Those who do not record history often labor under the misconception that it is easy: events happen, one after the other, fitting together like a well-crafted plot in which the characters do precisely what they must, when they must, to make the story turn out as it should. This is rarely the case. More often, significant moments overlap, crowding each other like geese around grain, each pushing the others aside for primacy. The death of the King of Thorne, the birth of the Prince, and the Consortium’s declaration of war against the Free Worlds of Tadesh comprise a trilogy of such magnitude that it is difficult to discern which of them had the greatest impact on the little princess. A conventional recounting of Rory’s life might prioritize the dramatic loss of her father, and the more subtle loss of her mother, as formative influences in what was to come.
But in truth, it was Grytt’s absence that affected Rory most keenly. Before the explosion, Samur had insisted on daily breakfasts with Rory, and when possible, lunch and dinner as well. Even during her pregnancy, when she was not interested in, or capable of, eating, Samur would sit (complexion waxy, jaw locked and set) at the table with Rory, listening more than she spoke (for fear of what might happen if her jaw were unlocked). But the shift in duties from Consort to Regent-Consort meant that breakfasts became hurried affairs during which Samur stuffed toast into her mouth at a pace that would have drawn criticism, had it been Rory doing the gobbling. Then she was out the door, gone before Rory had got halfway through her own toast—chewing before swallowing, little bites, as she’d been taught. At least before, she would have had Deme Grytt for company, should her mother be struck unexpectedly busy.
But now, after the explosion, Deme Grytt was not there, having been wounded and whisked into the medical facility beyond Rory’s reach. She had tried to visit. The medic at the front desk had been very firm in her insistence that Grytt could have no visitors, not even the Princess, but that she had been
badly hurt
a little banged up, your Highness, and that she
wouldn’t die
would be just fine
If fine meant in pain and all metal and wires, poor thing.
Messer Rupert, her next most constant companion and tutor, was thoroughly occupied with helping her mother run the Consortium, so Rory’s lessons were suspended, pending the acquisition of a substitute tutor.
And so it was that Rory found herself alone for the first time in her life. She thought she should feel lonely, and did, for exactly two hours, at which point she realized that there was no one to observe her loneliness and take pity on her.
That there was no one to observe her . . . doing anything. Well then.
Rory went down to the koi pond first. It was a destination she was permitted to visit alone, so long as she informed someone where she would be. She informed no one. And after skulking along the edge of the pond for several hours—having exhausted her supply of toast crusts, and thus having lost the koi’s interest, as well—she determined that no one actually knew where she was, and judging from the lack of household staff swarming about and calling her name—no one cared.
This realization, like the loneliness, was both bitter and sweet.
Next, she amused herself by creeping around the palace. Creeping, because although she could have walked almost anywhere unchallenged, she chose to dress in her least Rory-ish clothing and cling to the edges and shadows. It was a game, at first, to see who would notice her. No one did. So she went down to the formal banquet hall and spied on the contractors who had come to repair the damage. She took stock of the damage herself. The hateful chairs were so much kindling, now. The great table was all burned on one end. And there were dark stains in the polished wood floor that had, she told herself sternly, come from people bleeding. Like Father. Like Grytt. Like Ivar’s father.
She looked at those for a very long time.
She also looked and looked for any trace of the body-man—a wire, a sliver of steel—but found nothing.
By the fifth day, she had looked up a map to the medical wing on her tablet, and found the staff entrance where the laundry delivery came and went. She was making plans to sneak in to visit Grytt that way—at night, when there was no one to observe her—when there came a knock on her door.
It was well after supper (hers had been soup, a half a sandwich, and solitude), well after the time Grytt would have come in and turned off the lights and confiscated Rory’s tablet. When no one had come to collect her tray, she’d decided they had well and truly forgotten her, and told herself that was fortunate, since tonight was moonless and therefore a good time to sneak down to the medical wing.
But then the knock came. Her mind leapt to the immediate conclusion that someone knew what she was planning and had come to thwart her. Then her wits reasserted themselves. It was unlikely, she told herself, that a palace staff that had permitted her to run about unsupervised for days at a time could anticipate this particular transgression.
Her heart continued to crowd up her throat, unconvinced.
She swallowed it, best she could. Blanked the screen on her tablet and stuffed it under her pillow. Jerked the covers up, and then down again, so that her hair crackled and strands of it poked out of her braid. Then she sat up and said, “Who is it?” in her best sleepy little girl voice.
The door cracked open. Messer Rupert’s angular silhouette carved into the light spilling from the hall. Like a shadow-puppet. Flat. The effect would have made her laugh, except that Messer Rupert said,
“Rory.”
Not your Highness. Not Princess. Just Rory, very gently, as if she were a little girl again. Her heart climbed back into her throat and stayed there. Her voice squeezed past the edges.
“Is it Grytt?”
The shadow-puppet shook his head. “No. No, Grytt’s fine. Rory, it’s your father. He’s—”
Messer Rupert hesitated. He knew better than to lie to her; but he didn’t want to be rude, either, and say an indelicate, impolite truth.
Rory spared him that trouble.
“Dead,” she said flatly. “My father is dead.”
The official press release called his death a tragedy. The whispers around the palace called it mercy. Even Messer Rupert was relieved, although there was grief, too, when he tried (not) to tell Rory the details of her father’s passing.
She learned those much later, after she had mastered and misused her lessons in security-hexes for turings and hacked her way into the medical records. The King of the Thorne Consortium died of his wounds without ever quite recovering consciousness. The records say quite, because there were times his eyes opened. It is unclear whether or not he realized that he no longer had an arm or both legs, or that his torso ended halfway down in a sleek metal bulb that was mostly wired into the metal shell that did the work of his liver, lungs, and kidneys. What is recorded on his medical charts is that King Philip Thorne, first of his name, always ended these windows of consciousness screaming.
In that future time, an older Rory hunched in front of the terminal and read, unblinking, her tears turned to silver rivers in the screen’s blue glow.
But when it happened—when the servants haunted the palace with red eyes and swollen cheeks and Messer Rupert went about stiffly, his jaw squared against grief—then, Rory couldn’t find a single tear. She knew she should cry. She was sorry, certainly, that her father was dead. Sorrier still that so many people—the contractors and the medics and the folk unattached to the household—seemed personally wounded by it in ways she did not understand, a tangle of duty and pride in something much bigger than the man her father had been, something in which they, too, participated.
To them, Rory felt a vague mixture of guilt and obligation. At least their grief was honest. There were others who went around in public with faces mottled and streaky with grief—men who had been to dinner with the King, whom he had called friend—who were not a bit sorry. Not quite pleased, exactly; but not grief-stricken, either.
And then there was her own mother, whose weeping—always private, on the other side of doors—held equal parts sorrow and a dark, fierce joy at a freedom she had never thought to feel again.
Even Rory, who had little patience for prevarication, and even less skill at executing it herself, knew that her mother’s mixed feelings must remain private. It did not take an adult to understand that. Still, she wished very much for Grytt’s advice. She wondered if she dared tell anyone—her mother, Messer Rupert, the koi in the pond—that she missed her father less than she missed Grytt, or if that, like her mother’s dark joy, must remain secret.
Lacking any other advisors, she asked the Rory in the mirror. And that girl—oh, a pretty thing now, true to the fairies’ gifts, beautiful dark eyes, even red-rimmed, warm bronze skin, hair like a swath of moonless, cloudy night—answered.
“You keep it quiet, Rory. That’s what you do.”
Rory thought that was something Grytt might have said. She nodded approval at her mirror self, who nodded back.
Then Rory pulled her hair back into a tail, and pressed her lips together, and put her silence on like armor.
She wore that armor for the next four days, as the palace turned itself inside out, preparing for a royal funeral. The contractors would not be finished with the formal entryway in time, and so preparations were made to convert one of the side entrances. More work-people swarmed the hallways. Rory wore her armor through interminable fittings, where maids and seamstresses considerably less contained than Rory herself—Deme Ethel sniffled and leaked the entire two hours—measured and cut and stitched and remeasured, while Rory stood very still and had staring contests with her reflection.
The day of the funeral dawned exactly as grim and dark as the weather-hexes could make it, which is to say, so dark the birds didn’t even know it was daylight. Nothing chirped. The tree-rats, who, unlike the birds, knew very well what time it was, hung themselves in the branches and watched as mourners from the city gathered at the fence the entire night. They watched as media crews passed through the guards’ checkpoint and crept up the roads to the palace to set up their cameras. They watched, beady-eyed, as the King’s coffin and its attendants marched out of the palace through the newly official side entrance. They watched as it marched down the road, toward the gates, past the lawns and forests, until it stopped in front of the gates. Then they listened to the wail rising out of the assembled citizens like the sun, higher and brighter until the whole world seemed painted with sound. And they watched the procession return, by the same route, and the crowd outside disperse. Then, and only then, did the tree-rats come down to scavenge, knowing that any crowd of that size will have members among it clever enough to bring their own food, and still others enterprising and unsentimental enough to set up carts to sell to those less well-prepared.
It was a good day for tree-rats, but not for princesses.
Rory was spared the procession—Messer Rupert oversaw that—but she was waiting when it returned to the palace. There, in the same great hall in which she had been Named, its walls hung with tapestries and screens to cover the unfinished repairs, the whole place smelling of fresh paint and sour incense, Rory stood and waited for her father’s coffin. And when it arrived, she stood beside it, through the long hours of speeches by politically important people and monotone rituals by the three official faiths of the Thorne Consortium.
Let us take a moment, then, to describe this coffin, on which so much attention was fixed. It was made of a brushed pewter alloy. Homeworld tradition called for stone, but Messer Rupert had lost his heart for arguing on tradition’s behalf. Still, the coffin bore traditional shape: a raised sculpture of the King lying atop it, hands crossed over his chest, his face relaxed as if he were asleep.
It was very lifelike, which made it very horrible and very beautiful. It also made the King seem much sterner and cleverer than he had been, with a geometric jaw and firm lips. It was meant to be comforting, and it was, therefore, exactly the sort of social illusion the thirteenth fairy had equipped Rory to notice. It was like a small rock in one’s shoe. Annoying at first, and then painful, and then intolerable.
Rory made a point not to look at her coffin-father’s face. She stared just past it, to the worn front edge of the dais. Exactly the spot, although she did not know it, from which the thirteenth fairy had scolded the King. She herself stood in exactly the same spot her father had stood, during that scolding.
It should have been the Regent-Consort’s place, but the Regent-Consort was not in attendance, a fact about which her political enemies made much, and which ended up undermining her reign before it had even begun because people will always believe the worst about someone if it’s more interesting than the truth, particularly if that person is the least bit different or foreign. It becomes the task of historians to correct those misperceptions with a cold application of fact.
And so: The Regent-Consort missed her husband’s funeral because she was busy with an event as inevitable as war and death, though significantly more rewarding. She birthed her second child, a son, eleven days following the explosion, at the precise moment that her firstborn, much-wished-for daughter stood on the dais and listened to the Bishop of Tres intoning dogma about wheels and rebirth.
Rory was not entirely alone on the dais. Messer Rupert stood on her right side, like a tall shadow cast by a rising—or setting—sun. Rory knew he wanted to put his hand on her shoulder, as he did sometimes when he wanted to reassure her. She knew he wanted to stand between her and the crowd and let her hide in his formal robes, as she had when she was very young. She knew he wouldn’t dare either gesture, which made her both glad and sorry; but she also knew he was right in his suspicion that she did not need his reassurance.
Because she had Grytt back. That was the best part of the whole horrid day, the joy of which filled Rory’s chest and made her heart ache as it tried to decide whether to be sad or happy and ended up just hurting. Deme Grytt had
bullied her way
gotten out of the medical wing to be here. She stood, raw and pink where she had kept her skin, dull brushed chrome where she hadn’t. One of her eyes was a tesla, now, blue and bright in a metal socket. It made a faint whirring noise as it moved. And it moved constantly. Rory watched the shivers and winces ripple across the faces of the attendees and back again as Grytt’s stare passed over them.
So Rory stood between Rupert and Grytt, wearing black crepe and silk in a formal style meant for someone much older. She looked a little bit like a baby crow caught in the rain. But her eyes were clear, and her lips were tightly pressed, and her chin didn’t wobble once.
Everyone agreed, afterward, that she had been very, very brave.
When, after eighteen hours in labor, still sweat-soaked and bloody, the Regent-Consort formally entered hostilities against the Free Worlds of Tadesh, and committed her kingdom-by-marriage to war, no one said anything at all about bravery.
Such are the peculiarities of history.
The Thorne Consortium had been officially at war for two days before Rory Thorne met her brother. There was no conspiracy on the part of the Regent-Consort to keep her children apart. It was simply an issue of time, availability, and the diligence (the less charitable might say mulishness) of the Prince’s nurse.
A monarch in the early stages of a war has much to do, and the Regent-Consort had to fit Jacen’s existence into an endless series of meetings and planning sessions. Wars, as it turned out, required a vast shifting of resources, both mechanical and organic; they also required a great deal of funding. The Thorne Consortium was wealthy and well-endowed, so that was not (yet) a concern; but knowing which divisions and battalions and cruisers to put where was a matter of strategy and political argument and long consultation with people who had often conflicting advice.
The Regent-Consort was grateful, in those days, for two things: that she had grown up playing chess and that she had Deme Isabelle to look after the as-yet-unofficially Named Prince Jacen. A baby can be deferred with a bottle. However much their behavior may resemble an infant’s, politicians cannot.
Deme Isabelle had also been King Thorne’s nurse—an old woman, soft-bodied and sharp-tongued. She had never been Rory’s, to her chagrin. Then, the Regent-Consort had insisted on doing her own mothering duties and damn Thorne custom. But this time—with a war ongoing, and a kingdom to oversee—she yielded to tradition and necessity and consigned the Prince to his nurse for large swathes of the day.
Deme Isabelle had never forgiven the Regent-Consort for denying her oversight of the Princess and so, having acquired authority of this Thorne child, she was determined to keep it. Part of that authority meant controlling his environment. An infant, of course, does not have many visitors. Jacen had his mother, whom Deme Isabelle had to admit, whatever her grudges; but there were not, at this stage in the Prince’s life, a great many others interested in spending time with him. His sister, however, was interested, and here was where the conflict arose.
There were many, many things, in Deme Isabelle’s reckoning, that had been done wrong in the raising of Rory Thorne. Wild little thing, running about. It wasn’t proper. It wasn’t tradition. Of course, the real source of Deme Isabelle’s resentment was not Rory’s athletic habits. It was Grytt, to whom the young Princess had been entrusted once she was weaned and toddling, who infected the Princess with her Kreshti ways, allowing a girl-child to run and encouraging her to stick pins in the household staff who displeased her—by which she meant a single, unfortunate incident in which Rory had stuck a pin in the Vizier’s leg while he was engaged in attempting to teach her arithmantic hexes. The Vizier himself was usually much on the side of tradition for its own sake, and his relationship with Grytt was an evolving effort; that Grytt’s first reaction to the news of Rory’s trespass had been laughter, rather than horror, had not helped their relationship. But however inappropriate Grytt’s comportment, the Vizier knew that she had not encouraged the Princess to violence. It was just an unfortunately literal child-mind interpretation of the phrase stuffed shirt, which Rory should not have overheard and had and decided to test, as one does, with a straight pin.
Deme Isabelle, having drawn her own judgment once, refused to revise it, whatever the actual victim of the incident reported, and upon that belief based her decision to keep Rory Thorne well out of her brother’s nursery.
So when Rory knocked on the nursery door, fully expecting admittance, she was surprised when Deme Isabelle opened the door only half the width of her own body and peered down at Rory and said, “No, dear, I’m sorry,” before Rory even got out a word. Deme Isabelle’s whole face shone with a delighted malice. “This isn’t a good time. The baby’s asleep.”
Rory did not need the fairy’s gift to know that Jacen most certainly was not asleep. Babies do not shriek because of wet nappies while napping. Deme Isabelle wasn’t even trying to lie. She was just saying no, and daring Rory to do something about it. No. Not daring.
Rory squinted a little. There was something the nurse wanted to say. Something fluttering behind her squared-off smirk. She pulled out her best smile and pasted it across her lips.
“I am the Princess,” Rory said, in a tone so sweet butterflies would feed upon it, while teeth dissolved into cavities. “And I’m asking to see my brother.”
Deme Isabelle did not need the thirteenth fairy’s gift to hear order instead of ask. But perhaps she had been struck by some glamour, for instead of seeing seven-year-old Rory in front of her, she saw instead the Regent-Consort seven years earlier, holding an infant, and she heard the Regent-Consort say, “That will be all, thank you, but I don’t need your help.”
So it was as much to the mother’s memory, as to the daughter, that Deme Isabelle said, “And I’m telling you I’m sorry, but no. Princess.”
you’ll not be ordering me about, or anyone, now that we have a proper heir, just you wait
Her smile was wide, sharp, entirely sincere, and not a bit kind.
The fairies had given Rory kindness, beauty, and wits. They had neglected to include sweet, biddable disposition. Thus, we might forgive Rory if the temper she had inherited from her mother, which did not much love the word no when it was not attached to an explanation, flared up.
Rory looked at Deme Isabelle for a moment longer than was proper for child to look at an adult. It was a staring-down-the-help look, with a good bit of square-jawed stubborn thrown into the mix. In ten years, that stare would provoke results. But Rory’s stare was unripe, and Deme Isabelle unimpressed.
The nursery door was shut, harder than was entirely polite for servant to royalty (however young), separating sister and brother.
So.
Rory had become quite skilled at getting into places she should not be, in the past ten days since the attack, and though the nursery door was locked, we must add that it was not secured beyond Rory’s ability to hex. (That lesson in lock-picking was Messer Rupert’s fault, though unwitting: he had been trying to show a reluctant student the practical applications of theoretical arithmancy, in an effort to head off another pin incident.)
Rory stared at the door. The polished brass knob and keyhole were, like so many other things about the palace, remnants of homeworld tradition left purely for appearance. The actual locking mechanism was a panel on the door which was hexed to recognize, and admit, particular auras. Rory’s mother. Deme Isabelle. Baby Jacen.
It was indeed fortunate, Rory thought, that Messer Rupert had recently taught her how family members shared elements of their auras. It was even more fortunate that he had, upon seeing her interest (and rejoicing in it), showed her how her mother’s aura and hers, for instance, shared seven of ten frequencies and an unusual double-spiral pattern. It was all numbers, he assured her. The same dread numerals that made up arithmancy also described auras (and, he added, everything else in the multiverse).
She retreated down the corridor, and settled in a tiny alcove with a narrow slit window and a habit of utter neglect. But for this particular afternoon, as the bar of light from its window slanted toward evening and the sky outside deepened to an eggplanty-blue, it had the Princess in residence. She settled into a corner where the cobwebs were not too thick (there was a draft which made it uncomfortable for spiders, if not for young girls) and worked out her hexes with the arithmancy Messer Rupert had taught her, which involved holding her breath until she could see into that first, shallow layer of aether behind the one that everyone could breathe, where auras gleamed as bright as any rainbow. (We should note that holding one’s breath is not ideal arithmantic practice as it tends to lead to the arithmancer turning blue and passing out, which the Vizier made clear, and which we repeat here, lest our readers attempt to try this at home.)
Although an aura did have a propensity to particular hues and particular patterns, individual auras could, and did, shift their colors according to the mood and biochemical disposition of said individual. Rory was easily able to match her mother’s spiral pattern—only a little tweak to the angle between tangent and radial—but she was less sanguine about the matching of color.
She would eventually learn to identify colors by the numerical designations that governed hue, intensity, and value, which afforded a fine level of control; but the Vizier had started simply, and confined his explanation to a list of simple correspondences. Reds meant strong emotion, love or hate or anger. Oranges, agitation and distress. Yellow was fear or embarrassment; and the cooler shades, cooler emotions (except green, which was generally regarded as unsavory in all its variations, indicating mendacity or hidden agendas). The Regent-Consort’s aura had, of late, been populated by more green than was typical, a tinge that diluted the usual blues and blackened the edges of violets. Rory thought her own copy was rather too ultramarine, but she thought it would work long enough to fool the hexes on the nursery door.
And she waited. The supper hour was coming. Eventually, Deme Isabelle would have to come out. Or fall asleep. Or—something. Rory hadn’t worked out her plans that far, and thinking about them now—after the time already spent on a hex that would get her past the door, and which she badly wanted to try out—only soured her mood even further. Rory was on the verge of attempting to create a new set of hexes, the kind that would give an old woman green spots or make her speak only the k’bal dialect that sounds like dyspeptic chickens, when fate—or luck—intervened.
Although a half dozen servants had walked by the alcove in the intervening hours, not one had looked sideways and noticed Rory. But a Regent-Consort, however preoccupied with meetings, however focused on her tablet and on the subvocalized conversation she was having via earpiece and mastoid mobile, will always notice her daughter sitting in a neglected corner of the palace. And she will read the brow-knit expression (correctly) as a forewarning of mischief, rather than a headache brought on by an excess of dust.
The Regent-Consort stopped. She matched her daughter’s frown with one of her own and terminated her conversation with a short pair of syllables. And then she said, out loud, “Rory. For the love of—what are you doing here? Does Messer Rupert know where you are? Does Grytt?”
“No.” Rory scrambled to her feet, discovering along the way that hours spent in drafty stone alcoves stiffen even young muscles. She caught her balance on the wall and scraped her knuckle on the brick. The surprise of that, coupled with her general discomfort and threadbare patience, brought tears prickling to the back of her eyes. Her throat sealed around the rest of her answer. Only a tiny squeak escaped. She was horrified. She blinked hard, bit her lip, and tried to make herself stern-faced and grim. She failed miserably.
Her mother’s frown deepened. “Rory,” she said, and her voice was too gentle for the storm gathering in her eyes. “What happened?”
In a very short time, Rory would learn that the safest answer to that question and its sibling, what are you doing, is an ingenuous nothing, particularly if there is no evidence to the contrary. At the time, however, she knew only that her knuckle was bleeding, her bottom hurt, and her mother could fix everything.
The words spilled out like rice from a cut sack. “I came to see Jacen, but Deme Isabelle said he was sleeping, only he wasn’t, and she wouldn’t let me in.”
Rory paused for a breath, and considered adding what Deme Isabelle hadn’t said, about giving orders and proper heirs, but the Regent-Consort’s lips were drawing together like a miser’s purse strings. If there had been a Kreshti fern present, it would have turned a deep cerise laced with adamant aubergine.
“Come along,” the Regent-Consort said, and took Rory’s hand.
Within very short order, Deme Isabelle found the Prince transferred to his mother’s arms and herself sent to supper rather abruptly, on the very edge of courtesy.
“If you hurry, you’ll be able to eat with the rest of the staff.” The Regent-Consort smiled broadly, showing nearly all of her teeth. It would have been a lovely smile, had there been any warmth at all in it. Instead, the effect was rather predatory.
Deme Isabelle dropped an old woman’s curtsy to the Regent-Consort. “As you wish, your Grace. Thank you, your Grace.”
She crossed stares with Rory. One heartbeat. Two. Then she departed with as much dignity as she could manage. Her stare lingered, even after the door closed, dragging on Rory’s skin like old nails.
Rory had never seen hatred before, nor had she ever had an enemy. Her belly felt cold, deep inside, and the space between her shoulder blades itched. It was not an urgent sensation, like her fear of the body-man had been. A more patient cousin, perhaps, like ice on the courtyard in winter, appearing underfoot when you had both hands in your pockets and no way of catching yourself when you fell. Rory rubbed her cheek, remembering that lesson. In another heartbeat, she would have made a note to herself to tell Grytt about it. But then her mother interrupted,
“Here, Rory,” and handed her a squirming blanketed bundle. “Meet your little brother.”
And in that moment, Rory forgot about Deme Isabelle entirely.
Jacen had the smallest fingers in all the world, and a cap of dark soft hair that wasn’t sure if it should curl or simply stick straight out. His beautiful blue eyes, just like her father’s, stared up into hers. In that moment, she imagined a future in which she showed him the koi, and taught him to climb trees, and shared the best places to hide from Messer Rupert. Oh, she knew that would not happen for a long time—he was so tiny! so red!—but he would grow. Babies did. He would become a person, and he would be her brother, and in that moment, Rory thought that was the best possible thing in the world.
Then Jacen screwed up his face and howled and would not stop, no matter how Rory tried to soothe him. He only quieted when she gave up and handed him back to her mother. Then he stuck both fingers in his mouth and stared at her, red-faced and unhappy. Each time she tried to hold him, he howled.
This would become the pattern that defined their relationship.