The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series)

by S. M. Stirling

  The young knight could see the older woman take pity on her. “All right, let’s put it this way. There were questions that nerds discussed obsessively, far into the night. Sort of like this.”

  “Like arguing whether Harris Hawks are too easy to train to be real falconry? Oh, Lady of the Shield, I’ve heard that one! Futility incarnate, but Corbus here”—she named the estate’s chief falconer—“can thrash it over all day if you let him.”

  “Exactly. Though I basically agree with him on that. But this night I’ve finally seen that it’s actually possible to answer one of those questions. One that tormented Society people as they talked in circles.”

  Delia sighed; she’d been a small child at the Change, and didn’t remember it at all beyond occasional nightmares. “What is it, darling, this unanswerable question which can be answered now?”

  “Sweetie, it’s this: Knights versus Samurai.”

  She laughed aloud at their incomprehension, one dry quiet peal.

  “Well, I’m very glad you’re amused,” Delia sniffed. “Now I’ve got to go and take this outfit off. No sense in waking Melisende, you don’t need a tirewoman for a kimono the way you do for a cote-hardie.”

  “Oh, I’ll help,” Tiphaine said.

  Then she turned her head towards Heuradys, and gave one considering nod of approval that spoke pride more plainly than the words:

  “Good night, infant. You did well. And may you live in interesting times; we’ve had ours, thank you very much.”

  They left with their arms around each other’s waists and Delia chuckling again as Tiphaine grumbled about the awkwardness of the big complex knot that held the obi sash at the rear. Heuradys sighed a little herself, and poured another brandy. It was good to be home with the family for a while, and she had interesting work ahead. . . .

  But I’m worried about Orrey. How are things going at Todenangst?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Castle Todenangst, Crown Demesne

  (Formerly northern Oregon)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  June 1st, Change Year 46/2044 AD

  The thirst was the worst part of it. Her head throbbed with pain, and the feel of her own tongue swelling was like continually being on the verge of choking. Dazzle hid the greenery ahead as heat shimmered off the baked off-white ground. She couldn’t even taste the alkali on her lips anymore, but it still stung like fire in their cracks.

  Ahead of her Reiko stumbled and caught herself on the hilt of her sheathed sword, bowing over the hilt as if it were a cane. Her breath came in sobbing rasps, though her face was lost in intensely black shadow beneath the straw bowl-hat.

  Órlaith looked behind her, to make sure nobody had fallen out. When she turned again she had to blink and squint to make sure this wasn’t another of the mirages. Those towers, and the greenery that surrounded them—

  • • •

  “Hnnnn!”

  Órlaith came awake, gasping, and made her hand relax on the hilt of the dagger beneath her pillow—a sheathed one, of course, nobody in their right mind slept around razor-edged naked steel.

  The fragments of the dream faded away as she grasped at them; exhaustion, a terror that caught the breath in your throat and squeezed like an armored gauntlet. And thirst, and a dry deadly heat not like anything she’d felt in the waking world. And beyond the shimmering sand, a dragon . . .

  “Anwyn’s hounds, that’s the third night in a fookin’ row!”

  She scrabbled for the glass of cold herb tea by her bedside, half wishing it was a brandy-and-soda and still gulping it with huge relief. Sweat cooled on her flanks and she pressed the glass against her forehead for a moment. She’d had a full eight hours but she didn’t feel fully rested. Mourning with your family was work as exhausting as a dawn-to-dusk day spent pitching sheaves onto a wagon—something she’d done more than once, on visits down in the Mackenzie dùthchas, where there was little rank and everyone did the needful in harvest-time.

  “Bad enough without nightmares on top of it.”

  She poured more from the Bohemian glass decanter and looked at the clock next to the nightlight as she drank, suddenly conscious of a full bladder. It was five in the morning, before she’d planned to get up but not all that much, and not really worth going back to sleep since the sun would be rising soon and like most people she rose with the dawn unless something very unusual happened. Instead she touched the Sword of the Lady where it rested in a sandalwood rack beside the bed—whether magic or not, doing that always made her feel a little clearer-headed—then rose and threw off her night-robe. She preferred a short one anyway, pretty much like a tunic, since the longer variety always got tangled up. And some people were so obsessed by style they wore lace on theirs.

  Heuradys had been known to do that, saying style was worth some sacrifices, particularly when she wasn’t wearing it to bed alone and only had to keep it on until the gentleman in question got the full effect and reached for the laces. But then, she enjoyed wearing the full cote-hardie, too, which Órlaith merely put up with when she had to, and even danced well in one. Considering that you actually had to be sewn into some of the more elaborate Court versions, that was dedication.

  Thinking of it and her friend cheered Órlaith, and the dream receded further.

  A cat raised its head from the foot of her bed, a blue-eyed beast with silky white fur and a pushed-in face. It meowed with the petulance of someone whose sleep has been needlessly interrupted, but at least it hadn’t decided to fight her for the pillow tonight or drape itself over her face while she slept. These had been her Nonni Sandra’s rooms, high in the Silver Tower, and the Lady Regent and later Queen Mother always had a clutch of the creatures around. Her granddaughter had heard her say more than once with her infectious chuckle that you couldn’t come up with a really satisfactory evil plot without a Persian cat in your arms.

  And the cream of the jest, which I was too young then to appreciate, was that she actually did come up with more than one truly evil scheme in her day . . . while stroking the Persian cat she held in her arms. Also she genuinely doted on the beasties, and they her. Though I never saw one dare to claw the furniture.

  The three surviving ones were getting old and creaky, since it had been more than seven years since Sandra Arminger died and they hadn’t been kittens then, but Órlaith had never had the heart to exile them from what they probably thought of as their beloved home, or possibly their ancestral ranch. Even more than humans, cats rooted themselves in the familiar. If you looked at it from their perspective the mob of them had more right to this place than she did, having been there longer and much more consistently.

  Several of them had gone looking for Sandra with moans of distress in the days after she’d been taken from her deathbed—this great oval bed she’d just woken in, though that had never given her nightmares before. At least they had according to the servant in charge of feeding them and cleaning their boxes. Órlaith wasn’t sure whether or not that was simply the servant cunningly defending her adored charges. The woman in question was over seventy, had held the same post since the castle was built, and Órlaith was fairly sure she’d been quite mad since the Change, though reasonably functional.

  And the irony of that is that I don’t particularly like cats, except for kittens. I prefer dogs, and to be sure I miss Macmac sore, but Nonni’s ghost would haunt me if I let a dog in here.

  The cat landed on the ground with a thump and a slight feline grunt—whoever started that story about the silence of cats hadn’t been around them when they weren’t trying to be quiet—yawned, stretched and padded off to have a drink of cool pure water, or cream, or nibble at the salmon and chicken waiting in their little porcelain bowls, or the small pots of rooted grass or fresh catnip, or track down a really satisfactory patch of sunlight to nap in without inconvenient princesses rudely thrashing about. Órlaith had thought more than once that few humans—save perhaps a Count’s spoiled
favorite daughter—had lives as easy.

  The main rooms were a series of interconnected spaces linked by pointed-arch doorways in the Association’s style—what the books called Venetian Gothic—walled and floored in pale marbles that mixed white and gray and very light green. The ceilings were mostly groin-vaulted carved plaster in motifs of vines and flowers or sometimes simple abstract tracery. The furniture was similarly pale, spindly and delicate, though the tapestries were colorful enough, and the rugs.

  Órlaith hadn’t had the décor altered much despite her own more robust tastes, except to send some of the artwork to the gallery in the City Palace in Portland that was opened to the public on the innumerable Catholic feast days. Even the slight scent of lavender and patchouli and wax was still as she remembered it from her grandmother’s day. It wasn’t as if she had to live here all the time, and for now and then it was a pleasure.

  Almost as much as power, Sandra had loved beautiful things, and her searchers had scoured abandoned mansions and museums and galleries throughout the western half of the continent from before the end of the first Change Year to her final illness, fighting their way in and out where they had to. She’d patronized the Protectorate’s own makers lavishly too. Some had been given away to nobles or institutions she favored, some simply stored where they were safe from weather and decay, and the very best went here.

  Walls and niches and plinths still held many of the results; a tall Soong-dynasty Chinese goblet of green nephrite with handles carved in the shape of dragons, a many-armed goddess of ivory dancing creation and destruction on a lotus blossom, a Renaissance missal open to a page with a saint’s face shining in gold and indigo, a painting by a Victorian Englishman named Leighton that might have been a portrait of Heuradys’ mother with a peacock feather fan in her hand, but wasn’t, a row of glittering Fabergé eggs . . .

  The bronze statue of an athlete crowning himself with laurel had—probably—been done by Lysippus of Sicyon, Alexander the Great’s court sculptor. It was basically intact save for the feet, but the carefully patched hole made by a crossbow bolt was much more recent, product of a murder attempt by the magus-assassins of the Church Universal and Triumphant in the year she was born.

  And apparently they never stop trying, she thought grimly. All you can do is delay things.

  Workshops in Portland had supplied the tapestries that showed lords and ladies mounted on unicorns and hippogryphs hawking in a forest carpeted in asphodels, miniature dragons on their wrists, and the lively woodcarving in golden bird’s-eye maple of a plainsman on a galloping horse, his Stetson flying off as he turned to bend his short recurve bow and shoot backward over the animal’s rump. The libraries occupied several large rooms all on their own, though of course there were far larger ones in other parts of the palace-fortress, and the immense archives.

  Órlaith padded naked into the bathing suite, where Sandra had really let herself go; the most restrained element was the big tub of polished white granite carved into an abstract seashell. According to Todenangst legend, passed down from one servitor to another, the first time she’d used it she’d slipped below the hot scented foam and then cried when she emerged:

  “At last I can start living like a human being! And screw you, Nero, you piker!”

  Órlaith contented herself with a simple shower, or as simple as you could have in an enclosure of cast glass etched with designs of willows and wildfowl with hot water spurting from half a dozen nozzles, tied back her hair, threw on a fluffy white robe and walked out onto one of the fan-shaped balconies. Todenangst was fortress and palace both, and this high—the Silver Tower soared hundreds of feet into the air, and had the almost unthinkable luxury of a functioning elevator—defense could take second place. The balcony was several hundred square feet, with a balustrade of carved marble and the inner three-quarters roofed by a lattice of wrought-bronze rods grown with vines; foot-long cream clusters of Shiro Noda wisteria blossoms hung beneath it, against a background of bronze-green leaves and gold-pink rêve d’or roses in full musky-sweet splendor, dropping their scent through the cool air as dew pearled the flowers. A few petals lay on the tile. She sat and quelled her mind as they’d taught her in Chenrezi Monastery, focusing on a rose-petal and imagining it turning slowly in a pool of absolutely calm water.

  Dawn was just breaking, painting the snowpeaks of the Cascades to the east pink and tinting the cone of Mt. Hood. She sat and watched it as the light spread over the great castle; drums and trumpets marked a change of watch, and an orca-shaped observation balloon rose with a smooth rush from the Onyx Tower on the other side of the keep, its tethering cable making a long pure threadlike curve. As the rim of the sun cleared the horizon she stood; on impulse she took the Sword of the Lady across her palms as she lifted her arms and chanted the Greeting softly. Alone and in a high place was always best for her when she made that rite; it made her feel as if a cool wind had blown right through her, a wind of light. The Sword felt alive as she did. Nothing dramatic, but . . . there.

  Her brother John came with the servants bringing breakfast shortly afterwards. She sprang up and embraced him; he hugged back hard. He was nineteen and still an inch short of her five-eleven, so he probably never would overtake her, but well-built and getting very strong, and the unfortunate spots were gone. His coloring took more after their mother’s side of the family, medium brown hair still worn in a squire’s bowl cut and eyes on the greenish side of hazel, and square-chinned good looks which older people said favored Norman Arminger. Normally his face had a lazy good nature to it that she more than suspected was a mask he wore. Now it was stark enough. He hadn’t been as close to their father as she had—there had been some head-butting with the two of them—but he’d been getting over that, and they were close enough.

  “Thank you, Dame Emilota,” Órlaith said. “And thank you too, Claremonde, Douceline.”

  Dame Emilota oversaw the two girls carrying the trays; she was a middle-aged woman in a white wimple and green day-kirtle and a black mourning armband, an Associate lady-in-waiting originally from the High Queen’s household and transferred to Órlaith’s here when she moved into the old Queen Mother’s quarters. She was always extremely good at her job, in a way that managed to be irritating as well much of the time. Órlaith had never been quite sure if her mother just didn’t notice that part or if it was a very subtle joke.

  “Now you two just eat yourselves a good breakfast,” she said, beaming blue-eyed benevolence.

  Just as if we were both still ten, Órlaith thought with resignation, as Emilota went on:

  “Don’t your Highnesses go neglecting yourselves because you’re stricken.”

  “We won’t, Dame Emilota,” John said dutifully.

  “It looks delicious, Dame Emilota,” Órlaith added.

  “Grief or no, you have to keep your strength up,” she said, blithely ignoring them both. “So you eat, now!”

  John winked to one of the serving-girls as she bent to put down her tray, provoking a fit of shocked giggles stifled with an effort that nearly made her drop her burden.

  “Riding dress today, please,” Órlaith said. “Breeks, not a habit. Something plain and dark. Just lay it out.”

  Emilota sighed—she truly came alive when Órlaith dressed for festival and ceremony—curtsied and left, trailing the maids; after a considerable tussle, the Crown Princess had managed to convince her that she really preferred to dress herself unless it was something like a cote-hardie. That absolutely required skilled assistance, just as much as plate armor did.

  “Mom’s still in bed,” John said as he poured coffee for them both.

  It was expensive, but not impossibly so anymore. Her father had disapproved of that sort of ostentation. Órlaith added cream and honey to hers, frowning in worry; her mother had been very glad to have her here, and Órlaith had felt an overwhelming relief when she saw the familiar face, but they’d found little to say and you could only hug and cry so long.

  I really am
an adult, she thought sadly—she could remember when she’d been wildly eager for that to happen. I know mother can’t make it all better. And on the whole, I wish I didn’t know it. I can see why housecats enjoy being sort of like kittens all their lives. Of course, they’re not cursed with a sense of duty or knowledge of their own mortality . . .

  It wasn’t like her mother to simply lie abed in sheer misery, either, no matter how great that misery was. Her last pregnancy had gone wrong, and she’d come back from that with grim fortitude, not least by refusing to miss a single day’s work that she was physically capable of. High Queen and Lady Protector Mathilda Arminger Mackenzie was a woman of strong will and, usually, very disciplined habits.

  “Give her time,” John said. “Vuissance and Faolán are with her and that’ll help, and she’s been spending a lot of time with Chancellor . . . no, Father Ignatius. He’s wearing his spiritual-counselor hat, and he’s good at it—he’s kind, but he doesn’t cut you any slack to wallow either. I think the memorial Mass will help too, they’ve been making arrangements for that. Also . . . did you know she’s expecting?”

  “No, I didn’t!” Órlaith blurted.

  She was obscurely shocked both at the fact and that her mother hadn’t informed her. Of course, she’d been away—her mother might not have been certain before the Westrian tour began. Her father would have been, the Sword let its bearer see things like that where the Royal kin were concerned, but he’d told her he didn’t speak of what it told him to anyone else unless there was some strong need. And since then other things had preoccupied them both.

  “Well, she’s only forty-six and healthy,” John observed. “And . . .”

  She nodded. Their parents had been reasonably decorous—very much so, by the Clan Mackenzie standards her father had grown up with—but you could tell that side of their bond was still very much present along with the bone-deep comradeship and the sheer comfort that radiated when they were together.