by AnonYMous
For most of his life, he had been the one who needed comfort and encouragement. When he hadn’t been a desperately ill child, he had been a young man in a perilous political situation, a survivor of multiple assassination attempts. Now he at last understood how his parents must have felt when they’d embraced him—and the archbishop, when she’d cupped his face and touched her forehead to his.
He wanted to will her all the strength and resolve he possessed. He wanted to shield her from every last one of life’s cruelties. He wanted to lift the despair from her shoulders and carry it on his own.
He clasped his hands together in his lap. “Don’t give yourself so little credit. You took care of it. You made the choice.”
As if she hadn’t heard him, she pulled apart the summer eternity cake and examined the small creamy center hidden inside. “Now what does this symbolize?”
His heart pinched. She meant to close herself off. To remain alone from this day until her last day. “That’s just my chef showing off, since he seldom has a chance to prepare anything that poses a challenge to his skills.”
She smiled. “He’s welcome to push himself to the limits of his talent and imagination, now that he has me to feed.”
Her smile did not last. Her gaze turned as frosty as an autumn morning. “I did the right thing—I didn’t run away. But that is not to say that I am happy to be here. Nor am I happy with you, Your Highness.
“You have a talent of getting what you want, all the while appearing extraordinarily selfless—don’t think I haven’t noticed how you wield your generosity and understanding. They are gentle weapons, but all the more powerful for that. Truly, you have been ill served by your health. Had you been well, had you wished it, you could have ruled and your subjects would have all believed that it was by their proclamation.”
Her rebuke hit him with the force of a plasma grenade. And he knew exactly what the latter felt like, having lived through one such explosion, and would have died if his security team hadn’t thrown up a battle shield. Even with the shield, the impact had cracked two of his ribs.
“I have never wished to rule,” he said quietly. “But I will not deny that I did intend to influence you, as much as I could. And I would have done so even if my life weren’t at stake.”
Her expression turned derisive. “Because my soul was imperiled?”
He willed himself to meet her gaze. “Yes. And my heart.”
Matter meeting anti-matter led to the annihilation of both. What happened when a declaration of love met with a response of indifference?
She ate the rest of the summer eternity cake, her expression inscrutable. Then she rose. “Come, Your Highness. We should be at the assembly in ten minutes.”
*
Eleian did know how to leverage his better qualities to achieve the outcomes he desired, should the occasion arise. But his bride was a true master in the art of manipulating her public image.
They arrived at the assembly at the perfect moment to walk down the grand staircase to the applause of the crowd. A minute earlier they would have had to share the descent with others; any later and their appearance would have appeared too strategic and mannered.
When they had bid farewell to the gathering, they sat with media representatives. To questions concerning the swiftness of their courtship, he spoke of his delight in having for his bride one of the bravest and most beautiful women who ever lived. She returned the compliment. “I have long admired His Highness from afar. It is a dream come true to admire him in close quarters.”
And on the presumed brevity of their union, he asked for forgiveness from his people—and hers—that they would keep what little time they had to themselves, rather than meeting the public, as would have been expected under normal circumstances. She only said, “When his people needed him, His Highness rose to the occasion. I intend to do the same when my time comes.”
“You had them eating from the palm of your hand,” he told her, when they were at last alone in his private cruiser.
“That has always been the easy part. All my life, I’ve known the right things to say.” She gazed at the rapidly receding luxury liner. “For some people, to speak is to act. But for me, to speak is to pretend. How pretty they are, the cascade of words, the affirmation of honor and commitment, the reverberation of lofty ideals that make one glad to be alive.”
She glanced at him before returning her attention to the starscape again. “It really is too bad I must do more than speak.”
Her dark hair grazed her jaw. Her slightest movement was grace and strength. Her features were the beautiful smoothness of an emperador marble bust. He had never met anyone who looked more like a great heroine—and had to restrain himself not to take her hands and let her know that she was not as alone as she believed herself to be.
It was too soon. Anger still radiated from her, an infrared frequency, invisible but potent. Searing. She was not ready yet for solace, companionship, or any further avowals of tenderness and devotion.
He gave her a minute. “I need to be in a stabilization tank for the duration of the transit. Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?”
She turned to face him. “Your chamberlain said something to me about extra precautions earlier. I didn’t think to ask then, but . . . is Bridge travel dangerous to your health?”
Everyone must be strapped down and dosed with einstol for the transit. But these days the vast majority of passengers no longer bothered with other protective measures.
“Bridge travel produces unpredictable effects on my health. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all; other times it’s been known to put me in a coma.”
“Then why are we going to Mundi Luminare? We could have gone directly to Pax Cara.”
“I didn’t think you wanted to return directly to Pax Cara.”
In fact, he believed that she desperately didn’t want to go back to Pax Cara. Not yet, in any case.
Something flickered in the depth of her eyes. “Is that enough reason to tax yourself with unnecessary Bridge travel?”
His physicians had been aghast at his choice, nearly mutinously so. But he had held firm: Mundi Luminare first.
“I want to show you my home. And I won’t mind seeing it one more time myself, since there’s a good chance that I will not return alive from Pax Cara.” He hesitated a moment. “But they are secondary reasons. If I thought you wanted to be on Pax Cara, we’d be headed for Pax Cara.”
Was that too close to another declaration of love?
“There’s no need for anymore grand gestures,” she said coolly. “I’m not running away and you’ll get your chance at your cure.”
“Can I not make a gesture simply to please my princess? There is little enough I can do.”
So little, when he wanted to do so much.
“You wish me to be grateful?”
Her tone was bland, yet he heard a challenge. “You misunderstand me. I am grateful. And from that gratitude stems my desire to be of service.”
She stared at him for a minute, as if marveling that he could be so dense. “You are not the reason I will fulfill my role during the Pax Cara Event.”
“I know. And I’m no less grateful.” He leaned in and kissed her on her cheek. “Forgive me my part in bringing you back.”
Chapter 5
[Vitalis drives around the training compound.]
Vitalis: That building houses the classrooms and the simulators. Over there is the gym.
Voice off-camera: Huge gym.
Vitalis: We spend a lot of time training in there. Mess hall to your right. Next to it is the rec center.
Voice off-camera: This looks like a military base.
Vitalis: It was designed like one, and three of our instructors are soldiers. But none of the rest of us are in active service, even though I’m an honorary captain of the Civil Defense Force.
[A montage of Vitalis and her training mates at various moments in their daily routine, followed by a shot of Vitalis opening the front door of
her bungalow. She shows the pictures that line the hallway just inside the door.]
Vitalis: [gestures at the wall] These are all the Chosen Ones who lived in this house. And this is Pavonis, my immediate predecessor. When I moved in, I found a really beautiful letter that he had left me, written the day before he met the Elders. Maybe it’s because of that, but I’ve always felt close to him, as if he were an older brother I’ve never met.
Voice off-camera: Do you ever wonder what happened to him?
Vitalis: We know what happened to him; we just don’t know how it happened. His remains were washed up on the beach outside.
Voice off-camera: Images of the Chosen Ones’ remains have never been made available to the public. But I assume you, as a Chosen One yourself, must have seen them.
Vitalis: I have. And it’s sobering. [She tilts her face up to her predecessor’s picture.] But this is how I prefer to remember Pavonis. And—[Her voice catches]—and I’m pretty sure this is how he would wish to be remembered too: smiling, and forever young.
*
Vitalis’s heart pounded. Her fingers clamped her thighs. And she could barely keep herself from squirming like an earthworm suddenly dug up to the surface.
The glider flew above one of Mundi Luminare’s five oceans—and it was her first time traversing maritime airspace, something that was strictly forbidden on Pax Cara. In fact, other than the Chosen One’s training compound, no dwellings or settlements were allowed within a hundred klicks of any coastline.
Theoretically she understood that there was no such taboo on Mundi Luminare—or indeed anywhere else. But the interdiction on Pax Cara was so thorough and fundamental that she had to fight the urge to barge into the pilot’s cabin and order the woman to turn around and head for the nearest shore. This moment. And I’m prepared to use deadly force.
“Ah, the people have sent flowers,” said Alchiba. “Would you like to see, Your Highness? There’s a promontory eighty klicks north on the coast. Flowers cast off the tip of the promontory are carried by ocean currents to Regia Insula in about a day or so. They are directly underneath us now.”
She had turned the viewport next to her seat completely opaque, to reduce her body’s involuntary stress reaction to the sight of the glider penetrating further into maritime airspace. She took a deep breath and turned not only the nearest viewport, but the entire glider, transparent.
A sea of flowers. Millions upon millions of blossoms, all in vibrant shades of fire, as if an entire sunset had turned into petals and painted the waves.
“Orange is the traditional wedding color on Mundi Luminare,” Alchiba said.
Before this outpouring of love, Vitalis forgot her discomfort. “Do the people send flowers for his birthday also?”
At home they always remembered hers. Outside the gates of the Pavonis Center—the training compound was always named after the previous Chosen One—there would be volcanic eruptions of bouquets.
“Yes, they do,” the chamberlain answered softly. “Though some years His Highness sees only the recordings we make.”
Because he would have been confined to the recovery tank for weeks before and after his birthday.
She glanced at the recovery tank. He had been transferred there directly from the stabilization tank at the end of Bridge travel, well before they had reached Mundi Luminare’s largest spaceport. She had a glimpse of a bare shoulder before the lid of the recovery tank shut with a quiet, pneumatic hiss. Several times she’d asked his physicians whether he was conscious; each time they assured her that it was exhaustion that kept him inside, not loss of consciousness.
At first she had been relieved that she didn’t need to face him. But as minutes, then hours, passed, a new tension spiraled inside her, a fear that she would, in fact, never see him alive again.
In reverence I offer myself to thee, o goddess great and exalted.
At the time she had noticed the hint of slyness in his tone. But now, as she looked back, more than anything else she remembered the openness of his expression, so candid and wholehearted that it approached innocence.
Innocence was often confused with naivety and likewise dismissed. But only the bravest could be innocent and only the strongest could, in the face of her cynicism and disillusion, offer himself without reservation.
A man as fearless in love as he was in conflict and political turmoil.
“His Highness and I discussed the facts of his health, but not the causes,” she found herself saying. “Would you happen to know, Master Chamberlain, what exactly ails him?”
“I’m afraid that the facts of his health are all we know too, Your Highness,” answered Alchiba. “He’d never not been unwell, not since birth. At various points, different diagnoses were made—but in the end his physicians agreed that his condition isn’t one known to medicine. He refused to let them name it after him. So among ourselves, we call it the Devourer.”
The Devourer, according to mythology—or ancient holy texts, depending on whether one believed—was the Destroyer of Universes, an inexorable force of darkness and annihilation.
“Gallows humor?” she murmured.
“Very much so. There’s a saying on Mundi Luminare, Even the gods can only keep the Devourer at bay. And that’s all we can do about His Highness’s condition, keeping him alive one day at a time.”
Alchiba looked toward the recovery tank, an anxious tenderness in his eyes. And then he smiled at Vitalis. “We’re almost there.”
The glider was now only a hundred meters or so in the air, its shadow skimming along the tide of flowers. Or rather, the wide, curving boulevard of flowers, paving the way from the vertiginous coastal cliffs to the equally precipitous island that rose from the deep blue sea.
Regia Insula.
She’d been completely mistaken in her impression of where he lived, believing his retreat to be somewhere in the heart of a continent, uplands as far as the eyes could see. When in fact he lived on an island—a large, mountainous island, but an island all the same.
Not just remote, but cut off from the rest of the world.
“Life on Regia Insula isn’t as isolated as it might look from the outside,” said Alchiba, as if he had heard her thoughts. “We are approaching from the windward side, which is sparsely populated. In the interior of the island there are half a dozen villages, as many excellent vineyards, a wine cooperative, and a distillery. And the social and cultural life is much livelier than one might suppose, judging by first impression: year-round we enjoy festivals and village dances.”
But it was difficult to shake off first impressions. The abrupt, rocky rise. The densely forested ridges and slopes. The near complete invisibility of civilization.
A man who made his home here was content with very little.
With just being alive.
The glider veered around the island, instead of traversing its airspace—and Vitalis saw no signs of villages or vineyards, only more stern isolation, surrounded by pounding waves.
Shel laid a hand on the recovery tank—and pulled back in surprise. The surface of the tank felt like skin, cool, soft, and very slightly moist.
“Is it touch-sensitive?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“So the prince would know if someone was in contact with the tank.”
“Correct.”
“And does he . . . permit such contacts?”
“The etiquette for such contacts is no different from how it is for normal contacts. There are interfaces on the tank through which we can hail him formally, if we require his attention. There are handles, casters, lift strips, etc, for transportation and repositioning, none of which are touch-sensitive.”
“I see.”
In other words, were she not the prince’s bride, she would have committed a large faux pas by putting her hand on the tank.
But she was his wife and it was perfectly fine for her to touch him either in person or via the tank.
She touched the tank again, but this time ma
king sure to set her fingertips on a handle. Then she crossed her arms before her chest. For the next few minutes, until they arrived at the prince’s retreat, she kept her eyes on the landscape and her hands very much to herself.
*
The princely retreat, likewise, was not what she had imagined. No castle, anti-grav fortress, or stratosphere-piercing spires greeted her, but a collection of dwellings that, from a distance, blended almost perfectly into their surroundings. They resolved, when the glider was less than a klick out, into houses that resembled yachts, which had been built, along their long axis, into the bones of the slopes.
Modest houses too, considering the exulted identity of their chief resident. Not that the houses were small or sloppy—indeed Vitalis was sure they would be described as architectural gems—but they were hardly palatial, or even manorial.
They were well-designed, well built houses with excellent views—no less and no more.
The prince did not emerge from the recovery tank upon their arrival. Alchiba gave Vitalis a tour of the retreat. He pointed out the audience hall, the theater, the clinic, etc, etc; she listened with half an ear and repeatedly checked the time. How much longer would Eleian remain in the recovery tank?
The prince’s residence was neither the largest edifice nor the one at the center of the property. Instead, it was so well hidden that she stood on its roof and thought herself merely atop an overhang above a steep drop.
“We had some turbulent years in the principality,” explained the chamberlain. “Not here on Mundi Luminare, but still, the staff thought it would be best for the prince to occupy the site that could be best defended with limited security personnel.”
And so it was that Eleian had moved to the building colloquially referred to as the bunker. Not a true bunker, obviously; the interior was much bigger and more comfortable than it looked from the outside. And it was all softness: thick carpets, deep seats, and silky, padded walls.
As soon as she was alone, Vitalis called up the house’s internal monitors and checked the data.
Normally, for a person as unwell as the prince, bare floors and plain chairs would be de rigueur, to avoid areas where pathogens could hide and multiply. But this house was ruthlessly clean—and fiercely antiseptic beneath its aura of rustic coziness.