstances. Her mother would lodge a protest, but with Grytt’s murder of Tadeshi personnel and the possibility of a renewed war, Rory did not expect Samur to intervene beyond a diplomatic protest.

  At which point she would marry a clone, endure a short marriage, endure a longer period of official mourning and widowhood, and then, as soon as was decent, be compelled to marry again. The alliance between the Consortium and the Free Worlds required royal participation, not the stop-gap union of Regents and Regent-Consorts. But more vitally, the peace required heirs. Assuming Ivar did not succeed in siring any—and Rory supposed he would not, or could not; Moss would see to that—she would need to choose an acceptable husband and produce offspring.

  How long she survived after that depended on what Moss knew, or suspected. Accidents happened, out here in the void.

  Rory entertained briefly the fantasy that Ivar was fine, that he would break their engagement, that he would sign a peace treaty in perpetuity and require nothing more of her than a brief bi-yearly conversation. Then she dismissed that fantasy. Happily ever after was for children’s stories. What her happily ever after would entail, she had not yet considered. She had a civil war in her possession, after all.

  She had the documents proving the Regent’s treason, if she could get anyone to believe them. She suspected those files would survive in the turing exactly ten seconds longer than the Regent’s initial realization that she’d read them. She had separate copies, of course. She debated trying to send one set to her mother through the quantum-hex, and discarded the idea. Diplomatic communication was supposed to be secure, but no one believed that. And if she tried to hex it, then she would only be giving the Regent’s arithmancer a puzzle to solve before he learned what she knew.

  Rory wished Thorsdottir would check in. She was becoming increasingly concerned that something untoward had befallen her, and she was uncertain that her composure could withstand a second personal loss in as many days.

  Then Zhang’s pocket-comm chimed, and they both jumped. Zhang reached for it, while Rory made useless fists and failed at patience and the fern acquired periwinkle spots. It was not tradition for princesses to carry pocket-comms, for privacy and security and a host of reasons dreamt up before the existence of pocket-comms. Rory decided the tradition’s days were numbered.

  Zhang keyed in her pass-string and frowned at the tiny screen. “She’s at the flat. She’s sending Stary to get us.”

  “What? Why? Is she hurt? Is Franko hurt? Did she find Jaed?”

  Zhang tapped obediently. The comm murmured and chirped to itself. Then it chimed again. “She’s fine, Franko’s fine, and she acquired the target. She says Franko’s standing guard duty.”

  “On guard duty? Since when do we need a guard?”

  Zhang sighed, faintly, and typed, and frowned more deeply. “She says . . . don’t ask. She’ll tell you when you arrive.”

  The fern turned bright scarlet. Rory held out her hand. “Give me that.”

  Zhang held out the comm as if it were a live, particularly unappealing insect. It chimed, just as Rory took it. A new message flashed up. Rory read it. Then she returned the comm to Zhang, who also read it.

  They looked at each other for a long moment. The fern, unable to process the emotional morass, turned itself taupe and attempted to blend in with the desk. Rory picked it up.

  “Right,” said Rory. “We’ll wait for Stary.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Thorsdottir, as it happened, did not much enjoy waiting, either. She enjoyed it even less when she anticipated the end would be less pleasant than the waiting itself. She did not require Zhang’s confirmation to know that the Princess was angry. Rory liked no as much as any teenager, and she was unaccustomed to hearing it from Thorsdottir. It was a miracle, or a testament to the Vizier’s tutelage, that she had agreed to wait for Stary.

  Stary and Franko hadn’t liked what Thorsdottir had said and done so far today, either, but their chain of command was clear enough in this instance.

  “Hope you know what you’re about,” Stary had said. Franko had been less succinct and more profane in his response. But they hadn’t argued. Truth was, neither of them wanted Thorsdottir’s job.

  Thorsdottir didn’t want it, either. She wanted Grytt back, in the same fierce and futile way she’d wanted wings when she was four. She’d gotten a pony, instead: a beautiful, stubborn animal with a talent for self-destructive behavior and well-aimed kicks.

  Things hadn’t changed all that much.

  Thorsdottir read Zhang’s last message and flipped the pocket-comm off. She set it carefully on the desk, as if it were a grenade with a loose pin.

  “The Princess is on her way,” she said.

  Jaed Moss looked at her from the very farthest corner of the divan as if he wanted to recede into the gap between the cushions, to take refuge among the loose coins and stray fountain pens.

  “She’s angry, isn’t she?”

  “Oh. Yes.” Thorsdottir tried, and failed, to summon up any words of comfort. Instead, she heaved up a sigh, met Jaed’s anxious gaze, and said, “Wait here. Don’t touch anything. Don’t even move. I’ll meet her outside. Talk to her first.”

  “You mean, take the brunt of the yelling. I deserve that, not you.”

  “Yes, you do. Don’t worry. She’ll have enough for both of us.” Thorsdottir tried to retrofit her grimace into a smile. “She probably won’t yell. And she won’t deny you asylum, either. But I suggest you use the time to consider exactly how you want to tell her everything. And you do have to tell her everything.”

  * * *

  • • •

  And so it was that the Princess of Thorne arrived at the tiny cul-de-sac of Thorne sovereign territory, gripping a small Kreshti fern (wan yellow) tightly in both hands. She was preceded by Stary, who was armed to the limit of treaty, and followed by Zhang, who had resigned herself to feeling underequipped for the day’s shenanigans. Franko was, true to Thorsdottir’s warning, standing guard just inside the corridor’s threshold. He had a long-barreled ’slinger propped on his shoulder, and a helmet that made him look a little bit like a beetle. His uniform creases looked sharp as axe blades.

  He saluted. “Princess.”

  Rory paused. Another day, she might have returned the salute and wrested a smile out of him. Now she glanced past him, further down the corridor, where Thorsdottir waited in front of the flat, unarmed and out of uniform. She recalled what Grytt had told her about the various personalities of their tiny garrison, and about pointing a weapon if you didn’t mean to shoot it. Or in this case, two weapons. Franko on guard, armed like this, was no matter for levity.

  “Any trouble?” she asked.

  “No, Princess.”

  “Good.” Because if there had been, there would be pieces of it spattered across the decking. She looked at Thorsdottir again. “Stary, stay with Franko. No one comes in without my order.”

  “Yes, Princess.”

  She continued the remaining seven paces, Zhang at her heels. The fern in her hands still throbbed scarlet.

  Thorsdottir glanced at it, and at Zhang. “Princess.”

  “Our guest is an unwelcome complication.”

  “I’m sorry, Princess.”

  “No, you’re not. Why is he here?”

  “He told Grytt that the Vizier was being moved. He was supposed to tell you, to prompt some sort of reaction. Clearly he didn’t. I thought—by now his father probably knows what happened, or what didn’t happen, and so he’s probably in trouble. So he asked for asylum.”

  The fern shiv
ered. Orange lines crazed the red.

  “He asked, or you prompted?”

  “I suggested it. My judgment, Princess.” Thorsdottir let that hang between them, for a beat. “I also told him he had to ask you before it’s official. I also told him to tell you the truth.”

  “Which you’re telling me now.”

  “Only the parts I know.”

  Rory closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her mouth worked around what was either a pair of angry badgers or the grandmother of all reprimands. Then she let go of her nose and her breath.

  “Fill Thorsdottir in on the morning’s events,” she told Zhang. “I’ll be inside with our guest. Give us at least ten minutes, and knock first.”

  Jaed stood up as she came inside. He had his back to the porthole. Cherno’s dark hulk gnawed at one side of his silhouette. Reflected sunlight limned the other half of his hair silver. A shadow bisected his face, giving her one wide eye, the knife’s edge of his nose, a downturned mouth, and concealing the other half.

  Appropriate.

  Rory set the fern down on the edge of the kitchen divider, and pushed it carefully away from the edge. Then she crossed the expanse of decking in three short strides, neatly angling past the desk. She stopped an uncomfortable less-than-armslength from Jaed.

  “Rory,” he said, and stopped. His hands hung at his sides, the tendons ridged over stiff fingers.

  “You should have told me about the Vizier. Not Grytt. Me.”

  “I was trying to protect you. I thought you’d do something—”

  “Stupid? Rash? Who told you about Messer Rupert’s transfer? Oh, don’t bother sputtering at me. Your father did, I know that. You were supposed to tell me, and then betray me.”