by K. Eason
Zhang bowed, very slightly, and nearly smiled. “Since Grytt’s disappearance, we’ve been trying to figure out the best way to defend you. Grytt had the advantage of authority and experience. We don’t.”
Rory frowned. “You mean, I’d take her advice.”
“No, I mean—” Zhang flung Thorsdottir a pleading look, clearly hoping for rescue.
Thorsdottir sighed. “That’s partly it. But mostly it’s that Grytt is just older. She’s seen a lot more. What the Regent’s done here is beyond our experience. We don’t think he would have dared do this if Grytt were still here.”
Rory cocked her head. She did not need the fairy gift to hear we failed you in Thorsdottir’s speech. “Perhaps not. But it was Grytt’s action that precipitated this confinement. Mine, too, granting Jaed asylum in the first place.” A worm of worry curled in her belly. She had taken to eating one meal a day in the dining hall, and while her escorts kept her at a private table, she still overheard bits of conversation, particularly when she lingered over the dessert buffet. So far, she had heard nothing at all about Jaed. She took that as mostly good news—she imagined, not incorrectly, that the Regent would have come to gloat if he’d been recaptured—but she still worried. (And had she known the full extent of Jaed’s activities, she would have worried even more.)
Thorsdottir, too, was worried about Jaed, though not because she felt responsible for him. The Ursan networks had finally offered commentary on the Lanscottar referendum: as Jaed had predicted, they were calling it an empty political gesture by a small, bitter collection of colonists, it was a threat without teeth, it was meant to distract the people of the Free Worlds from the triumph that was the approaching wedding and the realization of an alliance with the powerful Thorne Consortium. Thorsdottir, who had discussed the referendum with Zhang and with Rory, suspected the reality far more serious than the official, breezy dismissal, though what the referendum’s signatories could actually do to realize their independence remained unclear. She also thought that handing Jaed Moss over to people who made a virtue of defying authority, particularly his father’s, might have been like adding a cat to a bag of tree-rats. (And had she known the full extent of his activities, she would have felt the grim satisfaction of being right.)
But neither she nor Rory did know Jaed’s disposition, and Thorsdottir was faced with a situation for which she felt unprepared: namely, a princess determined to pursue activities expressly forbidden by both Grytt and Messer Rupert. But unlike those two, Thorsdottir was unconvinced of her own correctness, and so she did what Grytt and the Vizier would not have done. She asked,
“Why do you want to learn?”
Rory had been preparing for a refusal and marshalling her arguments, so the honesty and simplicity of the query took her by surprise, particularly since she had not been planning to tell the actual, unvarnished truth behind her request. She settled for a half truth. “Because I don’t like feeling helpless.”
“No one does, Princess. But it’s our job is to protect you. That’s going to be a lot harder if you’re charging head-first into a fight alongside us.”
“What if I promise I won’t do that? My word, Thorsdottir. Zhang, you too. My word I won’t try to do your job for you. I’ll only fight if it’s my responsibility to do so.”
Thorsdottir was inclined to agree; Rory was, in Thorsdottir’s experience, honest. But Zhang had been present for the Alchemical Incident, and, while she did not doubt Rory’s basic sincerity, also knew that the Princess had been raised by viziers and politicians and would, if she deemed it necessary, leave out important bits of information to engineer her own way in things.
So when Thorsdottir looked at Zhang for agreement, she was surprised at her partner’s expression. “I think we need to know what you consider your responsibility,” said Zhang. “We are not Grytt or Messer Rupert. We don’t have their authority, and you don’t have a habit of obeying us. We don’t want that anyway.” Zhang paused and licked her lip. “But we do need your honesty, Princess. You keep things to yourself, and then you act, and we are left to react. That’s worked so far, but only because we’ve been lucky. So again, Princess: why do you want to learn, especially now?”
It was perhaps the longest speech Rory had ever heard from Zhang, and certainly the most impassioned. She also understood, without any benefit of fairy gifts, that she did not need to answer. She could command martial instruction, and Thorsdottir and Zhang would comply; she was their sovereign, after all. She had to trust her own judgment; but so did Thorsdottir and Zhang, because her decisions could get them hurt or arrested.
Or killed.
Rory looked down at her hands. There were callouses on her fingertips from playing the harp. She could make a curry with those hands, or hex a turing, or braid her hair. But it was the power she held that she felt most keenly, for the first time in her life. She imagined lives balanced on her palms. Whole worlds. All of the Free Worlds of Tadesh, as Ivar’s Queen (and then Merrick’s, if Moss’s plan succeeded). Lanscot, with its referendums and rebellion, would rest in those hands. She would hold lives, too, more than just Thorsdottir’s and Zhang’s: citizens who had never met her, who knew her only as a name, would be affected by her decisions. It was her duty to carry that responsibility. Her mother and Messer Rupert had aimed her whole life to that end, shaping her in their hands, so that she might eventually hold power over others.
She wondered, for the first time, if everyone might not be better off if there were simply more hands sharing that kind of responsibility. Messer Rupert, she thought, would be horrified at the suggestion. She thought Dame Maggie of Lanscot might approve. But ultimately it did not matter what they thought, what anyone thought, because all those lives were currently in Regent Moss’s flawlessly manicured, incapable-of-making-curry hands, and he was more interested in the power than the responsibility.
Rory flexed her fingers and spread them wide. Then she flipped them, palms down, and lowered them to her side. She cast her gaze at the law books. “I’ll do better than tell you. I’ll show you.”
* * *
• • •
If the Tadeshi seamstress, who spent hours measuring the Princess’s dimensions (and who was also Lanscottar on her mother’s side), noted Rory’s revolving collection of bruises—and it was unclear how she could not—she never commented; and as the Regent made no attempt to curtail the activities, Rory presumed she did not report on them, either.
Rory’s conclusion, equally as logical as the Regent’s suppositions about her activities, had one important difference: it was correct.
* * *
• • •
The Regent had larger, more pressing concerns. The station network, which had made Rory its darling for weeks, took note of Rory’s change in residence, and the manner in which that change had occurred. The Regent assumed that, once the initial flurry was over, the public would find someone else to occupy their interests. But it seemed that the Princess’s relocation catalyzed a new nest of conspiracy theories, in which the words imprisonment figured widely. More disturbingly, Urse security reported increasingly frequent minor acts of vandalism, particularly in the residential areas nearest the schools and the industrial zones, consisting of painted slogans on the bulkheads which said Free Rory and Free Jaed and Free Rory and Jaed; in the commercial districts, signs advertising the upcoming coronation and wedding were routinely defaced with doodled mustaches.
The Regent might have dismissed those as youthful romanticism. But other slogans bumped up on treason: Down with the Regent and The UnFree Worlds of Tadesh and Support the Referendum, and the associated defacing of his likenesses consisted of anatomical amendments more obscene than facial hair.
Coincident with the graffiti came a rash of ’bot failures, always in the vicinity of the vandalism, always at the times when the vandalism occurred, but not always where, so that a dozen ’bots would fail more or less at on
ce, forcing the dispensation of repair and security teams, inevitably to a location in which no vandalism was taking place. There was clearly a rogue arithmancer on the station, or perhaps more than one, aiding the vandals.
That it never occurred to the Regent that Jaed might be that arithmancer, we can’t hold against him.
His subsequent actions, however, we can.
* * *
• • •
Vernor Moss was unhappy. His chief arithmancer, Ashtet-Sun, did not require hexes to see that. The Regent of the Free Worlds of Tadesh was not sitting behind the gleaming expanse of his desk, but was in fact standing behind it, chair askew, arms folded. When Ashtet-Sun entered the office, the Regent jabbed out the hand nearest the desk, fingers spread.
“Do you see this?”
Ashtet-Sun side-eyed the desk. It was no longer orderly and gleaming, but rather smudged with fingerprints and piled haphazardly with tablets on which Ashtet-Sun could see varying reports from Maintenance, and at least one from Finance, and a small, disheveled stack from Security. “I do, sir.”
“The curfew is not helping. You said it would help, and it’s not.”
Ashtet-Sun had, in fact, suggested that a curfew—specifically, a lockdown on second and third shifts which required everyone abroad in the corridors to carry identification and, if stopped, produce a verifiable reason for being out—would limit civilian traffic on Urse, which it had. He had not suggested that the Regent should institute random security checks of suspicious persons during all shifts, which was in fact the cause of that tottering stack of security reports. The curfew had made station citizenry wary of the security, which prompted them to behave more suspiciously as a result.
It did not seem wise to point that out, however, so Ashtet-Sun sifted through an array of responses. After he had discarded the ones Moss could interpret as excuses, he was left with another iteration of, “Sir,” this time accompanied by a well-timed drop of his gaze to the deck.
Moss aimed his ire at the top of Ashtet-Sun’s head. “The detention block is full. It is, in fact, overcrowded. I have Legal filing complaints about the treatment of suspects. I have just authorized more overtime for Judicial to process the cases, but I am being told that won’t help. Do you know why, Ashtet-Sun?”
“Because there are so many hours in a day,” said Ashtet-Sun. “Because the judges are overworked.”
“Exactly so. If only there were a mechanism by which we could monitor activities in the corridors, instead of relying on the physical presence of security personnel. Oh! That’s right. We have ’bots to conduct our surveillance! Only the ’bots do not seem to be working.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You assured me you would find out whoever had been hexing the network.”
“Yes sir, I did.”
Moss and Ashtet-Sun stared at each other for a long and uncomfortable moment. “And,” Moss asked, in his most quiet and menacing voice, “have you?
Ashtet-Sun delayed his response long enough to muster enough saliva to oil his tongue. It would not do to rasp at the Regent. Or to mutter. “Not yet. But”—he hastened to add, as the temperature in the office dipped several degrees—“we have discovered how this vandal is doing their work. They have stolen a pass-string. Or perhaps several pass-strings, all of which have sufficient clearance to bypass the ’bots.”
“So revoke the clearances for those strings.”
“Well. I did that. But this vandal, whoever they are, has hexed the strings to recombine their clearances each time they are used, while at the same time convincing the turing that they are, in fact, legitimate. It’s a quite clever bit of hexwork.”
Moss’s nostrils pinched around a hissed inhale. Ashtet-Sun observed, from the corner of his eye, the slow crawl of red up Moss’s normally masklike visage, culminating in a pair of asymmetrical blotches at the top of his cheekbones.
“I was under the impression that you were a paragon in your field, Ashtet-Sun, which I took to mean as both experienced and highly skilled and, one presumes, also intelligent, and you are being stymied by clever.”
Ashtet-Sun had no defense to offer. He had examined the personnel records of every arithmancer for every embassy and delegation, and found a great deal of competence, but no cleverness, and no exceptional skill or abilities. He would have laid blame for this vandalism on the Vizier (the hexes bore the delicate precision of Rupert’s work), if he had not known for a fact that the Vizier was no longer on Urse.
(Ashtet-Sun would have derived some comfort from the knowledge that the vandal was actually two arithmancers, both receiving regular assistance from the Vizier over an illegal quantum-hex globe in the Lanscot compound. He would have been mortified to realize that the one of the vandals was Jaed Moss.)
And so, thinking it better to be thought a fool and remain silent, than to open his mouth and draw down the Regent’s wrath, Ashtet-Sun said nothing.
The Regent, frustrated by that silence (and half-convinced Ashtet-Sun was a fool anyway, or at least less competent than the Regent had supposed), decided instead to declare martial law.
The decision prompted several diplomatic protests, including one from the Regent-Consort of Thorne, and the station chatrooms continued to speculate about Rory’s well-being and Jaed Moss’s whereabouts, but the station corridors grew quiet, and both graffiti and ’bot-hexing ceased. The Regent assumed the worst of the upheaval to be over.
He was wrong.
Activity on the turing network intensified, with conspiracy theories about Rory Thorne and Jaed Moss giving way to complaints about the unfairness of martial law and anecdotes about friends and family detained or harassed by overzealous, overworked, and overtired security.
At the same time, new conspiracy theories appeared concerning the Prince’s health and whereabouts, in which the terms cryostasis and illegal cloning figured heavily (and were of course true, though no supporting documentation accompanied them).
And finally, there came a new crop of stories, this time about similar abuses of power taking place on Lanscot, Kymru, Zhenovia, and Tzoumish. Those stories were not true, but conceived of and composed by Maggie. However, they served to link the Regent’s unpopularity and the despised wedding (which had become a symbol now of both monarchy and thwarting a beloved romance) with the referendum and the pursuit of freedom (of which Rory became a potent symbol). And while there is little doubt that the Regent’s declaration of martial law provided the fertile ground for sedition, the rhetoric Maggie cultivated contributed greatly to the events that followed—which the more generous among historians call her plan, and which this chronicler calls a convergence of complementary events.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In Which A Wedding Almost Happens
Three months, two days, and seven hours after the Regent took custody of Rory Thorne, on the eighteenth birthday of Prince Ivar Valenko, a wedding, and then a coronation, were scheduled in the arboretum of Urse.
The events began at the rather arbitrary, unfriendly zero-eight-hundred of Urse’s first shift, coronations being lengthy affairs in which many ceremonies and speeches take place, and weddings being only slightly less so, and the day itself being required to play host to both. The wedding was first on the schedule, so that the Prince and Princess could be crowned together, as required by the treaty.
The Regent was a patient man. He could endure years of waiting, of planning, and had, without betraying his intentions. But the proximity of his plans’ culmination corroded his fortitude, leaving him snappish and fretful. Jaed’s whereabouts remained a mystery, and there was substantial (though whispered, and then only in secure chatrooms) anticipation that he would disrupt the wedding and abscond with the Princess in a fantastic blaze of ’slinger fire and martial skill.
The Regent was not especially concerned with his second son’s abilities to actually prevent the wedding. The bridegroom and future
King was a greater worry: Prince Ivar appeared, to the untrained eye, to be recovering from a night of debauchery. Pale complexion, verging on grey, pink-rimmed eyes, tremors in his knees. It seemed more likely that Ivar would collapse than that Jaed would breach the layers of security surrounding Rory and somehow rescue her.
The Regent was, however, determined not to underestimate the Princess of Thorne, who, having exchanged her metaphorical prison for a carapace of velvet, beaded embroidery, and a headpiece superseded in its complexity only by the crown of braids upon which it sat, epitomized serenity. Her smile hung perfectly balanced, neither too wide nor too fixed. She balanced the weight of her finery without apparent effort, gliding the length of the arboretum with her bouquet clasped in front of her heart, dragging the small garrison of Tadeshi security in her wake like shadows. Her own body-maids, uniformed and (under protest) unarmed, walked at her sides. They, at least, looked grim and unhappy. The Regent found that more reassuring than Rory’s performance.
She was too calm. The Regent didn’t like it. The Regent’s arithmancer Ashtet-Sun hovered at his shoulder, eyes soft-focused, watching the kaleidoscope of auras. He would alert the Regent if there was an emergency. He hadn’t, so far.
Rory, for her part, timed her steps to the deliberate—some might say sluggish—pace of the wedding processional, and took advantage of the pace to familiarize herself with the current disposition of decorations and delegates along the aisle. The dangling tesla strands were back, but in greater numbers, resulting in a twinkling starlight effect of bright white and red, the Valenko colors, which washed a dim pink in the corners, spangling off the polished metal accents of the Tadeshi military standing honor guard at the perimeter. There were elaborate protocols in place concerning which group stood where, how many members a delegation might have, how close it might stand to the dais. The Lanscottar, predictably, had been relegated to the back. She deliberately did not look at them, as she passed. She didn’t know what Maggie had done with Ivar’s files, but Maggie’s presence here suggested she’d done nothing, so far. She also didn’t know where Jaed was, or in what condition, her only proof of his continued freedom being the Regent’s grim silence on the subject.