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

by K. Eason

  “Right. And I didn’t.”

  “Which is why you’re here and Thorsdottir’s taken your side, instead of burying you in the arboretum under some unlucky shrub. You know how I found out what happened? I lied to your father this morning. I told him Ivar sent me a message, wanting to dissolve our engagement. I was trying to distract him with what I thought was something too preposterous to be true. Instead, he immediately suspected you of writing it. Why would he think that, Jaed? What have you two decided to do with me?”

  Jaed took a cue from the fern, then, and turned two uncomplementary colors at once. “We didn’t decide anything. I thought—he said he didn’t want you and Ivar to marry.”

  “He said that so you’d do something stupid.”

  “Which, evidently, I am alleged to have done. Writing a letter to you, pretending to be Ivar, trying to break a political engagement? That’s the stupidest thing ever.”

  “It’s your father who thinks you’re an idiot, not me.”

  “And what do you think I am?”

  “Politically naive.”

  “Maybe. Yeah. Okay. But I didn’t betray you. My father, yes. My—everything else. But not you.” He gulped a mouthful of air. “I wanted to believe—it doesn’t matter.”

  It did matter, very much. The fairy gift was quite adamant on that subject. Rory considered pushing the matter, then discarded the idea. Her head throbbed. She wished for a dark room, a cool cloth, and cup of green tea. Instead, she had Jaed Moss, a political crisis, and an hour before lunch. At this rate, they’d be at war by dinner.

  “So,” she said more gently, “your father thinks Grytt is alive. He thinks she escaped with Messer Rupert.”

  “Good—wait. He told you that?”

  “No, he told me that she was dead. He was lying.”

  Jaed shook his head slightly. “How do you know? Were you running a hex on him?”

  “No. I just do.” She did not want to explain the fairies to Jaed. “He’s not an arithmancer, your father. He’s just got some good hexwork which, yes, I got around. Don’t ask me—”

  “How?” Jaed’s expression made clear he would repeat that question until he acquired a satisfactory answer.

  “By poisoning myself. Oh, don’t. I’m fine.”

  Jaed looked as happy about that revelation as Zhang had witnessing it. And like Zhang, he did not comment, though it took visible effort. His jaw clenched around recriminations until Rory pitied his molars. “Oh, sit down. You’re making my neck hurt.”

  Jaed did, somewhat warily. Rory maneuvered to the other side of the coffee table and perched on the back of Messer Rupert’s favorite chair, feet dangling off the side. She propped her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, so that her eyes were level with Jaed’s and her head felt less like it wanted to roll off her neck.

  “I think your father wanted you to make an attempt on Ivar’s life, either before the wedding, or after, when the clone dies. Jealous Jaed murders the Prince. Grief-stricken Regent forced to execute his own son. Which would leave Merrick for me.”

  “Thorsdottir said as much.”

  “Thorsdottir’s said a lot today.”

  He winced. “So will you grant me asylum?”

  “Yes. Provisionally. If we’re lucky, your father won’t know where you’ve gone for a while.”

  “And if he figures it out?”

  “Stary and Franko can hold that corridor for a while.”

  “Rory.”

  “I’m not serious. Shut up and let me think.” She cradled her forehead in her palms. Her brain banged on her skull like a prisoner on a locked door.

  “You are not all right.”

  She heard him get up, a too-loud rasp of clothing on couch cushions. She sensed his hand hovering over her shoulder: an artifact of the alchemy, perhaps, that made him buzz like an exposed tesla coil. It was as if she could hear his aura, and feel it. Perhaps she was turning into a Kreshti fern.

  His voice was blessedly quiet. “Can I get you something?”

  The door chimed, just then, with a shriek like a thousand cats thrown simultaneously into a blender, or a single blast of the Lanscottar pipes.

  “Get that,” she said. “It’s Thorsdottir and Zhang, anyway.”

  She listened to the boom of his footfalls, and the metallic howl of the door on its slide, and the rumble of a barbarian horde—three people, all speaking softly, a room away—preparing an invasion. Then another set of footsteps emerged, thumping across carpet and ringing off the deckplate underneath. Thorsdottir’s boots appeared in the circle of Rory’s vision. Thorsdottir’s agitation buzzed across her skin like live wasps. She squatted down and peered up at Rory. Her eyes were fury and worry combined, and very, very blue.

  “You need to go to bed, Princess,” she said. “Now.”

  For once, Rory did not argue.

  * * *

  • • •

  Rory woke to the smell of Thorsdottir’s cooking, and a murmur of voices and the fuzzy chrysalis dark of her chamber, cut only by the patient glow of her turing. Someone had activated the opacity hex on the porthole. Rory banished it, and the stars faded into view. Cherno had retreated for the evening—it was evening, wasn’t it? That smelled like garlic, not breakfast. Her head still felt scuffed on the inside, but her stomach had recovered sufficiently to demand something in it besides the memory of eclairs.

  Rory sat up and discovered that although she did not recall undressing, she clearly had, or someone had done so for her. Likely the latter: the clothes she’d worn to see the Regent were absent entirely. There was a bulb of water on the bedside table, and a pair of pills of a more benign alchemy than her earlier ingestion. She took them both promptly, and swished the water around in her mouth before swallowing. She did not feel quite human yet, but her condition was improving.

  She swung her feet off the bed, facing the porthole, and squinted at her reflection, which was little more than a translucent afterthought in the porthole’s silicate alloy. A ghost, lost and—she leaned forward. A ghost whose braid was a mess. Rory grimaced and combed her hair out with her fingers. Her ghost self acquired a cloak of pure void in which the stars winked and glittered. A lovely image for some poet or artist. The ghost girl, hair made of stars.

  Rory made a very unartistic face at her reflection, and reached for her robe. Then she remembered the political refugee in her living room and reconsidered. There was more modesty in the robe’s concealing folds than there was in her tum’mo leggings and shift, and Jaed had seen her that way often enough; but there was an intimacy to the robe, too, reserved for the household, her sole garment which was not also a costume.

  You are a Princess, said Messer Rupert, a hundred-hundred times in her memory, with all that implied. A constant performance of someone else’s script. And on the other hand, there was Grytt, who—

  Rory sighed. Grytt would not say anything, because Grytt usually didn’t. But she also wouldn’t stand in opposition to Messer Rupert. She never had. She’d just hand Rory a pair of trousers and a sweater and expect no argument, because to Grytt, Jaed had been, was, and would be forever the outsider, which was half a step from enemy.

  Except he wasn’t. He was maybe a fool, sometimes, politically naive. But he wasn’t bad. She liked him, for some version of like. And he was the closest thing she had to an ally on Urse, not because of his personal qualities (or lack thereof) but because he and she had mutual interests. Outmaneuvering the Regent, mostly, and avoiding prison. Or marriage. The distinction was fuzzy.

  So, at the moment, was the distinction between Princess and person, and she was tired of playing roles.

  Rory shrugged the robe around her shoulders, taking extra care to wrap it close and belt it firmly. She left her hair loose, too, and her feet bare, and, having fortified herself with a breath and a hard stare at herself in the porthole, turned on her heel an
d marched into the corridor.

  The garlic smell was much stronger out here. Rory waded through it, toward the murmur of voices, which, upon closer proximity, resolved into a conversation. The subject appeared to be a recounting of an event from Thorsdottir’s youth, in which a basket of stolen eggs, brothers, and practical jokes figured prominently. Jaed was laughing and stirring a pot, while Thorsdottir wielded a substantial cleaver in pantomime, and Zhang smiled and arranged cutlery on the table.

  At that moment, Rory missed Grytt and Messer Rupert with a ferocity that quite stole her breath. It should be curry in the pot, not stew. It should be Grytt muttering, and Messer Rupert fiddling with a turing, and herself wielding the spoon. Thorsdottir and Zhang would be across the corridor, and Jaed would be avoiding his father and brother elsewhere on Urse. But that normal was over. Gone. Even if Grytt and Messer Rupert had survived—and Rory chose to believe that they had—they could never return to it, even if the Regent turned into a ball of blue smoke and they were permitted back on Urse. Too much had happened. Thorsdottir and Zhang and Jaed.

  And Rory could not regret it, not really, because in that normal, Messer Rupert and Grytt had intended she marry Ivar. Now Rory had different plans, new plans, and for the first time, an opportunity to act on them. She was no longer their Princess. She was becoming her own.

  Though what those new and different plans were, well. She didn’t know yet. She needed to think of them first.

  Zhang noticed her, then. She absorbed Rory’s informal attire, the loose hair, the bare feet, with a raised eyebrow. Then she offered one of her small, spare smiles.

  “Princess,” she said, exactly timed for one of the pauses in Thorsdottir’s story.

  “Princess,” echoed Thorsdottir, looking up.

  “Ah.” Jaed also observed Rory’s attire, and found something very interesting to examine in the depths of the stew pot.

  “Sorry,” said Thorsdottir. “We’re almost ready.”

  “No, go on. Finish your story. Tell us how you outwitted Sven and got out of the loft and recovered the eggs.”

  Thorsdottir snorted. But she continued, narrating a successful scaling of the old barn wall with bare feet and hands (“Didn’t you get splinters?” “Oh yes. Shed-loads.”) and the rescue of the eggs and the subsequent descent and flight across the farm, with Sven in pursuit, the recounting of which lasted until the bowls were on the table. Rory was grateful for Thorsdottir’s excellent sense of timing. She was spared any need to make conversation, or to respond to someone else’s attempt. After a day in which she had been the center of everyone’s attention, in a lifetime where that was often the case, Rory found anonymity at her own supper table to be a welcome thing. It left her time to think, and to see to the ingestion of her own supper for a few spoonfuls.

  Knowing what the trap was, how it would close, was no help if she could not also see a way past it. The Regent had outmaneuvered everyone. There was no way to undo his maneuvering. She could endure, at least for a while, and hope an opportunity presented itself. Except endure meant marriage, first to a doomed clone, and then to Merrick. It was what a Queen would do. What her mother was doing.

  Rory realized, with her spoon halfway to her mouth, that she did not want to endure marriage.

  Nor, for that matter, did she wish to endure monarchy.

  It was a startling realization.

  What good was the thirteenth fairy’s gift, if it showed her a truth she could not avoid?

  Messer Rupert would have remarked on her silence by now, reminding her that stew is for eating, and eating is best accomplished by conveying the contents of the spoon into one’s mouth, rather than reorganizing it in the bowl. Neither Thorsdottir nor Zhang did so. Nor were they likely to do, having no history of prompting princesses to eat. So it would fall to her to direct the conversation, and to jeopardize everyone’s enjoyment of what really was an excellent stew. Messer Rupert would have found a graceful way to do so, an anecdote or an observation to segue naturally into the topic at hand.

  Rory had exhausted her own supply of grace for the day, though hopefully not cleverness. Still, she thought she should save that for the actual plan, rather than spend it on pretty preamble.

  “So,” she said, and waited for three sets of eyes to find their way to her face. “I think some clone of Ivar is going to arrive on Urse very shortly, and my wedding will happen even more rapidly thereafter, and we need to see that it doesn’t. The wedding, that is.”

  Jaed blinked. Thorsdottir and Zhang looked at each other. Then Zhang squared her shoulders.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. I was hoping you had some ideas.”

  Thorsdottir stirred her soup as if the answer floated somewhere among the potatoes. “If you don’t marry Ivar—or some version of him—the treaty could fail.”

  “And if I do marry him, I’m a widow in two weeks and Merrick’s wife in twelve months and the real Ivar dies, if he hasn’t already. Look. If I thought marriage would save us from Moss, I’d do it. But I think my life won’t last much longer than the arrival of my first heir. Then I’ll have an accident, or I’ll end up on Beo while a series of my clones legitimizes another round of Moss sovereignty.”

  “You could always challenge the Prince to a duel. That was my original plan.”

  Rory sat up a little straighter. “What?”

  “It’s an archaic law, I know. Barbaric. Bloodsport to settle an argument. Or in this case, an engagement.” Jaed twisted his face into a self-deprecating grimace. “I thought it’d get you out of the marriage, but it’s a stupid idea. Thorsdottir pointed out why it wouldn’t work.”

  Rory rescued her spoon, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. She examined it as if there might be gems encrusted on the handle. There were not; but she was beginning to see something better than gems. She was beginning to see a move the Regent wouldn’t be able to counter.

  And so the littlest fairy’s gift worked its magic, unnoticed and unacknowledged, as the most powerful magics so often do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Contact With The Enemy

  There is an old adage, among generals and schoolteachers, that no plan, however well-constructed, survives contact with the enemy. While this maxim can be seen as one part cynicism, two parts irony—since of course both battle and lesson plans do in fact survive engagements, and people either die or learn, accordingly—the proverb’s underlying wisdom is sound. No plan, however thorough, can be guaranteed success. The enemy often will behave in a manner unanticipated, and random elements can skew the scenario. A wise general must, then, be flexible, able to adjust in the moment. They must, in other words, be ready to react.

  It is an uncomfortable position.

  A Regent, too, must possess some degree of flexibility and foresight, particularly if he wishes to wrangle a headstrong Princess into marriage before her majority as delineated by treaty. He must have reasons why the ceremony should be hurried, and responses to the inevitable objections, and responses to the next round of protests. But the Regent of the Free Worlds of Tadesh despised reaction. He preferred to act, and to keep his opponents reacting. In his mind, it was forever better to be on the attack than on the defense, and he had considerable pride in his strategic skills. He had, after all, engineered the death of two kings and one queen on his path to power, and removed his political enemies, and repurposed potentially benevolent research into what would, were it widely known, provoke outrage both within and without the Free Worlds. He considered himself a success, and predicted more of the same for his future.

  He was not, therefore, pleased with two surprises in as many days. The loss of the Vizier was unexpected and inconvenient, and Grytt’s participation in that loss was entirely unforeseen. On the one side, it removed two of Rory’s most irritating allies from play. On the other, he did not control them and, in fact, had no idea where they’d gone.
The missing shuttle had not turned up on Beo at its appointed hour. Nor had its wreckage been found in the system, despite extensive sweeps and searches. It appeared to have vanished utterly. The Regent did not require an advanced degree in astronomy to understand that the void was a big place, and the ways in which a small shuttle with two fragile biological entities could disappear were many, varied, and lethal; he had employed some of them to rid himself of the Queen, after all. So when his advisors assured him that the Vizier and the body-maid must be dead, he agreed. In private, he stared at system maps and brooded.

  The second surprise—the stupidity of his younger son—offered both greater immediate vexation and a simpler path to resolution. He knew how to solve that difficulty: he would confine the boy to the Moss family apartments, until Rory’s marriage, widowhood, and remarriage—in short, until the public forgot him—and then send him to some inhospitable, inconvenient corner of the Free Worlds—Lanscot, perhaps—with a political position just barely befitting his rank.

  The problem was that he couldn’t find Jaed.

  The Regent was not the sort of man to focus on frustration. He dispatched a missive to his distant wife, informing her that circumstances required a more rapid union of their kingdoms than anticipated. His fool son, rumors, and so on. When Samur responded, insisting on a real-time quantum-hex conference, he acted the part of the embarrassed father (which required very little acting) and the diplomat concerned for maintaining the peace (which did). Samur, to her credit, requested a conference with her daughter, which the Regent could not find sufficient grounds to forbid. But since the only equipment for quantum-hex conferencing lived in the Tadeshi municipal complex, he was not concerned that mother and daughter might conspire to surprise him. The conversation would be monitored.

  He dispatched a second shuttle to Beo, with orders to prepare his Highness for a wedding. And he sent a messenger to Rory, requesting her presence to discuss “matters of import to the Free Worlds and the Thorne Consortium.” He included a specific date and time, allowing her three days for preparations, tantrums, or frantic (monitored) calls to Samur.