Even a princess going to her death must appear worthy of her title.
And so, as the ship streamed against the cold velvet of space, my mother laced me into a new gown. It was the blue of a frozen sea, and something about how soft its many layers felt against my fingertips made me want to beg Mamá not to make me do this.
“Remember the fate you carry today,” she said, tightening the bodice. “The livelihood of nuestro planeta and everyone on it depends on your victory.”
“So does my life,” I said, failing to keep the bitterness from my voice.
She cut a glance at me. She always hated when I was sarcastic.
“This is how disputes have been settled for centuries. Accept it with grace.” She adjusted the blue stones of my necklace. “This is greater than you, or me, or your father.” She looked into my eyes, the same chilled brown as mine. “Whoever controls La Ruta controls everything. We cannot cede it to the Masielas.”
I could have recited her impending speech by memory. The route between our planets provided a vital shortcut away from one of the most dangerous asteroid fields in the galaxy, one that had broken into pieces more ships than it had let through. Many an astronave would—and did—pay dearly for an easement to use La Ruta, sparing them the danger of that asteroid field or the costly amount of fuel needed to go around it.
I glanced out the window of the astronave, looking to the ice crystals on the glass for some comfort. We were so close to landing, and the red-tinted surface of the moon below looked so forbidding and cold. Not cold like our home, not with endless life in the oceans beneath the ice crust. But like a place so dust-dry that nothing survives.
This was precisely the reason that the ambassadors, the ones from our planet and the ones from the Masiela family, had agreed on it. Only a place given neither to ice nor fire would be a fair battleground.
My mother gave the laces one last pull, so vehemently that the blue layers of my skirt, some as deep as the sky, some as pale as the crust of saltwater ice on our home, ruffled.
I thought of my rival, my enemy, how soon Ignacia de Masiela would sweep out of her own family’s ship to face me. The brown of her eyes would be as hot as the brown of mine was cold. Imagining her left my ribs and lungs tighter than the worst Mamá could do with the corset.
The ship rumbled to a landing. Just before los embajadores came for me, Mamá neatened the dark curls around my shoulders.
“Shouldn’t I wear it up?” I asked. “The better to fight?”
My mother gave me the kind of fond smile I only got when I showed perfect posture or the most delicate curtsey.
“When you win”—she drew a few curls to the front of my shoulder—“I want you looking every inch a future queen.”
Papá warned me what the moon would be like. I was, of course, ready for the cold. It’s so cold at home that frost collects on my parents’ thrones. But if he hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have been prepared for the air—so thin I had to draw each breath hard. Riosar was a moon so dry that the only plants that survived could condense water out of the air, their sword-sharp leaves a little like the agave I’d only seen rendered in books. My throat felt tight, and my skin parched almost instantly.
The ambassadors escorted Ignacia and me to the agreed-upon place, a rocky plain between the two landing sites. She emerged from the dull landscape, a sweep of dark hair and a fire-bright skirt. Her hands looked both delicate and strong, like the sea stars that survive in our freezing oceans. She wore a simple fire opal, raw and hanging just beneath her collarbone.
The ring of jewels around my neck felt suddenly gaudy and showy like I had something to prove, and she knew it.
I tried to keep my face impassive, the demeanor of a princess. But the embajadores must have seen my fear. One gave me a look of barely-veiled pity—the other, an encouraging nod.
“Buena suerte, princesa,” the ambassadors said as they left me.
Ignacia de Masiela and I watched our respective families’ astronaves starting up again, rumbling the ground beneath our feet. They propelled away from the surface, and we watched.
The ship carrying away my mother, painted in blues that matched my dress, trailed a stream of ice like a comet’s tail.
Ignacia’s eyes followed her own family’s ship, gleaming red and orange against the dark sky, powered along by a column of fire.
There was something a little heartbreaking at that moment, the two of us staring like that. Like we were not princesses but children who watched our parents leave us—like Ignacia was now my playmate on this barren planet.
It made me newly sad that I would have to kill her.
Neither of us moved. The ruffled edges of Ignacia’s underskirt were as light as fire so that even the thin air stirred them.
We regarded each other. She lifted her chin, not as though looking down at me, but as though appraising me. She had an odd look, as though sizing up an opponent when the truth was she knew me already. We had been around each other enough since we were children—from our families attending the same balls in all corners of the galaxy to the many failed attempts at treaties—that the sight of me was nothing unfamiliar. She knew my weak places already. She knew my strongest sinews and softest points. She knew where I was sharp and where my body yielded.
But she did not know what brutal will I brought to this fight. That was the one surprise I could still have for Ignacia de Masiela.
As the debris from the launches cleared, we saw it for the first time, the prize one of us would claim. La astronave that would go to the victor. The ship stood against the rocky landscape, gleaming pale gold, its fins adorned with what looked like pressure-made diamantes.
Only the victor would board it. The other would be left dead in the red-tinted dust, her body preserved in the cold, dry air for millennia.
The ambassadors had decided that our battle would not begin until we saw the signal overhead. They would be watching to ensure we obeyed, along with every spectator who’d come from all corners of our star system.
As we waited, I did a deep curtsey, the gesture I was told would befit either a gracious winner or a brave loser. Ignacia must have been told the same. She gathered her dress and gave her curtsey.
I shivered at the sight of her hands clutching the fabric. Those palms had been on my waist, tight against the bodice of my dress. Those fingers had brushed pieces of hair away from my face. I had rubbed those hands between mine to warm them; even in heavy layers, she was always shivering when her family visited our planet, and always too stoic to admit she was cold.
I shrugged away each memory as fast as it came to me. The feeling of pulling her body against mine to warm her. My family visiting her luminous planet, and her taking me to her room, helping me out of my dress when I overheated.
No one watching knew any of that. They didn’t know about her drawing me around corners to kiss me, me tying strings of delicate blue stones around her ankles because that was the only jewelry of mine she could wear without anyone seeing.
Those watching were busy considering their wagers. It was little wonder that most spectators hovering in the sky had put their faith—and, for the betting men, their money—on Ignacia. Ignacia, after all, came from a planet of fire, and I from one covered in a shell of frozen seawater. And she, far better than I, fit their image of a queen. She stood tall, branch-thin, where I was short and curved. I was a deeper brown while she was pale, with a nose as long and elegant as an icicle. Her hair flowed down straight as falling water, while mine moved in currents like oceans beneath the ice.
I may have been half a head shorter than Ignacia de Masiela. My chest may have been pounding from the thin air, but I kept my princesa’s posture—straight as the espada plants. I stood upright even in the face of the dress they’d put Ignacia in, reds and ambers and golds that reminded me she could vaporize me.
If I didn’t align my will with the ice in my blood, she could burn me up by pulling fire down from the sky.
What no one watching expected, what I didn’t expect, when the burst of flare light in the sky signaled the start of our battle, was for Ignacia to run.
The moment the signal painted the air, Ignacia de Masiela fled from me. Light layers of her dress trailed behind her, so much like a flame, I wondered if she had a train of fire.
Then she vanished into the crags of the landscape.
To pursue her as ruthlessly as I knew I would have to: there was one last memory I had to shrug away, the one that would weaken me if I did not cast it onto the fine dust of this moon.
The last time I’d seen Ignacia, she told me she would never touch me again.
I let this last memory fall from my fingers and felt my heart become a fist of ice as hard and cold and perfect as my home.
I followed Ignacia de Masiela deeper into the rock hills. And I did it while giving everyone their show.
I tracked the steps of Ignacia’s finely sewn boots in the soft dust, and I drew down frozen rain from the uppermost layers of the atmosphere. I followed the places her wide skirt had disturbed the dewed blades of the espada plants, and I spun a storm of whirling ice through the sky.
Without my hands to warm her, a princess accustomed to fire wouldn’t last long.
As I rounded every crag and boulder, I tensed, expecting to be ambushed by a column of flame.
But I did not cower.
“Ignacia.” I called out to her through the thin air so loudly it pinched my lungs. “Ignacia de Masiela, show yourself!”
I hoped to find her shivering behind a field of rocks, shielding herself against my storms.
I was half-disappointed and half-insulted when I found her perched on the edge of a low crag, the red flames of her skirt fluffed around her. She was drawing constellations in the now-damp earth.
“Que espectáculo,” she said, dry as the air. It was the first indication that she sensed me at the edge of the rock ring. “You’re giving them quite the performance. They’ll all be pleased.”
Rage rose in me. Did I inspire no fear in her at all? Was she really so calm that she could just sit here and draw?
The only thing that stayed my anger was the shiver that went through her shoulders, her skin paler from the cold.
As though sensing the anger vibrating my heart, Ignacia de Masiela looked up. The hard, perfect black of her eyes pinned me where I stood.
The sheets of frozen rain settled behind me. The ice-sharp wind fell at my back.
“I’m not going to fight you,” she said.
That fixed my heart in place.
No.
Not my heart.
My will.
“That’s too bad,” I told her. “Because I’m going to fight you.”
With those last words, what should have been impossible in these atmosphere-depleted skies began to appear, the condensing water I was shaping into silver clouds.
They glinted with a warning as though studded with the bluest ice.
Ignacia looked up, more with pain than fear.
“Don’t do this,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked, that beautiful blue ice shimmering in my blood.
“Because this is what they want,” she said. “You’re playing by their rules.”
“You decided we would follow their rules.” I didn’t mean to yell it, but I did, as loud as I had called her name.
Ignacia’s shoulders rounded, a flinch that was more in her body than her face.
“You decided they would never accept us together,” I said. “You decided we’d be enemies.”
“No.” She was yelling now. “I decided that they couldn’t know I loved you.”
I loved you. The words bit into me. She had never said them to me in the present tense. And now they were already in the past.
“What kind of show do you think they’d have made of us then?” She glanced toward the sky. “You think we have an audience now.” She gave a bitter laugh.
“Get up,” I said, “and fight me.”
Ignacia lifted her eyes to mine. “No.”
My rage swirled the cold clouds above us, turning them brighter blue.
“No me engañes,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said. La piel de gallina dotted her arms, from cold or fear or both.
The cold glint above us grew coarser. Fierce blue winked through the clouds.
I would bring down on Ignacia de Masiela a storm neither she nor the watching galaxy ever saw coming.
“You can’t fight like this,” Ignacia said. “And neither can I.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have no control.”
The clouds deepened along with my anger, not because she was wrong but because she was saying what no one else knew.
When it came to Ignacia de Masiela, I had never had any control.
“And you do?” I asked, my voice snapping back through the thin air.
“Of course not,” she said. “Why do you think I’m hiding? I can’t do this. I can’t end this because I can’t end you.”
“You ended us,” I yelled. La galaxia could listen in for all I cared. What did it matter now?
Ignacia rose to her feet.
Finally.
She saw me as something other than a lovesick girl. She respected me as the rival I was.
She came closer, said my name.
“Stay back,” I yelled. “We fight from a distance, como princesas.”
She moved closer still, fast enough that my body reacted before I could think.
I knew what was in my blood by growing up among the ice planets of our region—the deep blue of our atmospheres. I knew the stories of how, sometimes, when the pressure and gravity and composition of our worlds were just right, the atmospheres compressed molecules of carbon into the same glittering rocks adorning the victor’s astronave.
Sometimes, on our blue planets, the sky rains diamonds.
And because I had learned, and studied, and practiced, I now did that which neither this enemy princess nor the watching galaxy thought me capable. With the flinch of my instinct, I tore open the clouds above us and brought down a storm of blue diamonds on Ignacia de Masiela and me.
A rain of jewels, blue as our oceans under ice, fell from the highest layers of the atmosphere. Hard as hail but with the sharp facets of cut gems, walls of them poured from above. For a moment, it looked as though the entire sky was crowded with the glitter of blue stars. More sparkling blue than I ever thought was in me or all the ice planets of our line.
But I did not cower. I stood tall to meet my rain of diamonds. They might crush us both, bury us under a mountain of blue and sparkling rubble, but I would not shrink from my bright wrath.
I only saw the fear, the reaction, in Ignacia’s face for a fraction of a moment before her instinct met mine.
A line of flame streamed up from the ground into the sky. It rose, obliterating the storm of blue gems. It was a veil lifted off a star, a sheet of fire from a sun. It burned brilliant and hot as a wall of lightning.
It registered as only a flash before its heat blew me back onto the rocks, fast and hard as if I’d been thrown. Before I landed, one of the flames licked out. A searing feeling crawled along my arm.
When I struck the ground, the slick of something hot and wet underneath me told me it was the fall, not the flame, that would be the cause of my death. The side of my body had struck a jagged rock, and I was bleeding through my dress. But it was the throbbing from the burn along my arm and bare shoulder that forced my eyes shut. Every thought I had was on that burn. I barely felt the wound that was draining the life from my body.
In these moments before my death, I thought of my mother and father. I thought of Mamá teaching me that I may be as short as the smallest of nuestros ascendientes, but that I carried their blood, which was reason to stand tall. I thought of Papá, teaching me our night sky and commanding me to turn my back on anyone who claimed a woman could not map it as well or better than a man.
But most of all, as I lay on the dark earth, I thought of Ignacia de Masiela. I thought of how I had loved her, how the exchange of glances began the first time we were brought to a convening of our two families. How I once kissed her behind the gleaming silver wall of our palace gate and then tried to run, and she grabbed my arm and stopped me and kissed me harder than I had kissed her in the first place.
I pretended I stopped loving her a year ago when she said we could not pull each other into corners anymore—when she feared the star building between us would be used against us. And I hated her for it. But at this moment, I knew she was right. If everyone had known about us, one daughter of blazing planets and one of frozen ones, we would have fought each other far earlier.
I had loved Ignacia since our families forced us together during ambassadors’ visits, los embajadores demanding that we smile politely at each other while hoping we would stoke their rivalry in our hearts.
Ignacia ran to my wounded, bleeding body, which probably already looked like a corpse. Even with telescopios, no one could have seen through the swirling atmosphere that I was still breathing. They could not have seen the shape of Ignacia’s lips, how many times she said my name.
She breathed hard, tearing pieces from her skirt. “Is this what you wanted?” She held them against the wound the jagged rock had left. “For one of us to die for a stretch of airspace?”
I couldn’t tell if she was yelling at me or the sky.
I cried out at the pressure of her hands. “You’ve won.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Take your victory.”
My body was too weak to resist her wrapping cloth around me, tight against the wound. I wanted to fight her. What would she do with me? Keep me alive longer? Make sure I was awake and alert enough to watch her take off in her victor’s ship?
“I thought this was the worst they could do to us.” She tied the ends, and I clamped down my teeth not to scream. “Put us on a moon where we would think we were the only two souls in all these stars.” She put her hand to the side of my face. “Did you ever think maybe that’s what we needed, for it just to be us, a world that’s ours?”
My eyes worked to bring her into focus. “What?”
She was still breathing hard, her lungs fighting to get enough of the thin, chilled air. “We’ve wanted this for so long, for it to be just us, just once. All those moments sneaking around corners while our parents and their men screamed at each other. What would we have given for a world of our own?”
I looked at her, at the tears that dried so quickly in the parched air they didn’t fall. “Don’t leave me here,” I whispered, pain choking my voice. “Not like this.”
Ignacia pressed her lips together. “Nunca,” she said.
I breathed out. So there was at least this much love left between us. She wouldn’t leave me here still alive, bleeding into the dust as I watched her go.
My body tensed, bracing for however she would end me.
But then I felt my body move. I felt her lift me from the scorched ground and take me in her arms. Pain shot through me, making me scream loud enough to reach the asteroids. My limbs were so slack only that pain reminded me I had not died yet.
When the searing ache of being moved let up enough to open my eyes, I saw the astronave. Ignacia carried me, as gently as a flickering candle, into the jeweled ship. She ripped open the supplies meant for the winner to patch herself up, tearing gauze with her teeth, spreading the hearts of sábila on my burns, closing my wound with a flame-cleaned needle.
The next time I woke, I found her sleeping alongside me. The stars floated outside as the astronave followed the course Ignacia had set.
Blue glinted from under the hem of her dress.
“You kept them,” I said.
“Of course I did,” she said.
I kissed the bone of her ankle, not to thank her for her mercy but because I found a string of blue stones right where I had tied it so long ago.
By now, everyone on my home planet is wondering what has become of me or my lifeless body. The Masiela house wonders what has become of their victorious princess who flew off in a jeweled ship with the body of her enemy. They want their fierce princesa, the one who defeated her rival with a wall of flame so bright it was seen from stars away.
I thought it was the cruelest trick of our two families to make us the only two hearts on a lonely moon. But Ignacia was right. Us being the only two people in our world was what we had needed this whole time.
My mother and father raised me to be a proper princesa, stoic and beautiful, never making a scene. So I can imagine their horror that I have not only made this recording, that I have not only sent it out through our entire sector but that I have beamed it throughout our swirling branch of the galaxy. I want everyone who watched that day to know. I want all who hovered above that barren moon, waiting for the show of two girls destroying each other, to hear this. After all, they came for a show. How ungracious would it be of me to deny them the truth of how it all turned out?
Perhaps we are on some distant moon. Tal vez, on a shadowed planet. Or maybe we’re on the other side of the asteroid field that so many navigators fear. For now, we will not tell you where we are hiding. Not yet.
Send word in the stars if you all—ambos: her family, and mine—can accept that we will reign together.
When you can, your princesas, your precious heirs, will come home.