Dear Sami,
Well, I did it. Contract signed, deposit paid, leaving on Friday.
My genetic material turned up a plum match for my preferences. This particular universe’s Ruritania has gender essentialism and heteronormativity at zero—thank fuck, and can I smuggle some back through on the way home?—and a moderately high Narrative Causality Index, which means events should play out more or less predictably, but with plenty of room for improvisation on my part.
Danger level: moderate.
“When you say moderate,” I said, as they were giving me the sales pitch, “do you mean, do a refresher first-aid course, or do you mean, update my will?”
“Maybe a duel-happy courtier, or revolutionary elements. Less effective anaesthesia, if you slip and break your leg.” The saleswoman fixed me with a look that said, the contract doesn’t hold us legally liable for any of this, but I’ll pretend to care until you’ve paid a deposit. “It’s adventure tourism. Far more people die canyoning in New Zealand, Miss Jones.”
Then they showed me the list of all the things that Crown Princess Elinor, in disguise as Normal Hot Mess Elinor, is and is not allowed to do to my life while I’m absent from it. Did you know that our world has quite a high NCI? The Agency has had trouble with several Ruritanians falling in love and not wanting to go home again. They asked if I had any attractive single neighbors, or perhaps a close friend who may have always secretly loved me.
(Pause for you to laugh uncontrollably for thirty seconds.)
“And finally,” she said, “it’s worth considering that some of our clients have trouble with the lack of connectivity and social media.”
I was dearly tempted to say:
Actually, I just “resigned from” my job because my dickhead boss told me to put something on his Twitter feed, and I told him it was a bad idea, and he told me that HE was the senator, not me, and so I did it and surprise!! there was a PR shitstorm!! And I took a severance payoff and Senator Dickhead announced it was an unfortunate independent act by a staffer who had since resigned. So now half the country thinks I’m a bigot, and half of my friends think I’m a moral coward for taking the money to be shoved under the bus, and honestly, who cares about the danger rating—at this point I would escape to the fucking MOON if that was an option. A holiday in a parallel universe seems like the next best thing.
What I actually said was, “Going offline won’t be a problem.”
Wish me luck and relaxation and not too many duels, I guess,
El
Dear Sami,
I’d been in Ruritania all of four hours before someone tried to kill me.
Let’s back up.
The real Crown Princess Elinor will be formally crowned in two weeks’ time, which is apparently a trigger for her to be gifted with an entire coterie of attendants-of-the-bedchamber and personal guards. Most of whom she’s exchanged barely two sentences with in her entire life, but all of whom are young relatives or friends of someone on the Privy Council. Or someone who’s bribed a member of said council.
It's uncannily like my first week on the senator’s staff, when the people who’d been with him on the campaign treated those of us who’d merely answered a job advertisement with narrow-eyed suspicion. Politics! Multiverse notwithstanding: same shit, different plumbing.
I missed half the names because I was too busy admiring the sheer number of clothing layers, and the embroidery, and the jewels, and the embossed leather sheaths for swords and daggers—Sami, it’s hedonistic, it’s like someone regurgitated the Royal Shakespeare’s costume-storage facility.
The other half of the names, recorded for posterity and assistance with recall:
Imagine you’re in an Evelyn Waugh novel and someone turns around from the billiards table, cue in one hand and glass of port in the other, and is introduced as Jonty. Yes. There. That’s exactly what Jonty looks like.
I mention him because he’s on the Agency payroll, and therefore the only one who knows who I really am. I’m meant to make him my favorite so he has an excuse to stay close, but I get a depressingly creepy vibe from him. You know. In the Waugh novel there’s a smirky, classist remark daubed on his lips at all times. In our world he’s probably about to monologue the plot of his screenplay directly at your breasts.
Barely enough time for imperious nods and being laced into my own outfit before I was bundled off for a court dinner, featuring lots of people whose names I’d at least had a chance to learn from the briefing packet. Food very butter-heavy. My kingdom (hah!) for a nice, sharp salad.
And then there was a round of fancy wine, for toasts, and I’d barely taken my first sip from my cup when there was a gasp and someone smashed it out of my hand.
More gasps all around. I was too surprised to do anything. The same someone—it was Dominica, personal guard of the disapproving frown—picked up the spilled cup, stared at it, and then lunged at me and scrubbed at my mouth with a napkin. All I could think was that she was smearing my lipstick everywhere.
“Excuse me,” I managed, through the napkin, and shoved her away.
“Poison, Your Highness.” She tilted the cup to show me. Green pearlescence clung to the rim. “It’s subtle, but it leaves a surface residue. It caught the light. How do you feel?”
The word poison by this stage had spread halfway across the room. I felt—odd. My chest was tight and the room was dark at the edges. In retrospect I think that part was just shock.
“My lips are tingling,” I admitted; they were.
That was the end of the party. I was bundled back to my rooms in a knot of guards, a doctor was summoned and did nothing but proclaim me healthy and inform me darkly that he’d been waiting for something like this to happen, everyone knew that there were religious sects who favored poisons and didn’t want me on the throne, blah blah, get some rest, Your Highness.
Dominica was still hovering by my side like she’d been glued there. Jonty gave her a black look and me what was probably meant to be an encouraging nod, before he left with the rest of the attendants.
“Thank you, Dominica,” I said.
The woman’s face twitched and then she actually knelt, and took my hand. I’d already logged the basics: bone structure by Bernini, hair mahogany brown and tied sleekly back. In that moment I discovered she also had short fingernails and eyes like topaz: dark gold and faceted and very clear.
“No harm will come to Your Highness while I am at your side,” she said, and it was very stiff and formal but her voice still sounded like the first sip of coffee on a cold morning, and I’ll tell you what, that was when I really got the whole Ruritanian fantasy thing. Some bizarre feudalistic bunch of lizard-nerves woke up and sang like a fucking motet choir at that.
I think I went bright pink under my face powder. She was dignified enough not to comment.
One now wonders what high danger levels look like: imminent plague? Palace built on the edge of an active volcano?
Yours, still in possession of functioning internal organs (and also a brand new wank fantasy, if I’m honest),
El
Dear Sami,
Unexpected side effect of monarchy: I’ve got peasants.
Imagine that said in either the tones of “I’ve got pubic lice” or “I’ve got a firethrower.” The way people speak about them to me is usually one of the two. Unfortunate nuisance, or useful resource!
And look, it wasn’t unexpected, it’s just that what with all the fancy dresses and the terrifyingly beautiful women kneeling and swearing their loyalty, I’d forgotten that this country runs as every country has ever run: on someone’s sweat. They took me on a pre-coronation grand tour of the surrounding villages and farmland today, and there was the kind of nodding-and-smiling you get when shoving a phone camera in someone’s face as they exit a polling booth: I’ll pretend that this isn’t an annoying interruption to my day, because I don’t know how much power you have over me.
Only here they do know.
It all put me in a foul mood, which I took into an afternoon of party planning. Sorry, coronation logistics. Dominica was clearly bored to tears by the entire thing and nearly glared a hole in a saucer when I, foolishly, asked her to help me choose between two near-identical tea services.
“The green pigment of Hurst porcelain is a byproduct of dangerous mining practices and is toxic to the children who do most of the detail work,” she said, with far more repressive and princessy hauteur than I’d managed so far.
The Keeper of the Plate (I wish I was kidding) looked as if someone had farted.
“What?” I said. “Children?”
“Dominica,” said Jonty. “I'm sure it’s understood that Her Highness is not to be bothered with such things until after the coronation.”
Rental property to be left in the condition you found it, in other words, and directed at me.
But... child labor and toxic paint. Come on. I chose the gilt-edged pink plates instead and asked for a report on Hurst porcelain to be prepared by the next morning, and we moved on to menu planning.
At dinner tonight Dominica did her usual iron-faced act, but she also interrupted to usher me away for a Very Important Thing when the Baron Wilhelm spent ten minutes going down the list of his sons and daughters in the clear hope that I might like the sound of one of them and agree to be betrothed on the spot. He was very patronizing and very drunk. Dominica put her hand deliciously in the small of my back as she steered me to my Very Important Thing, which turned out to be complimenting the kitchen staff who’d constructed the enormous chocolate swan. I was handed a small silver axe and asked to decapitate it, which is more violence than I’m accustomed to in my desserts.
Then I took the head away on a plate and prodded it with a tiny fork, trying to convince myself it wasn’t looking at me accusingly. I kept thinking about the children in the fields, and children with paintbrushes. The chocolate was cloying on my tongue.
“Dominica,” I said, because we were alone. “Do you know...”
She stared at me as if I were another gilded saucer, and I heroically managed not to whimper please step on me.
“Do you know why people want to kill me?”
Another long stare. It’s safest for her to think I’m some sort of deeply sheltered sugared-rose-petal of an idiot, who’s simply never thought to ask about whether people might be dying in her mines or suffering to make her pretty tea service.
“Was that a serious question, Your Highness?”
I nodded.
Dominica said, “You’re different from what I expected.”
Which wasn’t an answer to my question, and at that point I was swarmed by Jonty and Moritz and Luisa clamoring for me to come and dance, so we didn’t finish the conversation. But I haven’t forgotten it.
Yours,
El
Dear Sami,
I’m ninety percent sure someone is reading this, or at least trying to. Remember in high school when I proved my parents were reading my diary? Same tricks apply. And same method of making it a useless endeavor for whoever’s snooping; raise a glass to Nanny Tilda, the one tolerable member of my godawful family, and her work as a secretary in the days when shorthand was a useful skill.
I still remember you learning it from me in two days flat—I was thrilled—and the look on Mr. Dunn’s face when he intercepted a note and tried to read it aloud.
I’m all the way sure that something is going on with Jonty. He keeps changing around my other attendants’ schedules at the last minute and vanishing during meals, and now he’s come down with a sudden attack of piety and begged leave to attend midnight service at the palace chapel, which Honor says is unusual for him.
I got Jonty alone and asked him outright if something was wrong, if the Agency was having issues—if maybe Princess Elinor had fucked up something about my life, and they were trying to keep it from me? But he just put on his most placid and smirky face and told me that I had nothing to worry about.
He’s going to chapel tonight.
I’m going to follow him. (Don’t look at me like that, it’s a mystery, I can’t help it.)
Jonty’s also done a complete about-face on the subject of Dominica, which I find even more suspicious. He still treats her as barely one step above a servant, but he’s now providing more and more excuses for us to be alone together: acting all concerned about the stress of the upcoming coronation, and I look peaky, and wouldn’t I like to rest quietly in my chambers? With my personal guard?
If he were a normal sort of attendant I’d think he’s noticed my epic crush—frankly, it wouldn’t be hard—and is tacitly encouraging the crown princess to have a hot fling before the inevitable political marriage looms.
During one of these The Princess Has A Headache interludes, Dominica was teaching me how to cheat at a card game that’s popular among the guards, and we got onto the subject of how she came to be on my personal guard. She volunteered for it in her twin brother’s place, after he died; they grew up very close, their mother never told them who their father was, and then the brother died last year in a skirmish which—reading between the lines—was the royal army bullying farmers in the northern towns when a blight meant they couldn’t produce the usual crop yield.
“Sending a single unit up against desperate people with farm tools and nothing to lose,” she said, very bitter, looking up to meet my gaze from the winning hand she’d just laid on the table. “Someone’s bright idea.”
I waited for the usual respectful addendum—Forgive my outburst, Your Highness—but she just kept her chin up, as if seeing if I could take it.
I wanted to say, Neither of us are what we’re supposed to be, are we?
Instead I said, “My best friend died a few months ago.”
“Oh?”
“I’d known her since we were—really young. I still feel completely lost when I remember she’s gone.”
Like the world is a different world. A shift for the worse in the multiverse. It hurts so much. I didn’t know how to tell her how much it hurts; I was absolutely sure I didn’t have to. She tilted her head and firelight reflected off the polished sweep of her hair, and her mouth was the softest and most careful I’ve seen it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I'm sorry about your brother.”
...God help me, I think we might be friends now. She answers all my questions and bullies reports out of bureaucrats, and we’re in the midst of a fragmented lecture series entitled Why People Might Want To Kill You. Some of the religious sects approach it from a woo-woo perspective—full of mutterings about bad omens and prophecies—but I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that the revolutionaries, the ones involved in violent social protest, have a real fucking point. Frankly, Ruritania is a mess. And what am I supposed to do when I hear about a local lord tyrannizing a village, or an entire edict slapping down the right of peaceable assembly, or a charity hospital in the city about to close for lack of funds?
Answer: write a letter to that lord under my personal seal, and flounce my way into the Privy Council chambers to repeal the edict—changed my mind, so sorry, what a flighty girl I am! I even sold some of the ugliest pieces in my vast jewelry collection to raise money for a personal donation to the hospital, which went into embarrassing royalist spasms and instantly renamed itself in my honor.
Jonty looks more constipated by the day. He can’t exactly contradict me in public, though.
And maybe the Crown Princess Elinor will come back and reverse it all again, but maybe she won’t bother, and at least I’ll have left the rental property with a well-weeded garden and a more nicely arranged linen closet. Better than I found it.
I miss you,
El
Dear Sami,
Fuck. All right. Fuck.
I roped Dominica into the “go and see what Creepy Jonty is up to” plan, because I’m not a complete moron and there are, as established, plenty of people trying to kill me. Plus it’s very difficult to sneak, as a princess, and I needed an ally.
The main chapel is a glorified wing of the palace, high-ceilinged and hushed. It was dense with candlelight as midnight service began. We were a long way from Jonty’s heels, but saw him slip into a side chapel, and Dominica took hold of my arm when I went to follow him. She pointed at a narrow set of stairs tucked in a corner. I did have a brief moment of wondering if I was about to be thrown down from a height and turned into an exciting corpse in the middle of the mosaic floor.
But the stairs led to a middle gallery shrouded in wicker screens—a kind of service corridor—and when we crouched, we ended up with a reasonable view down into the chapel where Jonty stood. Alone. I’d assumed some sort of conspiratorial assignation. I’d even have settled for a licentious assignation, simply to know what was going on with him, though voyeurism in combination with desecration of a chapel is a bit heavy-handed on the kink even for me.
And then Jonty pulled a multiverse gate opener out of his pocket and fired it up.
Dominica’s hand was still gripping my arm. I assume she didn’t trust me to be quiet. When the gate opened, expanding from speck into perfect circle with a quiet thwop and a shimmer of that sickly yellow-green, her fingers went tight as a vise.
The person who stepped through the gate was me.
Dominica inhaled hard and I dug a warning elbow into her side. It was the Crown Princess Elinor, obviously, wearing my favorite pink skirt and a denim jacket I didn’t recognize. It seemed unfair. Why did she get to come home for a visit?
Then I remembered all the jewelry-selling and edicts and other parts of Ruritania that I’d merrily been tampering with, and swallowed a great big mouthful of something that probably should have been guilt. Wasn’t, though. I don’t regret any of it.
“What is taking so long?” Princess Elinor demanded. “The revolutionaries have been slowly coming to the boil for months. We allowed that Ruys woman to infiltrate the guard, and the general assured me that the rest of them would be vanity placements—next to useless. Everything was poised for a successful attempt. Why isn’t she dead?”
It actually took me a moment. The startled fascination of seeing someone with my face, in my clothes, was still sinking in. Dominica's fingers tightened even further before she snatched them abruptly away. When I looked at her, all I could see was the wide whites of her eyes. Then it hit.
She. She was me. I was meant to be dead.
“Dominica Ruys is the problem, Your Highness,” Jonty was saying, beneath us. “I’ve given her plenty of openings for violence, but she hasn’t taken any of them. I think she’s become friendly with the replacement.”
“Friendly.” Spoken as if holding a dirty tissue at arm’s length. “This is unacceptable, Jonathan.”
Jonty bowed deeply. “There was always a risk of this, Your Highness. The Agency’s contract did stipulate—”
“Oh, do shut up. How much could this tourist really have done in—” Princess Elinor cut herself off and rubbed at her forehead with two genteel fingertips. It was a gesture totally unfamiliar, totally unlike me, and somehow that eased my heartrate down from rabbit levels. “Very well,” she said. “We move to the backup plan. Inform the general. It will take a bit more work, but he should be able to pin her death on the revolutionaries. Produce a convenient confession from someone defiant and idealistic. Then we proceed as planned. Use the excuse to round them all up for deplorable violence and high treason, produce me bruised and shaken but miraculously alive, and the threat is eliminated before the crown is even on my head.”
Jonty closed the gate once the princess had stepped back through, and he left the chapel. My head was spinning and one of my feet was numb and tingling from my crouched position, but I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
The Agency.
What a good business model theirs is, after all, taking money from both sides. Fantasy holidays for young people estranged from their families and gone reckless with irritation and grief. And a useful service for Ruritanian royals all over the multiverse: could you use a doppelganger? No doubt some of them really are just looking for a two-week escape in another world before assuming their royal duties.
But some of the others....
What’s the saying—if you’re not the consumer, you’re the product? Looks like it’s possible to be both.
I braced my hands on the screen and managed to stand up. Neither Dominica nor I spoke as we scurried back to my chambers, but we exchanged looks that said: once we’re safely shut in the bedchamber, it’s going to be a fucking race as to who gets to shout at the other one first.
In the end Dominica won because she cheated by shoving me up against the door the moment it closed and getting her face really close to mine. My brain and my heart and my ladyparts all short-circuited at once in a combination of leftover fear and inappropriate lust. That gave her enough time to speak.
“You’re not the real Princess Elinor?”
“My name is Elinor!” I protested, like an idiot. “And can we agree that I’m not the worst person that you’ve seen tonight wearing this particular face?”
“That’s not what I...” She shook her head, looking frustrated. I’d no idea how much of what we’d seen she’d actually understood, but it turned out: most of it. Because she said, “This is our life, and it’s all just a joke to you? A holiday?”
Solid hit. I swallowed. “It’s not a joke.”
Dominica’s grip on my shoulders loosened. She was still frowning. Emboldened by her pause, I continued: “And don’t think we’re not going to talk about the fact that you were going to kill me.”
“I was not!” she said. “Not after the first three days. My main job was to sound you out; none of us had been able to get close enough, before, and we thought it was good luck that I managed it.” Sounding bitter. She was as much a dupe in this as I was. “We’d only ever judged you—the princess, I mean—on her actions and her speeches, and they were... troubling.”
No doubt. Poisonous entitled little shit, my Ruritanian counterpart. Pity I’m not still working for the senator; she’d have fit in just fine on his staff.
“I was meant to find out if you were a completely lost cause. And if so... yes. I would have done what was necessary to protect Ruritania from your rule.”
“You swore to protect me, on the first night,” I said accusingly. “Before you knew me at all. You knelt down and everything. I remember, because it was unspeakably hot. Was there even any poison?”
Her face colored on hot and then colored some more. “Yes, but I added it to the cup after I’d knocked it away. And there was only a single drop on the napkin I used to wipe your mouth, so that your lips would tingle. It was a quick way to gain your trust.”
“Revolutionary elements,” I sighed. “I was warned, I suppose.” I looked at her more closely. Unknown father. Brother dead under maybe-suspicious circumstances. “Dominica, are you sure you’re not a princess? A secret heir? I don’t think anything else could surprise me tonight.”
“I am not royalty.” She looked as offended as if I’d accused her of whipping puppies for fun. Which I kind of had, given the standard for royalty in this place.
“Narrative causality,” I said, in apology. “It’s—let me explain.”
I rang for someone to fetch hot chocolate from the kitchens, and Dominica and I sat on my bed and drank and talked and planned, and I was pathetically excited by her bare feet when she deigned to relax so far as to remove her boots and socks. Her sword stayed within arm’s reach even though there was another guard on duty outside; Dominica’s only the daytime shift, usually, and sleeps when I sleep. Maybe she, too, had the words vanity placements still dancing uncomfortably in her mind.
She’s asleep now, on a couch in the outer room. I should try to sleep myself, but my skin is still buzzing. Writing this instead. We have a terrible, foolhardy plan that’s likely to increase the Narrative Causality Index of this universe all by itself, if we pull it off.
I’ll take whatever luck you can send me,
El
Dear Sami,
I’m writing in a cabin in the mountain woods, with a thick blanket draped over my knees. There’s a view through the small window down to the city, where the lights are dimmed and bells are calling mourning every hour. The Crown Princess Elinor is missing, presumed dead.
Sometimes you have to shove a stick into the trap and let it slam shut. Or in this case: if a real assassination attempt is on the horizon, sometimes you have to let a fake one happen first. Dominica got quick word to her revolutionary allies, and they staged a very dramatic scene with an explosion on a barge. Thank fuck for just enough years spent in Scouts that I learned how to swim in heavy clothes.
As expected, the general and everyone else in Princess Elinor’s conspiratorial faction raised a great fuss and called for the arrest of all known revolutionaries, but given said revolutionaries were pre-warned, Dominica tells me they’ve all vanished into countryside retreats like this one by now. And it’s nighttime, and winter. Nobody wants to be racing around in the dark when they think they’ve had victory handed to them unexpectedly.
Tomorrow, no doubt the crown princess will appear just in time for her coronation. Tomorrow, the real fireworks of this plan begin.
The only people in this cabin with me are Dominica and a middle-aged man who treats her with enough familiarity that I’m wondering—uncle? Neither of them has said. I haven’t asked. I was too busy shivering in my drenched underthings until Dominica threw some towels at me and told me that the entire plan would be ruined if I went and died of a chill. Her already mediocre deference-to-royalty, which was clearly an act anyway, has dwindled to a scrap.
“Tell me you weren’t lying about your brother,” I said, when I was toweling my hair.
“No, I wasn’t," said Dominica. “He was the best thing about me. He would have fought, like I’m fighting.”
My throat was thick. “My best friend would have fought, too,” I said. “She would probably have stormed out of the palace and led a rebellion herself rather than do anything involving a chocolate swan. She was much braver than me.”
All right, I was fishing. Dominica didn’t play along, but amusement looked good on her. The side of her mouth curved like the bend of a river.
“What would she say about all of this?”
I grinned. “She’d tell me to go ahead and raise hell.”
You know you would, Sami,
El
Dear Sami,
Today has lasted at least five years and also I don’t think I’ve taken a single conscious breath. No way to put this down except step by step.
There’s an old-fashioned Ruritanian veil that covers the face—mostly worn by dowagers who want to spy on everyone from beneath them—and we disguised me with one of those. We sneaked into Jonty’s chambers when the palace was near empty, just after everyone left for the coronation ceremony, and found his multiverse gate opener tucked into a chest full of cravats. I hid the opener down the front of the red dress I was wearing; it was one of the princess’s own, smuggled out of the palace in the furor surrounding her “miraculous return.”
Dominica still had her guard uniform, and she tucked her hair up under a felt cap and marched us to the front rows of the coronation hall as if escorting someone’s grandmother who’d fallen ill and slept through breakfast.
Crown Princess Elinor made her grand, smug way to the front of the hall, to the sounds of trumpets. As soon as she was standing alone, I yanked the veil off and strode up onto the dias—between two very confused guards—to stand beside her.
It wasn’t subtle, as plans go.
“You—” the princess hissed, and was clearly raising her hand to gesture for my capture, but I grabbed her wrist and forced it down.
“An impostor!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “You shall not harm Ruritania!” I threw my other hand to my bosom in Shakespearean dismay, and retrieved the gate opener. We hadn’t found Jonty’s Agency directory, so I’d pre-set the opener to a random code on our way to the hall.
I pressed the button. A gate thwopped itself into existence and I dragged the princess through it, then closed the gate behind us before I could hear more than the beginnings of shouts and excitement. There’d been one princess, then two, then none.
Dominica would have killed to protect her country from a bad ruler. I hadn’t entirely ruled that out, but I did have other options.
This place in the multiverse looked similar to the Ruritania we’d come from, but the scent of the air was completely different. The air was warmer and drier. We were halfway up a gentle hill carpeted with scrubby grass.
“Unhand me!” the princess shouted. I unhanded her. She jabbed her finger in my face. “Take me back there immediately!”
“No. I have another offer for you,” I said. “Go back to my world. My life. You can have it.” I supposed it was too much to ask that she might have fallen in love. My looks are completely wasted on someone with a personality that unpleasant.
She hesitated, and frowned. “There are certainly some interesting aspects to your world,” she allowed. “But you have no position of influence, no significant wealth, and no friends. And an extremely rude and condescending person claiming to be your brother keeps trying to contact you. And the throne of Ruritania is mine. I have worked too hard for it to give it up now.”
I wondered suddenly and unpleasantly about the hunting accident that resulted in the death of the late king.
“It might be yours, but you’re ruining it!” I said. “You don’t care about these people!”
“How dare you, you—you tourist! I was born to lead—”
“Hereditary monarchy is a stupid system!” I shouted, and kicked her legs out from under her.
She went down with a surprised yelp. For all her ruthlessness, she’s lived a life with other people wielding swords on her behalf; I’m no expert fighter, but I did grow up with Brendan for an older brother, and at least I know how to lash out when cornered.
“And feudalism might have its sexy moments,” I went on—I was angry—“but it’s not much better. I take it that’s a no to the offer?”
I dialed another code and stepped through the gate. Scent of faintly burning wood and salt on the furious wind. A city on the horizon that took up half the sky. My hair whipped around as Princess Elinor scrambled to her feet and came through after me; what choice did she have? The opener was her only way home.
I glanced at the NCI reading on the device and repeated the process through two more worlds—one green-clouded and actively raining, smelling of unfamiliar plants, the path active with people. One city that could nearly have been my home, except that the smells of metal and smoke were off-kilter, and the buildings too tall, their colors extravagant.
That one had a fairly high NCI.
“How do you feel now?” I asked hopefully.
“Go to hell,” the princess spat. She tried to grab the opener from me but I danced away and dialed another number, and we raced through a couple more nodes of the multiverse. My hope was that in a very high NCI world, the essential romance narrative would grab at her and she’d agree to the switch.
A light on the opener flashed rapid orange. I was forcing a lot out of it and its charge was running low. And the adrenaline holding my bones was beginning to crack, leaving me shaky.
The princess must have noticed. She was breathing hard herself, and kept eyeing the opener and myself with equal venom.
“You can’t keep this up forever. If you’re going to knock me out and abandon me, stop messing around and do it.”
Sami, you said something to me once. We were sitting side by side on your hospital bed and you were kicking my ass at some video game or other. You put down the handset and said, quite suddenly, not looking at me, “It fucking sucks that you don’t realize how much you want to live until the worst possible moment.”
You were right, as usual. I’ve been ambivalent on the subject of living for weeks. And then in the moment of deciding that even the Princess Elinor deserved to live, and not be knocked out and abandoned in a world with a danger rating that could be anything, I realized—
Well, I realized I was finally looking forward to whatever came next. Even if it was going to be hard.
Back then I looked at you and you picked up the handset again and said, “Keep taking the chances you’ve got, El. Don’t waste them. Promise.”
And because I did promise, you’ll be pleased to know I entered one more gate code and stepped through. Sunny skies, paved streets, glassy green buildings; we were in an alley between two of them.
I looked at the opener, nodded, and dropped it to the ground. It took two good hops with my entire body weight for the cracked screen to go blank. Glass and bits of shattered plastic skidded across the stones.
Princess Elinor gave a little shriek. “What have you done?”
“Ruritania doesn’t need either of us, and the Agency doesn’t know where we are,” I told her. “This seems like a nice place with a high chance of indoor plumbing, and the NCI here is nearly a perfect ratio. Probability is shifted overwhelmingly towards a predictable and satisfying story. Which means you’ll get what’s coming to you, based on the role you choose to play. I advise you to make better choices from now on.”
Pleased with that as a parting blow, I turned and began to walk towards the mouth of the alley. I did sneak a look over my shoulder; she’d leaned against the wall, as if to catch her breath.
I got a few yards before there was another thwop and a yellow-green gate opened in front of me. Dominica stepped through it, an intact gate opener in her hand.
I froze. Dominica saw me, and froze too. Her expression of blinding fury had a brief spat with one of equally blinding relief, before she glanced over my shoulder and lunged to grab me by the hand.
“You are such an idiot,” she snapped, and pulled me through the gate before I could respond. There was another shriek of dismay from the princess, behind me, but the sound vanished into nothing. Dominica had closed the gate when I was barely through it, and we were standing in a small corridor with the familiar wall panels of the Ruritanian royal palace. The smell was right. We were back.
Dominica tossed her opener to the ground and skewered it with her sword. It made a sad little noise and began to spark.
“What?” I said.
“I told you I wouldn’t let any harm come to you.”
New, improved question: “How?”
“I threatened Jonty,” Dominica said. “I thought he might have a way to contact the Agency and ask for someone to bring a new one of those little gate boxes, in case his own one stopped working, and I was right. And then I asked the woman who appeared if there was a way to cut this world out of the multiverse, to stop people coming here from anywhere else, and—well, she looked quite relieved at the idea, and said we weren’t going to be any more use to them now anyway. And something about wiping the coordinates from the database,” Dominica spoke the words gingerly, as if she didn’t trust the syllables, “and payments not being refundable. And Jonty decided to go back through the gate with her, which was wise of him because otherwise I would have made him very sorry.”
I stared at the smoking pile of ex-opener and didn’t doubt it.
“And you were what, going to keep putting random numbers in until you found me?”
Dominica shrugged. “Yes.”
“That could have taken years!”
“Well, it didn’t.”
I wondered what the probability was that she’d somehow managed to dial the right code on the first try. The odds must be infinitesimally small.
But very narratively satisfying.
“You can’t go home, Elinor,” Dominica said. “I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t want to. I didn’t intend to,” I said, weakly. “I was making a gesture!”
“A gesture? Sacrificing yourself for Ruritania like some kind of—of—” And then Dominica knelt at my feet like she had the first night we met, and the kiss she gave my hand was savage, like she wished it was a bite instead.
The kiss she swept me into when she stood up was more savage again. I’d wondered if maybe she was one of those revolutionary creatures who dedicated themselves to liberty and ignored the pleasures of the flesh, but her lips were lush and confident against my own. This was someone whose flesh had definitely been pleasured before. It was fucking glorious.
“Come on, Your Highness,” Dominica said, when she’d released me and I’d shaken myself out of my kiss-glazed state. “We’d better get you crowned.”
“About that,” I said.
I gave her the feudalism-is-stupid speech. Dominica shouted at me for repeating her own talking points back to her. Then she kissed me again, and then settled into a contemplative frown when I suggested that the best course of action would be a gradual, peaceful transition to democratic government. After all, I’d already proved good at signing away my power, and I do know my way around political PR.
“I can be the last queen of Ruritania,” I said. “Sounds impressive, don’t you think?”
Dominica told me again that I was an idiot and not to be ridiculous, but her eyes were alight with fondness and I’m pretty sure only half of it was directed at liberty and democracy and all of those things; the other half was all for me. I can’t wait to hear how much she shouts when I suggest she runs for office.
Maybe somewhere in this world is a version of you, Sami. You’d be different; you might hate classical music and love blue cheese. We’d have no history. It wouldn’t be you. I’m not going to go looking. But it’s a thought to cling to: somewhere in the infinite multiverse we do have infinite chances.
I’m not going to waste this one.
Yours, always,
El