by K. Eason
Thorsdottir re-emerged at that moment. She handed the bag—a military-issued duffel, rather more stuffed than a Princess’s immediate needs might suggest—to Zhang, and glared so forcefully at Medium Blond that he snapped his lips closed on a comment. To Rory, she handed the fern, which promptly divided its efforts between vermillion and magenta.
“Thank you,” said Rory. “Franko, help Thorsdottir pack my apartment, please. Go now.”
She waited two purple tree-rats, then said, “May I have your word, sir, that my body-maid and guard will be permitted to pack my belongings without interference?”
Medium Blond looked as if a sudden crop of nettles had materialized in his small-clothes. He could not very well say, “No, Princess, our own personnel will sift through everything.” He was no longer certain they could, without incurring a conflict that he was under strict orders to avoid. He settled instead on a, “Yes, Princess,” that earned him a sharp side-eye from Large Blond beside him.
Rory recycled her most gracious smile. “Thank you.” She readjusted her hands on the fern. “Then please, whenever you’re ready.”
Medium Blond gestured, and a second trio of security moved to the end of the corridor. This set was more olive in complexion, and both taller and broader. They formed a spearhead, dividing the crowd as neatly as a boat’s prow slices through water. A third triad, medium brown of both skin and hair, fell in behind, effectively surrounding Rory and Zhang with a fence of black uniforms. Rory was uncertain if she should feel like a prisoner or a precious commodity, and decided that she was both.
The Regent certainly didn’t mind parading his prize through the station. They took the main thoroughfares, drawing stares and crowds where they passed. Word of her coming spread ahead, so that by the time they reached the diplomatic plaza, a small audience was already waiting. The Thorne embassy staff had turned out, nearly en masse, in an ominous clump. Rory feared (and hoped) for a moment that they would stage a protest, shout and surge at the Tadeshi, but they did not. The embassy guards saluted. The civilian staff bowed, male and female alike.
Rory risked the ire of her escort and stopped to wave, to smile, to offer reassurance that she fervently hoped no one believed. Surely a message had been quantum-hexed to her mother by now. Surely that. Although, on reconsideration, Rory imagined the quantum communications might be suffering outages today, or intermittent service, or just simply fail to work in the Thorne Consortium’s embassy. Samur had been silent on the matter of Messer Rupert’s arrest, which Rory had taken as evidence she’d been arguing with the Regent behind the scenes—but what if she hadn’t known at all?
“Please,” she said, and thrust an arm between the two halves of her escort. She walked up to the Acting First Ambassador of Thorne, who bowed a little more deeply.
“Please welcome Stary and Franko, when they arrive,” she said. “And please don’t hesitate to assign them duties, as you see fit.”
“Majesty,” said the ambassador, which was not technically correct, as Rory was not yet Queen; but it was a declaration of loyalty, and unexpected, and Rory’s eyes stung and threatened her composure. She blinked hard and rapidly, and retreated into her escort—which was, predictably, scowling at her, at her embassy, at the fern—vivid orange, now, with spatters of furious pink—and permitted them to take her the rest of the way to the municipal complex.
The sound of those doors, when they whisked shut behind her, was the loudest thing Rory had ever heard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Gilded Cage
It is a common practice, among Kings, Regents, and other sovereign personages who make plans which involve nations, colonies, and large investments, to protect those plans by limiting the ways in which they interact with chance. While the methods vary according to historical period and monarch—as detailed by Ghota in her excellent Maintaining Control: A Historical Survey of Two Kingdoms—a universal source of chance, and thus disruption, comes from the people involved. Arithmantic predictions can offer probabilities of likely actions and reactions, and many a sovereign has relied on those with great success. But the more conservative sovereigns—dubbed alternately conscientious or tyrannical, depending on the historian—attempt to control the most disruptive elements through fear, coercion, or, perhaps simplest, incarceration.
Of course, there are laws, most of the time, which attempt to limit, or outright forbid, incarceration without crime. Thus, a sovereign who wishes to act conservatively and prevent his plans from ever coming into contact with the enemy must use diplomacy, and sometimes force, to relocate a problematic individual to a location in which her potential for damage is eliminated. Narrative tradition is full of dungeons and towers employed for this very purpose; because while prisons and detention blocks are very well for ordinary citizens, they permit too much potential interaction with fellow prisoners, allowing for conspiracy, sympathy, or escape.
Thus, in keeping with tradition, both political and narrative, the Regent ensconced Rory in the least accessible location in the Tadeshi municipal complex. He could not put her in a dungeon for two reasons. Firstly, a dungeon is impractical on a void-station, not because of its cramped confines and windowless chambers—which are standard, and unremarkable because of that—but because the horror of a dungeon relies on its damp walls and vermin, and the Regent was short of both. Ordinarily he did not consider that much of a loss. Today, he mourned their absence, though not necessarily for Rory herself; he did not like the look of her body-maids, one for her Kreshti complexion, and the other for her size, and both together for the looks of sheer murder they cast about like most men cast shadows. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he did have free cells in the detention block, and while those cells lacked mold or rats, they were designed to render their occupants miserable. They remained an option, should the Princess require incentive for good behavior, though the Regent did not expect that she would. Rory had proven herself resourceful and clever, but still, at the end of it, too pragmatic to offer resistance for its own sake, particularly when the consequences would be borne by others.
The second reason for avoiding a dungeon—or a detention cell—as Rory’s residence was this: prisoner-princesses do not fare well in dungeons, not because of any inherent incompatibility, but because, politically, a princess in a dungeon invariably wins the sympathies of the sovereign’s own allies—children, cousins, siblings, and, most damning, the jailors themselves. The Regent was well aware of Rory’s charm, and while he was himself immune, he did not suppose everyone in his employ would be.
The other traditional destination for prisoner-princesses is a tower, and while tower as a physical artifact was impossible, tower for all practical purposes was not. The municipal complex of the Free Worlds permeated several levels of Urse, sealed unto itself. The Regent selected for Rory a suite at the very top level, against the outer hull, with a single double-wide porthole overlooking the dock, through which Bielo made daily traverse. It was a lovely set of rooms, appointed with fixtures more in keeping with planet-side luxuries than traditional void-born pragmatism. The tesla fixtures hung in glittering confections of metal and silicate crystals from ceilings paneled in warm polycarbonate amalgams and grained to look like old timbers. The carpets spread across the deckplates were thick, and richly patterned, and priceless. There was even a cast-resin mantle, framing a ’caster facsimile of a fire, on which was moulded fantastic beasts that sneered and snarled at the room.
Rory sympathized.
There were also ’bots in twenty locations, both audio and optical, and a layer of high-quality hexes on the turing, ’casters, and ’bots. Rory ascertained that immediately, having taken one turn of the premises under Medium Blond’s watchful eyes. She choked up a thank you, dismissed him, and resisted throwing what looked like a genuine antique candlestick at the door. Instead, she held it in her right fist like a club, and prowled her new prison’s confines, marking the location of
each ’bot. With the exception of the lavatory, each room was covered from multiple angles; the lavatory had only one ’bot, rather boldly mounted on the freestanding mirror in the corner, where it could not quite see the interior of the shower. The toilet cubicle had no ’bot at all, but Rory discovered a pressure plate under the ridiculously shaggy rug, which would report excessive occupancy by weight.
Rory stomped on it, pure pique, before returning to the main chamber. She looked at Zhang. She looked at the fern, which was trying to hide by turning itself ecru.
Zhang followed her gaze. The fern’s barest edges flared crimson. Zhang’s expression did not change. She looked at Rory, who had fixed her stare at the elaborate light fixture overhanging the even more elaborate table.
“Shall I help you unpack, Princess?” she said.
“Yes,” Rory told the chandelier. “I’m sure Thorsdottir will be along soon.”
Whether in response to Rory’s exhortation, or by coincidence, Thorsdottir did indeed arrive shortly. She came with several bags draped over her person, with a half-dozen Tadeshi security in her wake, serving both as porters and as insurance of Thorsdottir’s good behavior. None of them seemed happy, especially the Tadeshi in custody of Rory’s harp case. He was red-faced and damp at the hairline and collar and looked as if he wished to deposit the instrument on the decking with all the ceremony one grants a sack of tubers.
Though Rory was predisposed to kindness, she was also only sixteen, verging on seventeen, frightened and angry, and unable to reach the source of her distress. The security were the only targets available.
“I’d like that over here,” Rory called, from the far end of the room, and watched as the man wrestled the case—real harvested wood, not vat-grown, and almost as valuable as the instrument inside—across the carpets, which seemed to snag and grip the case with fibrous fingers. She directed the harp’s disposition to the minutest detail, this angle, that angle, over by this chair, before dismissing him at the conclusion of his labor with an impatient hand gesture. He left, with the rest of his companions, even redder of face, his jaw ratcheted tight around anger.
Zhang watched, impassive. Thorsdottir frowned. While Thorsdottir, at least, would not have objected to violent expression of her own frustration, she also realized the futility of harassing people whose personal goodwill could be an asset later on, whatever their professional alignments.
“Your Highness,” she said.
Rory held up a finger, just that: imperious gesture and warning together. She neither looked at Thorsdottir, nor spoke, and, after a heartbeat, returned her attention to the harp case, opening the brass latches, easing the instrument out of its prison, setting it beside the porthole.
Thorsdottir shook her head and retreated, dragging several bags with her. After a moment, Zhang followed.
The Princess remained, alone in the front room, drawing her fingers across the strings with apparent idleness. Then she pulled the chair to a more convenient distance, sat, and began tuning the harp with a savage expression at odds with the care and precision of her play.
And so Rory’s imprisonment began.
* * *
• • •
The same narrative tradition that places imprisoned princesses in towers neglects the details of their confinement, as though the princess merely waits, patient, for her circumstances to change. Instead, the story refocuses on the adventures of the individuals who eventually arrive to liberate the princess from captivity. The reason for this neglect is easily explained: long literary descriptions of people doing nothing is boring for an audience. This explanation, however, rests on the assumption that the prisoner is actually doing nothing for the duration of her confinement—which is to say, physical actions may indeed be limited, but the actions of mind are not.
Rory did pass her first afternoon in captivity doing a great deal. She tuned her harp. She practiced tum’mo. She rearranged the contents of the wardrobe and the disposition of the furniture in the main room. And all the while, throughout each activity, she was thinking. Then she returned to her harp and began to play it, for a duration greater than any since leaving Thorne. Rory had an idea.
* * *
• • •
The Regent came to visit Rory that evening. He was not, as one might have expected, feeling particularly triumphant. He had summoned Rory to dine with him—phrased as a request, of course—and been rebuffed with an excuse of headache, so succinct that it bordered on impolite.
That might have amused him, on another day, as evidence of her pique. He did not believe any stories about headaches; the Princess was angry, and asserting her power the only way that she could. But he had failed to find Jaed in Rory’s apartments, which left the Regent still unsure where his younger son—and the second most likely source of disruption to his plans—was. He was certain Rory had some information on the matter; he was equally certain she would not be forthcoming with it.
The Regent elected, therefore, to visit her himself, prior to the delivery of her evening meal, under the auspices of soliciting after her health. He was fully prepared for her ire, her demands, her tantrums—and once those were out of the way, he thought might manage to learn something. He did, although not the information he’d hoped to acquire.
Rory greeted his arrival with all the expression of the grotesques on the mantle, which is to say: stony, flat, and forbidding.
Nor did she rise to welcome him. She remained seated beside the porthole, her harp tilted back in the playing position. When the Regent came into the room, she pushed it upright with visible irritation.
“My lord Regent,” she said. She did not invite him to sit.
He did so anyway, selecting the central cushion on the couch, which afforded him the clearest angle to see her face, past the harp’s silhouette. He left his escort standing near the door, two black columns of uniform, armor, and weapons. He was mildly amused when the second of Rory’s body-maids appeared from the rear of the suite, pretending to join the first in a game of chess near the porthole, in which, evidently, pieces never actually moved.
“I trust you find this suite acceptable,” said the Regent, after a long moment in which he waited for Rory to adhere to protocol and make some polite inquiry about whether or not he’d like refreshment.
“Quite. Thank you.”
“Good,” said the Regent. “If there is any way in which I might make your stay here more comfortable, please do not hesitate to ask.”
Rory’s very dark eyes flickered, as if she were reading a HUD’s optical display. The Regent cast his own surreptitious glance sideways, and encountered only the fern, which was clearly unwell, being a pale, venomous green.
“You could begin, my lord, by explaining why I’m here at all.”
“I received intelligence that your life was in danger, Princess. An assassin. I thought you would be safer here.”
Rory raised both brows. “I see.”
She clearly did not believe him, and while he had not thought that she would, he’d expected a better show. The Regent found the dearth of emotional feedback disconcerting, accustomed as he was to seeing an aura report on a pop-up window on his turing. He resolved that next time, he would permit his arithmancer to accompany him, if only to gauge her emotional state more precisely than the obvious anger.
“An assassin,” he added, more testily, “is a threat we must take seriously.”
“Of course, my lord.” Her lips flexed, visibly holding back whatever else it was she wanted to say. Her hands gripped the harp’s curves so tightly they were bloodless.
The Regent waited. Silence was a powerful tool, he’d discovered, particularly against teenagers and amateur criminals. Wait long enough, and most subjects belonging to those categories would break.
Rory did, after a respectable minute or so, although what she said was not what he’d expected.
“We fin
d the lack of a kitchen somewhat inconvenient,” she said. “If I might, my lord, I request a portable refrigeration unit, a small cooking device, and a cabinet for storage.”
He blinked. “We have an excellent kitchen in the complex, Princess.”
“Then I will avail myself of its facilities.”
The Regent imagined how his chef would respond to a princess banging about, disrupting his staff. Then he imagined the Princess with access to cutting implements and to everyone’s food. “I am afraid that isn’t possible. You will take your meals here, or in the formal dining room with me and Merrick.”
The fern seemed to be dying as he watched. It bled through red, then drained white, even as the tips of its leaves turned a halogen green. Rory’s face matched the fern for pallor.
“Then let me repeat my earlier request for portable kitchen materials.”
“Princess, you will hardly be poisoned.”
“Cooking relaxes me,” she said. “And it provides structure for the day, which I believe I will find sorely lacking otherwise. Unless I will be permitted to leave these quarters at will? Perhaps resume my duties in the embassy?”
“Until we resolve the matter of the assassin, it would be best if you remained in our custody, Princess. But should you wish to travel within the municipal complex, simply request an escort from the security outside your door. There will always be two men there, Princess.”
“I see. Thank you for explaining, my lord.” She plucked a string on the harp, then pinched it into silence. “Was there something else you needed from me?”
The Regent marveled at the girl’s audacity, to imply that she might dismiss him. His patience, already strained, creaked alarmingly.
“Where is my son, Princess?” he said sharply. “Where is Jaed?”
She bent her lips into the sort of smile that earns that classification only by shape. “Confined to his room, I’d imagine. Much like I am. Isn’t he?”