Human beings are fascinated with time. They measure it out according to celestial motion and ecclesiastical cycles, parse it into increments that accrete or divide to bracket the experience of living.
And they tell stories about its passage, the speed of which is said to vary according to the quality of the experience. The reality, of course, is that time, for all its relativity and proportional relationship to velocity and gravity and physics, marches along at exactly the same pace. Moments of heartbreak and joy, birthday parties and skinned knees, are all temporally equivalent, slotted into weighted categories of memory labeled unpleasant and pleasant. Sometimes, those categories overlap—a skinned knee might happen during a birthday party—injecting a brief tragedy into a much longer joyous experience.
To Rory Thorne, however, the brevity of the skinned knee would have been pure proof that interesting moments passed too quickly. To her, a skinned knee meant an adventure; but a birthday party meant an ordeal, involving a guest list as long as Messer Rupert’s leg (she printed it once, to check), most of whom were adults, all of whom were invited for her father or mother’s sake. The few children in attendance, like Rory herself, were stuffed into clothing more suited to formal events than enjoyment. There was cake, yes, but it came at the terrible cost of sitting still.
One did not acquire skinned knees by sitting still. One did not, in Rory’s experience, accomplish anything by sitting still except a sore bottom, especially at birthday parties. The great carved chairs to which she was consigned during formal meals had been made for adults, and her chair—carved with long-snouted bushy-tailed beasts with triangle ears and lolling tongues—had grooves in the seat that rubbed her in exactly the wrong places. Squirming didn’t help. Squirming, in fact, attracted attention. Deme Grytt, sometimes, would flash her a sympathetic unsmile and shake her head very slightly. Or Messer Rupert would gather his eyebrows over his nose and draw his lips into a little wrinkled raisin of unhappiness and whisper at her to sit still.
At least he said please.
She had asked, at her fourth birthday party, why they had to sit in these chairs.
Her father had leaned across the table—so he could see past the Duke of Somewhere and the See-Eee-Oh of Something and some ambassador who looked human and therefore boring—to look down at the end where his daughter’s head only just cleared the table’s rim. And he had said, in his too-slow, too-loud voice that he always used on her in front of company,
“Because they’re family heirlooms, my dear.” And he’d smiled. All teeth. No eyes. “Do you know what that means?”
Rory was a smart child. The fairies had seen to that. So although she did not know what an heirloom was, she did recognize when someone else wished she’d be quiet and disappear into the scenery. She knew her father’s smile meant shut up, Rory. She also knew the other adults to whom she was not related and with whom she did not live were amused by her question. The See-Eee-Oh was smirking, and the ambassador leaned sideways and whispered something to her nearest companion, who snickered.
One of the gifts Rory had not gotten from the fairies was a particular eagerness to please.
“No, Daddy. That’s not right.” She knew she was talking too loudly for the table, but she had to be louder than the ambassador. “You want people to be as miserable at these things as you are.”
The See-Eee-Oh laughed out loud. The ambassador covered her mouth and coughed. The King’s eyes rounded like eggs and his cheeks purpled like that vegetable Rory didn’t like except when it was fried.
She hadn’t gotten any cake, that birthday. And she’d learned there were more ways to get a sore bottom than sitting in uncomfortable chairs. The next year, she didn’t ask about chairs or customs. Smile, Deme Grytt said. Say nothing. Messer Rupert had sneaked her tablet to dinner, in the endless folds of his court robes, and slipped it to her so she could read under the table, if she propped her napkin up just so.
That had worked for her sixth birthday, too, only that year it had been her mother who’d smuggled the tablet to the table, when her father had accused Rupert and Grytt of conspiracy.
This year, her seventh birthday, the tablet had been forbidden outright, and Mama was very pregnant and very grumpy and no help at all. The third prong of the triumvirate of awful came when Deme Grytt stuffed Rory into a dress with laces and boning and a much higher potential for discomfort than the chairs presented.
Rory was not happy. “I command you to stop this, Grytt!”
Deme Grytt had been her mother’s body-maid, before she’d come to
protect
serve Rory. She knew all about stupid clothing. She also knew all about tempers.
“Hold still, Princess. And you will call me Deme until you’re big enough to beat me at spear-throwing.”
Rory thought it would be years before she could physically best Deme Grytt at anything except hiding in small spaces. She tried a new approach. Made her eyes big and sad and said, high-voiced, “But Deme, I hate this thing. It’s stupid and tight and uncomfortable. Daddy must hate me.”
“Yes, it is, and no, he doesn’t.” Deme Grytt made it a practice never to lie to Rory. She never lied to Rory’s mother, either, but she had come to the Consort’s service when they were both almost adults, so it was a matter of respect between them. The Princess, however, had an uncanny knack for picking out unspoken truths, and a very long memory for people who lied to her. So Grytt took a wrap on the laces, and a deeper breath.
“It’s meant to be all those things, but mostly it’s supposed to make you look pretty. Now, hold your breath. Okay. Wait. There. You can breathe, now.”
“No, I can’t.” Rory frowned past Deme Grytt at the girl in the mirror. She looked like a sausage, in that stupid dress. “Pretty for who?”
“For whom. Some princeling and his self-important father.” Mirror-Grytt made a face at mirror-Rory. “Probably some boy they’ll want you to marry, someday, for galactic peace and favorable trade routes.”
“My father will want that, you mean. Mama wouldn’t.”
Grytt sighed. There was honesty, and then there was actually encouraging mutiny. A good body-maid—one who had served the Consort for a dozen years, in this place—knew that the former was a rare gift, and the latter was no favor. “Be nice, Princess. He’s about your age, and I bet he’s not a bit happier to be here.”
Rory took exactly two seconds to decide, upon meeting said prince, that Grytt was right. Prince Ivar was
terrified
“—pleased to meet you, and—”
I want Mr. Buttons
“—happy to be here—”
and as uncomfortable in his stiff fancy clothes as she was. He was not a bit pretty, either. He was starched and round and his hair was slicked dark and oily as a tree-rat.
Rory was wiser than she had been, three years ago. She took a fistful of skirt on each side and folded her knees like the paper animals Messer Rupert had taught her to make during Holy Day gatherings.
“I am very pleased to meet you, Prince Ivar.” That was a lie, but it was the kind Messer Rupert called being tactful and the kind Grytt called good strategy. Rory thought they were both right. She also thought that if she’d told Ivar that he was really scared of her and that he wanted—what was a Mr. Buttons? must ask Messer Rupert—he might cry.
Rory herself didn’t cry. Crying was too much like giving up. And she didn’t much like other people doing it, either.
Ivar did not cry. Instead, he made fists of his own hands and stared hard at the floor. His body-man, a small round hairless fellow with deep reddish scars along one side of his face and an artificial eye that glowed like plasma, leaned down and whispered something in the prince’s ear.
Rory stared at the top of the body-man’s head. At the wrinkled flesh where the implant slipped under skin and into bone. The circuits traced under his skin, little metal veins that disappeared under the stiff starch of his collar. She was no stranger to mecha implants. Deme Grytt had some: bolts on her forearm, a plug at the base of her right ear. Lots of people did. So it was not squeamishness or disgust that made Rory recoil from the body-man, or that made her want to get as far away from him as she could manage.
It was fear. Not the sort that crept up on her in the dark, at night, while the palace muttered to itself and shadows against the wall took on the exact shape of the monster from the ’cast she wasn’t supposed to have watched so close to bedtime. This was the kind of fear that made koi scatter into the center of the pool and dive under the broad razor-leaves when a dayowl’s shadow crossed the water. Threat. A sudden strike, a more sudden end.
An older Rory might have hesitated, or examined the impulse. Fortunately for Rory, Ivar, and the universe, Rory was young and quicker-witted than she was wise. She grabbed Ivar’s hand, which felt a little bit like a dead fish. She wanted to drop it, but she didn’t.
“We have a koi pond,” she blurted. “Would you like to see it, Prince Ivar? We can even feed them. They’re very tame.”
Ivar hadn’t decided yet what he should do about his imprisoned hand. He turned an alarming shade of pink. He held the contaminated arm out stiffly, as if he were trying to get as far away from it as possible. At her question, his face had a tiny seizure.
She thought it was supposed to be a smile.
“Um. If it, ah, pleases my, ah, lady.”
No. He was terrified. Of koi. She knew the impatience showed on her face. Heard it in her own voice. Messer Rupert would have been
embarrassed to death, my Princess
mortified, but he wasn’t here.
“Koi are fish, Ivar. You know. Fish? They live in water. Swim around?” She wiggled the fingers of her free hand. Ivar stared at her, very much like the baby koi did. Round. Unblinking. Unaware of the dangers of dayowls.
She seized on a sudden idea. “They’re animals. Like tree-rats, only wet all the time.”
Ivar brightened. He looked at his body-man, who seemed to consider. Head cocked, eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance. A man thinking, except he looked more like one of the guards getting orders from the little earbuds. He was listening to something, or someone, only he had no earbuds.
Rory’s mind shot along half a dozen new vectors. What could she say to convince him, could she just drag this Ivar after her, should she leave him, what could she actually do—
But the body-man refocused on them both. Smiled, a more natural expression on his face than on Ivar’s, and said, “Go along, your Highness.” Then he turned to Rory and bent double at the waist: “It was very fine to have met you, Princess.”
That was truth. And more than truth, that was relief. He wanted them to go, both of them, very much and right now.
The body-man was afraid, too, except unlike Rory, he knew exactly why.
Rory tugged the prince’s dead fish hand.
“Come on. Let’s go now, Prince Ivar.”
Because he was a biddable boy, and accustomed to doing as he was told, Ivar came along. Quick steps at first, and then, when Rory made it clear she wasn’t slowing down, and that he could either keep up or be dragged, an all-out, clumsy run.
It was during that run that Ivar, who was not a natural athlete, tripped over his uncomfortable shoes, which were too stiff, and fell, and pulled Rory down with him. Ivar scuffed both palms and tore a hole in his trousers. Rory’s dress survived, but her knees did not. The tumble laid them both flat, and required some moments of recovery—much fast blinking and brave sniffing and no tears at all from Ivar, about whom Rory had harbored some doubt, and only a wince from Rory herself. But because of those moments, Princess Rory Thorne and Prince Ivar Valenko were essentially unharmed when Ivar’s body-man walked into the Thorne palace and detonated himself just past the front foyer.
The shockwave flattened several structures more sturdy than children, and tossed debris about with lethal consequences. The koi, safe in their pond, survived. Twenty human adults, including Ivar’s father, King Sergei Valenko of the Free Worlds of Tadesh, did not. Rory’s own father, King Philip Thorne, survived the blast for a time, although that was no kindness on the part of the multiverse.
The incident started two wars, one civil and one inter-planetary, and plunged several solar systems into piracy and lawlessness. It was also how Grytt came to have a few more mecha implants, and how the Consort added Regent to her title.
And it marked the end of Rory Thorne’s childhood, by whatever measure one employs.