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

by S. M. Stirling

  All acts of love and pleasure were pleasing to the Goddess, but it was still obscurely embarrassing thinking about your parents in that context.

  Mother-of-All, be gentle to her who wore Your seeming to me and walked in Your power, however she names You. It must be like having a foot and a hand amputated, only inside. Worse for her than for me. I lost my father, and it hurts, oh how it hurts, but people do outlive their parents and that’s what parents wish. That is the way the Powers made us. She lost the companion of all her life—they were anamchara when they were ten years old, even though their families were at war then, long before there was any question of marriage. All their lives after that they were friends, and when the time came lovers, and comrades-in-arms and parents and working partners in all the wonderful things they did. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have that cut off after so long, only that it’s worse than anything I’ve ever felt.

  Her brother’s hand tightened on the edge of the table.

  “She’s kicking herself—beating herself bloody inside, I’m sure of it—because she didn’t go along on that trip with you and Father, and of course that was the reason, she suspected it even a month ago and didn’t want to risk another miscarriage by spending weeks in the saddle. Damn, if I’d only gotten off my useless butt and been there instead of that troubadours’ convention—”

  “Don’t you start beating yourself up either. What would you have done that I couldn’t?” Órlaith said bluntly. “I was there, Johnnie, and it was just . . . too quick. If he wasn’t fast enough—”

  He sighed. They’d both seen their father slash flies out of the air in practice sessions in the salle d’armes. Órlaith went on:

  “You think I haven’t played it over and over in my head, thinking what I might have done, or he might have done? That knife was headed for me. I think it would have gone right into my eye. I’m certain it would have, and I couldn’t have stopped it, I didn’t see it coming in time. He swung me back, that’s why he didn’t have enough time to shield himself, that and the old wound to his right arm. Herry snapped her shield up in front of me, but that’s her duty and she was too far away to do it for him, anyway.”

  Her brother sighed again and nodded, turning up his hands. Like hers they had thick sword calluses, but he’d never been quite her match in the salle d’armes; he was stronger now, but just a hair slower.

  “I’d rather be in my schoon than yours right now,” he admitted gently. “But do you think he’d make that decision differently, even knowing what it meant and with a thousand times to reconsider? And father usually made the right decisions, especially when he had to do it fast and dirty like that.”

  She nodded. Her brother had always been good at seeing what people felt. He also looked a little more haggard than was right even now.

  “Not sleeping?” she asked.

  John shrugged. “Not sleeping well, no.”

  He was in full Court garb, though the tight hose weren’t parti-colored and the fabrics were all plain and none brighter than the indigo blue of his houppelande and there were no little golden bells on the upturned toes of his schoon and there was a mourning band on his left arm. The turn-out was immaculate as always, but he didn’t seem to be as . . . smooth as usual.

  “Bad dreams,” he said.

  She felt a chill, a prickle up her spine and arms the way you did when the moaning, coughing grunt of a tiger came from a swamp and the reeds stirred against the wind. He went on:

  “Well, odd dreams, really. Usually I just have the common sort, you know, I’m playing a lute and suddenly realize all the strings are out of tune, or I’m in the salle and realize my breeks have fallen down and the audience are all nuns? These have been . . . different.”

  “Oh?” she said, very carefully. “Different how?”

  “Nonsense, really. I’m floating in seawater, only it’s warm.”

  They knew that was theoretically possible, but you were well-advised not to go swimming in the Pacific anywhere on Montival’s inhabited shores without a wetsuit—a cold current hugged the shore, bringing richly abundant life to the sea but making falling into it a real risk of death by core-chilling.

  “And then there’s this really old man with a white beard and weird clothes shouting something I can’t understand, but in the dream it seems really important. And there’s a boat with skulls all along the gunwales. And storms and shouting and . . . just nonsense, really, however real it feels at the time. I’ve been reading too much Howard and Fraser.”

  “Possibly,” she said, feeling the chill settle deep in her stomach, as if she’d eaten snow in winter. “Been bothering you a lot?”

  “Just the last three nights, like going to the same play three times in a row. But . . . louder each time. Though I may have had it earlier and not remembered.”

  A jolt went through her. That wasn’t anything like my dream. Still, the dreams of the Royal kin . . . are not those of ordinary folk. Sometimes they’re not, at least.

  Then she took a long breath, returning to what could be dealt with in the light of common day.

  “OK, Mom’s out of it for a little while, though when the baby comes that’ll help. I’m not sure seeing me did more good than harm.”

  “Hey, she loves you too, Orrey! You’re her first.”

  “Yes, she does love me, very much—I never doubted that, even when we were fighting about religion.”

  He made a slight grimace, for which she didn’t blame him. Back when she was thirteen—and he eleven, old enough to remember it—she’d suddenly decided that she was of the Old Faith after wavering for years between the different beliefs of her parents. That had been just before Nonni Sandra’s funeral mass, on the very day of it in fact. In retrospect she admitted to herself suddenly refusing to take communion at her mother’s own mother’s funeral was a typical thirteen-year-old’s act of offensively, grossly inconsiderate narcissism. Especially since the Old Faith allowed for its followers occasionally taking part in other rites. It didn’t make the same sort of ferociously exclusive claims that the Religions of the Book did.

  At that age you were still rebelling against the notion that you weren’t the center of the universe, or at least had the star role in the great drama of life. Their mother hadn’t reacted well. A coldly furious Arminger was not something to be taken lightly. Still, that was years ago now—most of a decade—and it helped that John had chosen their mother’s Catholic faith, along with her sister Vuissance.

  And that I made a deservedly humble apology after I came back from that trip to Stath Ingolf. Which was no fun, but I felt better afterwards about myself. When you do something that wrong, some groveling helps all around. You can’t really say sorry unless you acknowledge that you’re to blame.

  Órlaith went on:

  “But I was there when Da died, and she wasn’t, and she just can’t help envying me the extra time we had together, and then feeling bad that she does. She did always say that she got terrible mood swings when she was pregnant—when it doesn’t make her sleepy all the time. I was . . . frightened when I noticed her crying in public yesterday, but maybe that’s part of the reason. So we’d better settle some things ourselves. The kingdom comes first. First off, we’re going to have to finally get off our rumps and publicly declare you heir to the Protectorate. The time for artful ambiguity is past.”

  He winced and occupied himself with the plates. There were four small omelets a few inches across, fluffy things with golden-brown crusts and a scent of strong melted cheese and ham, hot rolls under a cloth, butter, jam, and small bowls of stewed dried fruit and nuts with whipped cream. Órlaith nodded thanks, said the Blessing, and ate a forkful of her omelet. She stopped and made herself actually taste it by an act of will: one thing her parents had always agreed on was that taking food for granted was an insult both to the Divine in whatever form you followed it, and to the people who worked to produce it for you.

  Nine-tenths of the human race had starved to death within livi
ng memory, after all. That wasn’t as real to her down in the gut as it was to her parents’ generation, who’d grown up children of the survivors; and vastly less so than it was to those last few survivors of the great dying themselves, many of whom were slightly mad on the subject, but she could see the point. And the overwhelming majority of living humans worked all their lives in the fields as they had since the age of polished stone; she’d done a little of that, enough to know first-hand how hard it was.

  The smoky flavor of the ham and the sharp Tillamook cheese went well with the creamy lightness of the egg and the hint of garlic and chili from the crust. The tastes awoke her stomach, making the day seem more real.

  Her brother crossed himself, kissed his crucifix, murmured: “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive through Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen,” buttered a roll and went on plaintively, in a fair imitation of a sulky three-year-old:

  “Do I hafta be Lord Protector?”

  He could have been a fair actor, if he hadn’t been born a prince, in one of the troupes that shuttled between Corvallis and Portland and Boise. He might even have made it into the Lord Protector’s Men and had a permanent slot.

  “Yes, you have to. Absolutely. Eventually.”

  “There are all sorts of things I’d rather do than be Lord Protector. Hunt. Make music. Make love. St. Michael witness, I’d even rather carry a spear in a foot-company with a mean sergeant.”

  “You absolutely have to,” Órlaith said firmly. “Besides the legal part. The barons want it, and the Church wants it even more badly.”

  “I know,” he said, and added impishly: “My confessor comes down on me like an avalanche of anvils every time I tell him how I wish I didn’t have to do it. Tells me there are no princes in a confessional booth, so take up the cross God’s handed me, drag it up to Heaven’s gate, and stop whining in the meantime.”

  Órlaith nodded; Mom would have picked the man, and she always chose conscientious ones for the Royal family. “Da was never Lord Protector; our grandfather Norman was the last man to carry the title.”

  “And he was a mad tyrant by all accounts, so it’s not a good precedent.”

  “Mad tyrant or not, he built the Protectorate and it’s a big part of Montival.”

  She made a gesture around, as if to indicate what that demonic will had accomplished, the bulk of the Onyx Tower, rearing even higher than this; the great circuit of the inner keep, with its round machicolated towers, the outer bailey and the linear town along the inside of the wall, courtyard and cathedral, garden and workshop and barracks and armories. The realm governed from here and from the City Palace in Portland stretched from the lower Willamette to the Peace River in the north, and inland to the borders of Boise and the Dominion of Drumheller. It was the largest single unit in the inhabited part of the High Kingdom, had at least a quarter of its people and wealth, and everywhere within it the patterns of life followed the Lord Protector’s dream . . . or much of it, however modified by his wife, daughter, and less directly, his son-in-law, who was the son of the man who’d killed him.

  Probably the Protectorate was rather more than that proportion of Montival’s military power, which would be crucial when the summons went out, and the barons were the core of that.

  “Mom’s always worn that hat,” John said.

  “Mom made the office something different, with the accent on the Protector instead of the Lord. The commons up here in the north-realm love her for it, too, the way Nonni Sandra and then Mom reined in the nobility without ripping the place up.”

  “And she’ll be Lady Protector for the rest of her life,” John said, a little more cheerfully, evidently trying to look on the bright side. “Since she holds it in her own right of birth and I won’t inherit while she’s here. Mary Mother willing, I’ll be the age she is now before I have to take it on, or older.”

  “Sure, and you can just slide into it as her apprentice, so to speak. She’ll have more than enough work, being High Queen without Da until I come of Throne age, and Lady Protector to boot, so you can take some of that off her and then run in harness with her when I take the throne.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said mournfully, wincing. “Years and years working under Mom’s supervision . . . you know the way she works, as if wading through documents and listening to bureaucrats and negotiating with backwoods barons were just one long course of cherry pie and brandied apricot ice cream with cittern accompaniment. I’ll be an old man in twelve months! Or endowed with an enormous case of Bureaucrat’s Bottom.”

  “Don’t look at me with puppy-eyes as if you’ve been condemned to the squirrel cage,” she replied dryly. “And if the lard gets out of control, you can always go down and do a volunteer stint.”

  The elevators in Todenangst were run by convict-manned treadmills in the dungeons; for some reason squirrel cage was what they were called, though they actually looked like an endless set of steps on chain loops. When the elevator wasn’t in use the same treadmills pumped water from the deep tube wells to the cisterns high above, supplementing the windmills on the points of the witches-hat roofs of the towers.

  It wasn’t a sentence of death, not like the bad old days when men had just vanished into the lower reaches and never come out again except as pallid emaciated corpses. But it wasn’t a pleasant way to spend a sentence of, say ten years, either. Even compared to making big rocks into little ones for the roads or digging drainage ditches or cutting timber and picking oakum for the Navy.

  “You’ve got years and years—hopefully decades and decades—before you actually have to assume it fully,” she went on.

  “Christ and His Mother grant it, but don’t I get at least a few years of being a carefree young lord kicking up his heels?”

  “No, you don’t, Johnnie, except what you can fit into your spare time: we’re the Royal kin.”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes, but without real anger and nodded as she continued:

  “Just be glad you don’t have to do the whole thing now. But we need to get you declared, officially the heir. With some sort of ceremony, in that nice orthodox Cathedral with the Cardinal-Archbishop or someone like that presiding. There was a point to keeping it ambiguous while . . . while Da was here . . . but now . . . Look, Johnnie, face it: you’re male, you’re Catholic—”

  “Mom is Lady Protector and they’ve accepted that.”

  “She’s also Catholic, and she has you, and you’re the son of the legitimate daughter of Norman and Sandra Arminger. I’m female and I’m of the Old Faith and my father was a pagan Mackenzie.”

  “He was my father too!” her brother said, sounding genuinely offended this time.

  She made a soothing gesture. “Of course he was, Johnnie. Sorry I am, and I shouldn’t have put it like that—but it’s more obvious to outsiders with me, you know what I’m after saying? When was the last time you put on a kilt?”

  He shrugged, the easy smile coming back. “You look better in skirts, Sis.”

  “It’s the legs . . .”

  “All right, I admit it, I’m an Associate in my heart,” he said.

  “Which is the point. Seriously, the Associates were pretty good about putting up with Da, considering that he was the son of Juniper Mackenzie and Mike Havel, and considerin’ how many of their grandfathers stopped the pointy end of Mackenzie arrows and Bearkiller lances during the wars against the Association . . . not to mention that Da’s father killed Norman Arminger—”

  “Who’s our other grandfather, yours as much as mine. And considering that Father founded the High Kingdom and won the Prophet’s War . . .”

  She nodded. “True. But I didn’t do either of those things, the great fame and amazement of the world, eh? There is absolutely no way half or better of the baronage will tolerate a pagan High Queen Regnant who’s also Lady Protector. Not to mention, say, Count Stavarov, can you imagine it?”

  “I can imagine his head over Traitor’s Gate,” John said a little
grimly.

  “If Nonni Sandra could never manage that safely, do you think you could? Or me, for that matter?”

  “Point,” he said; he hadn’t known her as well as Órlaith, being younger, but her reputation was yet green. Probably that reputation was what made him continue thoughtfully:

  “Or he could just . . . have an accident, like so many of the people who got in Nonni’s way did. Because he would just love to be Lord Protector, and to hell with Montival.”

  “We don’t do that sort of thing so very much anymore, to be sure we don’t,” she pointed out.

  Though not so much isn’t at all the same as absolutely never, and if he ever tries to set me up with his repulsive son Yuri again . . . who he would just love to see as Consort to the High Queen, and his grandson’s fundament on the Raven Throne.

  House Stavarov was one of her maternal grandfather’s bigger mistakes, in her opinion. He’d used their manpower in the early days, and while from all the tales he hadn’t trusted anyone very much except perhaps Nonni Sandra, he also thought he could keep them inconsequential by putting their estates in the Chehalis lowlands, where the climate was too damp for really first-rate farmland.

  That meant the ruins of Seattle lay in House Stavarov’s fief of County Chehalis, and Nonni Sandra had had to confirm it as a House Stavarov demesne as the price of their support in the chaos after the Protector’s War. It was one of the rare but always painful occasions when Norman Arminger’s area of historical scholarship had played him false; in the early-medieval Norman kingdoms where his heart and mind had dwelt since his youth, salvage wasn’t a crucial economic factor. Here and now after the Change it most certainly was. Seattle was the largest of the dead cities within easy reach, and even with the Crown Third taken off the top it produced a huge and influential revenue stream each and every year, capable of buying everything from knights to newspaper editors.

  Odd that a man born before the Change had that blind spot. He would have done better to let them have the Skagit Valley baronies and kept Seattle in Crown demesne instead. Water under the bridge, and it isn’t the most important thing right now. Da was right, a ruler has to be a six-armed juggler and just ignore the odd itch.