by K. Eason
The small brace of Consortium uniforms, among them Stary and Franko, clustered around the acting Consortium ambassador and her delegates. They were close to the dais, a position of honor, acting as the Regent-Consort’s proxy. Samur’s intended attendance had been prevented by an outbreak of mirri plague beetles on Thorne, which had caused a planet-wide quarantine. Rory mourned her mother’s absence (and blamed the Regent for it), but even more, she wished for Messer Rupert and Grytt, even though they would have encouraged this marriage, even though they would have opposed, with their collective wisdom, Rory’s own plans for the day.
A fairy’s gift is not a miracle. It can shape a person, delineate trends and tendencies, prescribe a set of preferences. But it cannot make a person be a certain thing. It is a gift, not an imposition. As with any gift, it is subject to wear, to damage, to displeasing its recipient. It can be ignored and stuffed in the back of a metaphorical wardrobe.
In that moment, as she walked past a sea of eyes—some curious, some hostile, some glazed over and bored—Rory wavered. The thirteenth fairy’s curse loomed large in her awareness. She knew that her future, the one to which wiser, more patient heads had counseled her, was only the beginning of a longer, more complicated political dance. The curse would allow her to see the steps. She might gain sufficient skill to outmaneuver the Regent. She might see the jaws of the trap closing and be unable to stop them. But at least she would know what was coming, and why.
The littlest fairy’s gift was a lonelier prospect. Courage always is, because it takes us into the unknown.
At last, Rory achieved the far end of the arboretum, and climbed the small step up to the dais. The official wedding party waited: Ivar and two marines, Merrick, the Regent, and the Minister of the Interior, who was acting as officiant, the position of Lord Bishop having been dissolved in favor of popular atheism. Zhang took her place opposite a stern-faced, steel-haired Tadeshi marine. Thorsdottir’s own opposite number was a slightly younger, taller version, whose eyes, the color of wet stone, bounced from Zhang to Thorsdottir with force enough to leave bruises before coming to rest on Rory with exactly the same hostility.
Rory let her smile drift away, having no audience left except those on the dais. She handed her bouquet to Thorsdottir and sank into a much-practiced curtsy, spreading her hands wide across the expanse of brocade and beads that glittered like fresh snow at twilight, the shadows fading grey and blue. She rose again, a beat later, and clasped her hands at her waist. Her knuckles made a brave attempt to out-white the dress, chasing all the blood out of skin pressed flat against bone.
“Princess,” the Regent murmured. “You are radiant.”
Rory ignored him. She leveled her gaze at Ivar, expecting him to continue his rapt examination of the top of his own boots. She was startled, therefore, to find him looking back at her.
The Prince cut a poor figure, stoop-shouldered and huddled into himself like a wet sparrow. His hair flopped across both eyes in a poor imitation of current fashion. He blinked through it, rapid fluttering of pinkish lids. It took effort to look this unappealing. Rory suspected the Regent’s hand in this, a cosmetic meddling to further skew public opinion. No one would mourn when their King died. Not really.
Prince Ivar knew it. Sweat glittered like beads at his hairline, collecting at the rim of the simple circlet around his temples. He looked like a man condemned, who, having exhausted all prayers, only hopes that his end comes swiftly.
Rory had learned to pity Ivar as an abstraction. At that moment, she pitied Ivar the man.
She offered him a small smile. “My lord Prince.”
“Princess,” he blurted. Then, “Rory.” He thrust out his hand. His lips trembled, twitching toward what he evidently intended as a smile, but which looked more like impending tears.
Rory took Ivar’s fingers, which latched onto hers with a papery determination. She squeezed, very gently. Then she turned her attention back to the Regent, setting her gentleness aside, and bared her teeth.
Ashtet-Sun frowned slightly. He swayed toward the Regent, then stopped himself just short of whispering.
The Minister of the Interior stepped forward. Round-faced and red-cheeked, she should have looked jovial, but her eyes sat in the folds of her cheeks like two chips of coal.
“My lord
idiot
Prince,” she said. “My
Kreshti strumpet
lady Princess. It is with great joy that we join you today, in this
travesty
celebration of your marriage and the union of our nations.”
Rory let her attention drift. The formula was traditional. The greeting, some small speech extolling her virtues, then Ivar’s, then a meditation on the nature of marriage, usually the one by Herrick, and then the exchange.
“. . . and there is no greater gift than that peace,” said the Minister. She paused, to allow the audience to understand that the dull bit of the ceremony was over.
“Prince Ivar,” she said in stentorian tones. “Do you accept the responsibility for the Princess of Thorne’s well-being, her happiness, and her comfort?”
“Yes,” said Ivar faintly. His hand in Rory’s shook like a palsied tree-rat.
“And Princess Rory,” said the Minister, “do you accept the Prince Ivar as your sovereign, your guardian, provider for your happiness?”
Rory took a deep breath, and took hold of the littlest fairy’s gift with both mental hands.
Ashtet-Sun stiffened, and snatched at the Regent’s sleeve, but it was too late.
“No,” said Rory. “I do not.”
The arboretum got very, very quiet, so that everyone in it could hear her say:
“I challenge this man’s ability to provide for my well-being, happiness, and comfort. I issue a challenge to Prince Ivar Valenko to prove his worthiness in unarmed combat, where the loser must yield or die. And,” she added, after a moment, “I name no proxy. This is a personal challenge.”
The Regent moved so rapidly that he created a small gust of displaced air, which ruffled the arithmancer’s robes and Merrick’s hair and startled his security into reaching for the weapons. He drew up a scant half pace from Rory and leaned down until their eyes were level.
“Absurd,” he said, in a voice as quiet and controlled as his face was red. “You cannot.”
“By the Laws of the Free Worlds of Tadesh,” said Rory, “I can. I refer to heading three, in On Succession, subsection five: The bride, or her guardians, may elect to challenge the sovereign’s worthiness, and may name the terms of the contest. And in that same section, paragraph seventeen: If a challenge is issued, the right to a proxy may be waived.”
She paused, while various Ministers consulted their tablets and the Regent turned an alarming shade of burgundy.
“She is correct,” said the Minister of the Interior. She looked as if she’d discovered a live crab in her trousers.
Rory nodded. “Does the Prince accept my challenge?”
Prince Ivar squinted at her. He licked his lips. He looked at the Regent, and at the older marine, as though he expected someone to tell him what to say. The marine did not even blink. The Regent took a half step forward.
“He does not. I am the Regent, and—”
Ashtet-Sun laid a hand on the Regent’s sleeve, and set his lips close to the Regent’s ear. That ear, and the rest of the Regent’s face, grew even redder. A vein throbbed across his forehead.
“Prince Ivar,” said Rory. “I ask a second time.”
The older marine laid a hand on the Prince’s shoulder, whether for reassurance or to keep the Prince from bolting off the back of the dais, it was not evident.
Ivar looked past Rory at the wedding guests in the arboretum, and saw them perhaps for the very first time. He stood up a little straighter.
“Yes,” he said. “I accept.”
Rory twisted and leaned forward, rounding her shoulders so that the rigid bodice of the dress gapped away from her breasts. She reached down between them, while Merrick and both marines gawped and a murmur rose like a flash flood through the arboretum. She turned, holding a slim, unassuming blade in her fingers.
“Thorsdottir,” said Rory.
“Princess.” Thorsdottir took the slender blade, unsheathed it, and with two quick strokes undid months of careful stitching. She laid the bodice open along the lacing, front and back, and it sprang away from Rory’s ribs like a manacle unlocked. The skirts, unsupported, succumbed to gravity and slid down off the Princess’s hips.
Zhang scraped the fabric aside as the Princess stepped free of skirts and shoes at once. Beneath the gown, she wore a scanty second skin of tum’mo clothing, the sort a practitioner might wear in tropical climates during the heat of the day. The yellow-green legacy of her martial practice marked her shins, her thighs, her ribs. A fresher bruise, still purple, smeared her upper right arm.
The susurrus crested into an audible commentary, among which the words indecent and lovely and holy shit figured prominently from several points in the room.
Ivar pinked.
The Regent, by contrast, paled. “When,” he said, “did you do that? When?”
“The harp,” said Ashtet-Sun. His eyes were wide. “It’s the harp. You’ve been hexing the ’bots.”
Rory inclined her head. “I was surprised that you didn’t notice.”
The arithmancer shook his head. His mouth looked like a string with a knot in the middle. “Well done. Who taught you to do that? The Vizier?”
“No one,” said Rory. “It was my idea.”
Ivar had, with help from the steel-haired marine, managed to divest himself of his outer layers. He stood reduced to a silk shirt and trousers, and though his boots lent him several extra centimeters to Rory’s bare feet, they gave him no greater illusion of martial competence.
“Clear the dais,” snapped the Minister.
For the second time that morning, silence reigned in the arboretum. Personal communication units crept out of pockets and sleeves, nestled in palms, angled like solar panels toward Rory and Ivar. Everyone had meant to steal pictures of the event, private mementos of I was there. But no one had expected a battle instead of a wedding.
Rory, for her part, did not expect a battle even now. She stalked a slow semi-circle, flexing her toes against the brushed steel, acquainting her skin with the chill. Then she turned sharply toward Ivar, who simply stood where he’d been left, and came within arm’s reach.
“As the challenged,” she said, “you may strike first.”
“Strike,” he whispered, and looked at his fist as if he had never seen it before. Then he thrust it forward, the whole of his body weight behind it, in Rory’s very general direction.
Rory noted that the Prince’s eyes were squeezed shut, making it simple matter to fold sideways and let momentum carry him past. He pinwheeled for balance at the dais edge while his boot’s very excellent heels gripped the metal and, in a stroke of luck, prevented him from spilling off. He flailed, and came around, and charged at her a second time.
This time Rory stepped to the outside of his punch, took his outstretched wrist, placed a hand against the back of his shoulder, and levered him to his knees. She leaned down, twisting the arm up behind him. A struggling opponent could dislocate his shoulder; Ivar, however, went limp as a tree-rat playing dead. He turned his head as far as the limits of shoulder and neck would permit. The unfortunate hairstyle surrendered its fight against gravity and slid over his forehead, revealing round, unblinking, terrified eyes. His lips quivered, buckling as if under great weight, then steadied into something like resolution.
“Help me,” he whispered. “Rory. I remember you. Help me.”
It seemed to Rory that void had replaced all the aether in her lungs.
The Prince was not lying. The gift said so. He did remember her. It was Ivar. The real Ivar. The boy who had been so afraid of koi. The man she was supposed to marry—here, on his knees, asking
begging
her to help him. She had prepared herself for a clone, whose life would be measured in weeks. She had not imagined—considered—that the Regent might supply the real Ivar. It occurred to Rory then that she might have been wrong, given the sliver of optimism in which a girl predisposed to kindness feels guilty because she’s assumed that someone else is unkind, about the Regent’s intentions. Perhaps he meant to let Ivar rule, which would mean leaving Ivar alive.
More likely he couldn’t guarantee an heir in a clone’s allotted lifespan, assuming they can reproduce at all, said Rory’s cynical self, which sounded like Grytt. And if you didn’t know about the clones already, switching out a new husband every few weeks might clue you in.
Rory sent her guilt packing. She leaned over Ivar, so that her lips came within a finger’s width of his ear.
“Yield,” she breathed, “and I will help you. I swear it, Ivar.”
The Prince’s lungs heaved, producing a sound very much like a sob. “I yield.”
The Regent made a small, strangled noise. The older marine closed his eyes. The younger marine grimaced. Somewhere behind Rory, Thorsdottir blew all her breath out slowly, like a leak through a cracked seal. The Minister of the Interior only watched, unblinking, doing a credible imitation of a woman turned to stone.
Rory let go of Ivar, rocked onto her heels, and straightened. Ivar remained on his hands and knees, looking at the floor as if he hoped it would open and swallow him.
“The challenge is decided,” said the Minister. The words crept out from between her teeth and fled to the far edges of the arboretum, where the assembled dignitaries picked them up and repeated them. The Minister listened to the echoes for a moment, then sneered.
“What now, Princess?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Happily Ever . . .
Rory had rehearsed this moment in her mind a hundred times. She would declare the marriage null and void, denounce the Regent’s perfidy, expose the cloning facility on Beo. Then someone could retrieve Ivar, and restore the true Prince, and. . . . She hadn’t gotten much farther than that, unwilling to imagine too thoroughly how the Ministers might respond, or the diplomats. Or security. She could feel them staring holes in the back of her head.
Rory had not imagined Ivar being Ivar, however. Isolated on Beo, perhaps in cryonic suspension, he had not had the benefit of a Messer Rupert, or a Grytt, or even a wretched Deme Isabelle. The Regent would, if his schemes were revealed, face arrest, trial, execution. But those things wouldn’t help the Prince. Vernor Moss was an ambitious, amoral man, but he was hardly unique. True Prince or no, this Ivar, her Ivar, was no sovereign. The Free Worlds of Tadesh would be ruled by someone, in Ivar’s name. That hadn’t mattered six months ago, three months, three minutes. But it did, now.
The Regent, emboldened by her hesitation, peeled a smile and hissed, “Dissolve this marriage, Princess, and the peace dissolves with it. The treaty is very specific. There will be war.”
Rory matched his tone. “You have no power to declare that, Messer Moss. You are no longer the Regent. You have not been, since the Prince turned eighteen, and that was almost four hours ago.” She turned to Ivar and reached out a hand. Ivar took it, warily, and let her pull him to his feet. His fingers clutched at hers, still cold, with a grip surprising for its force.
“You are the King, Majesty,” she told him. “The coronation is a formality. Tadeshi law, Section One, subsection forty-three, paragraph two. Which means you”—and she rounded on the Regent—“have no power at all now, save what your sovereign grants you.”
“The Pri—King has not relieved me.” The Regent stared fire at Ivar. “Majesty. I am your humble servant—”
“That man is no king,” said a voice from the rear of the arboretum. “
The true Prince is dead. That man is a clone.”
This time, the surprise lurched past murmur and straight into commotion, with voices—both human and otherwise—striving to shout the loudest.
“We have proof.” The voice and its owner, the Lanscottar ambassador, just-call-me-Maggie, shook free of the crowd and stood alone and surprisingly tall in the middle of the empty path. “We have medical files on Prince Ivar, detailing the methods by which Regent Moss cloned his Highness in three separate attempts. The real Prince, our Prince, died on Beo, where he was prisoner.”
“Nonsense,” said the Regent. “Lies. Arrest her!”
Tadeshi security moved to do so, converging off the perimeter like ants toward spilled sugar. Their progress was hampered by the sudden surge of the crowd, who, having found themselves between security forces and their target, attempted to move out of the way by pushing at everyone around them and shouting a great deal. This, in turn, proved helpful to some individuals wearing the formal dress of Kymru, Zhenovia, and Tzoumish, several of whom had produced sticks of varying lengths, and who accreted into a barrier around Maggie, who ignored all of them.
“Truth!” she bellowed. “We have proof, which we have uploaded to the station’s turing. We’ve also quantum-hexed it out to Lanscot, Kymru, Zhenovia, and Tzoumish. The word will spread.”
The Regent whipped around, staring at Ashtet-Sun. “Is this true?”
The arithmancer produced a small, sleek pocket-terminal and poked at it. His eyes widened. “On all the major news channels,” he said, in a grey voice. “And the social feeds. She’s telling the truth, my lord.”
The noise in the arboretum damped several notches, as people nearest the conversation retrieved their personal devices and began checking the newsfeeds, at which point their neighbors followed suit, and so on, until everyone, with the exception of the security forces and the ring around Maggie, was bathed in the glow of small handheld screens.