Thorne’s sovereign territory on Urse was a double suite, large by station standards, measuring approximately one thousand square meters, comprising two discrete units. The smaller of the two suites housed the four-person guard detail in military luxury, which is to say, very little comfort at all. The larger one was more finely appointed, with three sleeping rooms (“I’ve had bigger bunks than this,” said Grytt) and a central living area (“Wonderful, if we don’t mind bumping our knees,” said Grytt), with a small, private kitchen, so that they needn’t troop to the common mess to dine (“Oh, bother,” Messer Rupert had said. “We aren’t letting Grytt cook, are we?”).
It was a perimeter unit, as well, nested against the outer hull of Urse, at the juncture of two corridors, which meant it had two portholes in the living area. It was, Rory was assured by the Tadeshi staff, a wealth of portholes.
“Which is evidently what one calls a pair, here on Urse,” she muttered to Grytt. “What is one, I wonder? A paucity of portholes? I think we should change the name. Call these two a prosperity. What do you think?”
Grytt, who had proved none too sanguine about walking on a deck rather than a floor, or living with a horizon that curved the wrong direction, or a half dozen other things, which she would detail at length with very little invitation, eyed the two
invitations to disaster
objects in question and grunted.
“Hope the seals hold. Leak would pull us right out. Be a contest to see if we freeze before we choke.”
Rory did not point out that, should the seals fail, the sudden evacuation of aether would probably draw them against the opening, thus rendering the pulling of Grytt’s apprehensions into a more violent, gruesome sucking, which would then supplant asphyxiation and freezing as the likely cause of death. She also thought any catastrophic decompression was highly unlikely. The porthole seals were so thoroughly hexed against failure that their perimeters glowed to the naked, arithmantically educated eye. Rory had spent some time examining them, with an arithmancer’s admiration, before Grytt shooed her away, insisting that she would “mess something up” and “kill us all.”
Grytt had completed her mandatory service as a Kreshti marine, to be sure; but, as Grytt was fond of recounting, marines did not have portholes in their quarters, and battleships did not invite hull breach by cutting holes in good steel to improve the scenery. And ship life was, most importantly, temporary. A body could expect, after a tesser-hex or several, to drop dirtside and experience proper gravity.
By which, Rory supposed, one might surmise that Urse’s gravity was entirely improper, although that was far less true for the station than for any of the battleships that used a gravity-hex instead of basic physics. Urse was an old-style station, one of the first: essentially a giant wheel, spinning around its axis as it rolled an orbit between the planets Bielo and Cherno, called the Brothers, and their unassuming yellow star, Svaro.
After the first seventy times Grytt had imagined out loud some gruesome death, Rory began to think it might have been kinder to leave her on Thorne after all. But when she had suggested it to Messer Rupert, he nearly choked on his tea.
“Whatever makes you think that?” he had asked, dabbing distractedly at the damp patches on his robe, while at the same time peering at her from beneath knotted brows. “Have you
taken leave of your senses
quarreled?”
“Not at all. She’s just so unhappy here, Messer Rupert.”
“Bah. Don’t let the frequency or the volume deceive you, Princess. She
isn’t any more unhappy than the rest of us
was a marine before she came into your mother’s service. Complaints are a marine’s version of a counter-hex against universal ill-will and bad luck.”
Then perhaps, Rory thought, Grytt should complain even more strenuously.
Outside the prosperity of portholes, the gas giant Cherno, the darker of the Brothers, crept into visibility. It filled the porthole, a massive sphere of hydrocarbons rendered darkish orange and brown by the chemicals in its poisonous atmosphere. Its dozen visible moons glittered like gems that had been tossed into the air and had forgotten to fall again. It should have been imposing, perhaps even intimidating, a childhood monster creeping out of the dark. Certainly Messer Rupert preferred the curtains be drawn when Cherno appeared. But to Rory, the single deep, dried-blood stripe, which sat just a little above the equator, made the planet look like a fat man with his belt too high. A favorite old uncle, instead of a troll.
Or perhaps a fat troll, Rory thought. Ready to eat princesses.
“Do you mind if I turn off the lights?” she asked, knowing full well Grytt’s mecha eye could see in all wavelengths. And Grytt, knowing full well this was Rory’s favorite time of day, grunted what passed for yes, when it was just the pair of them with no Messer Rupert to insist on complete syllables.
Rory whispered the tesla counter-hex. The room’s artificial, blue-tinted lights winked out, dropping the room into the orange-y glow of sunlight bouncing off Cherno’s cloud layers. It was a little like being at the bottom of a pond, looking up. Local opinion considered Cherno ugly. It was, Rory supposed, meant to be a subtle insult, placing her quarters on this side of Urse, for all that she rated a prosperity of portholes.
She thought it a kindness. The brighter Brother, Bielo, was a pale, methane blue, exactly the same poisonous shade as Vernor Moss’s eyes. Put that outside, and she would have twitched the curtains closed and kept them that way, preferring teslas and cold shadows to even the suggestion of that man watching her.
That Moss did eavesdrop, however, was inarguable, despite the marked lack of actual eaves. Messer Rupert had found no fewer than six tiny spybots in their quarters within fifteen minutes of their arrival. Grytt had promptly destroyed them, in total silence, making sharp shut up gestures whenever Rory tried to ask what was happening. Only afterward did Messer Rupert say that he’d expected the ’bots, and that Regent Moss would have expected them to find and destroy them; so there might be others, better concealed.
Be careful, Messer Rupert meant. But in Messer Rupert’s absence—he was currently in the embassy, performing endless acts of administration and diplomacy—Rory raised her voice and enumerated Moss’s moral failings with a volume and inventiveness that would have sent her tutor into apoplexy, had he been present.
Grytt, forever cleaning her weapons (permitted only under elaborate treaty amendments), only smirked.
Rory hoped (but held no hope) that Moss might be scandalized enough to send her home. But she suspected she swore entirely for her own comfort. It was like lighting a match against all of the cold void and holding it close for the warmth.
He had yet to meet her formally. That was either a social breach, or a deliberate snub, and it did not take fairy gifts to discern which. He had not met her shuttle at the dock to convey his welcome. He instead sent a handful of guards—one more than her own complement—and his Prime Minister, who had a prior acquaintance with Messer Rupert, and whose first utterance after Welcome, your Highness was a well-rehearsed apology. The Regent was engaged in important business and unable to break away. Please accept his most sincere apologies and the assurance of a meeting at the earliest possible hour.
Rory had smiled, inclined her head exactly as far as a Princess should to a social inferior, and told the Minister to think nothing of it, she would be pleased to meet the Regent at his leisure, they were weary from their journey, they were just glad to be here, on Urse.
It was fortunate that the Minister did not possess a version of the thirteenth fairy’s gift.
Nor had Prince Ivar sent word of any kind, beyond a generically formal note on the turing terminal in their quarters. A set of five lines, centered on the screen, that said:
Welcome, Princess Rory Thorne, to the Free Worlds of Tadesh.
I hope you find these quarters to your liking,
and I hope to renew our acquaintance soon.
Please feel free to summon staff if you need anything.
I remain your servant, Prince Ivar Valenko
Rory had spent a great deal of the journey to Urse imagining how Ivar might have evolved: whether he’d be taller and dark, like his father. If he’d have developed callouses on his hands, or on his spirit.
There is imagining, and there is hope, and Rory thought it best to remain neutral on that subject. She had not, however, imagined her first communication with him to be a one-way note on the turing.
She had showed it to Grytt, who grunted, and to Messer Rupert, who raised an eyebrow and said, “Hm,” and, “The terminal’s probably been hexed with spyware. Don’t link up your tablets until I’ve cleared it.”
Then they had got to unpacking and arranging, and discovering that Cherno marched across their portholes once a day. They also agreed that they did not want to invite station staff into their quarters for meal preparations if it meant sweeping the place for ’bots every time, and while they had not been forbidden the common dining areas, Grytt did not feel it prudent to explore the station overmuch.
And so, while waiting for Moss’s official summons, they learned that Grytt could not cook, and Messer Rupert could, and Rory had a knack for making curries.
“A fairy gift, no doubt,” she had said. “A princess should be able to cook. That’s pleasing to kings and princes, isn’t it?”
“A princess should be more able to eat neatly, without spilling soup on her shirt,” said Messer Rupert. “And I assure you, the fairies made no mention of making curry in their blessings—here. Add the cardamom and the turmeric.”
The apartment still smelled orange and brown, good match to Cherno’s sullen glow. Rory glanced around the room again. Grytt at the dining table. Messer Rupert absent. The turing terminal, left untouched since their arrival, Messer Rupert never quite finding the time to unhex it.
Whereas, Rory was learning, a princess who was also a hostage, being studiously ignored, and thus unofficially confined to her quarters, had a great deal of time.
She sidled toward the terminal. Slid a guilty glance at Grytt, whose chromed half-skull flashed dully as she bent over her weapon. Urse law forbade ballistic firearms—not for any fear of perforating the outer hull, which was far tougher than bullets, but because small high-velocity bits of metal or plastic had a tendency to ricochet in the narrow corridors. As a result, Grytt’s permitted-by-treaty arsenal included more archaic blade weapons, the use of which Rory knew well, and the P-370 ’slinger, which she did not, and which Grytt currently had in twelve pieces on the table. She seemed occupied. Busy, even.
Rory took another step. A third.
“Get on it, Princess,” Grytt said. She tilted the ’slinger’s chassis carefully from side to side, peering into the barrels from all angles. “Better to say sorry than may I.”
“Do you always know what I’m thinking?”
Grytt snorted. “No.”
“Just most times.”
“You’re wasting your time. He’ll come back soon enough. Best you’re done when he gets here.”
“Right,” Rory muttered, and slid into the chair behind the turing terminal’s console.
Cracking a turing’s security hex was a great deal more complicated than hexing an aura-scanner. It was all arithmancy, true; but a turing’s logic and motivations shaped the sorts of hexes it could accommodate, and most public access turings, and tablets, were basic, simple drones performing a set of limited, prescribed tasks. A simple turing was easy to hex because its motivations were simple: do its job and repeat, without variation. The complications came at the higher levels, with an almost-intelligent collective composed of all the terminals on a network pooling their experiences, which conferred enough originality for the collective to detect tampering with one of its drones. The station’s networked intelligence might be overtaxed by the demands on its systems. It might be bored or diligent, suspicious or curious. Rory didn’t hold out much hope for that last quality, but she was hoping for the first or the second.
She found her way into the terminal’s settings readily enough, with a few taps on the keypad. Then she unlocked its root access, and began a careful exploration of its systems. Very basic, very simple, which was both encouraging and daunting together. She held her breath and slid her awareness into the first and nearest layer of aether, where she hexed a rudimentary sense of curiosity into the turing’s code. Not much, not enough that it would start pinging queries at every other terminal on the network, but sufficient that it would seek information of its own volition, at least on particular topics.
Like the current whereabouts and disposition of the Crown Prince, for instance.
Rory squirmed a little higher on her chair, drew her legs up, and reached around her knees to reach the keyboard again. This was the tricky bit, the part where she discovered just how sophisticated the turing collective was—
She let her breath go all at once.
“You all right?” asked Grytt.
“Mm,” said Rory, which Grytt understood (correctly) to mean yes, everything is fine.
The collective was, in fact, very limited in its resources, which rendered it somewhat stupid. Her little hexed turing terminal was its smartest component, so far. It was also, she discovered, even more limited in its permissions. She poked along its base-code hexes, rendered in neat lines on the screen, discovering the borders of allowability. Poked a little harder in the aether, to see what sorts of locks and barriers the Ursan IT arithmancers had made against intruders.
She was not impressed. She hexed a layer of ingenuity into her turing. A double layer of caution. A smidge of paranoia. And, after a moment’s deliberation, a rather sophisticated set of hexes for breaking, entering, and retrieving the information she wanted. This sounds like a complicated procedure, but recall: Rory had been dabbling in security-hexes since childhood, and she had plenty of practice. The Vizier would have been both appalled and proud, had he seen her handiwork.
Then she sat back and set her turing loose and waited, while Cherno loomed outside the prosperity.
The turing terminal beeped.
“Good?” asked Grytt.
“Depends.” Rory unfolded her legs and leaned forward onto her elbows. Her reflection filled the monitor, ghosted insubstantial, partially eclipsed by text. “Ivar’s on military maneuvers. On . . .” She scrolled. Frowned. “On Beo.”
Rory had done a great deal of reading about Urse’s system, having thought it prudent to know as much about her new prison as possible. Beo was the third of Bielo’s seventeen moons, and one of the few which had the courtesy to be solid and warm enough to support a Tadeshi marine training base, while still being poisonous and cold enough to make survival a skill, rather than a guarantee.
“Nasty,” said Grytt, who had read the same materials.
“Perhaps Messer Rupert’s right about Ivar,” Rory said. “Perhaps he’s changed.”
“Or maybe he hasn’t.”
“Grytt, be fair. He’s with the marines.”
“Compulsory service is a rule in the Free Worlds.”
“Nothing’s compulsory for royalty.”
“The future King can’t get an exemption, even if he’s incompetent.”
“But that’s an elite base.” Rory tapped the screen, as if the impact of her finger on the glass made the facts more impressive. “Doesn’t that mean Ivar’s elite, too?”
“Might be Moss wants him dead in a training accident.”
“Grytt!”
“Moss has two boys of his own. Think on that.”
Rory did. She had just sent her little turing to investigate the service records of Vernor Moss’s sons when the door alert rang. It was not precisely a ringing sound. More of a raucous howling, as if a dozen tree-rats were trapped in the wires. Rory had not suffered the misfortune of hearing it before, and so she might be forgiven for leaping nearly a meter straight up and out of her chair. Grytt was no less startled. She tipped the table on its edge and had taken cover behind it, the ’slinger’s muzzle just peeking over the top.
The door shrieked again. This time, a voice followed, deep, male, and as expressive as new deckplate.
“Princess Rory? The Regent sends his regards. Please open the door.”
Grytt stepped carefully around the table, putting herself in front of Rory. She kept both eyes and her ’slinger pointed at the door. “Coincidence? Or did you trip an alert?”
“Coincidence,” Rory said, a little breathlessly. She leaned over and swiped the turing’s screen blank. “Better put that down before I open the door. Don’t want an incident.”
“Huh,” said Grytt, but she tucked the ’slinger down against her hip.
It was not Regent Moss himself at the door, of course. Instead, Rory found herself chest-level with a uniformed pair of armed men, on the larger side of human genetic variation, alike enough to be clones. The one on the right bowed at the waist, and offered on his gloved palm a little silver scroll stuffed with a roll of what appeared to be real paper, tied with a real ribbon. An extravagance, a statement about the wealth of Tadesh. A casual gesture of power, meant to intimidate—or, more charitably, a sign of respect, an acknowledgement of her worth.
Rory was not feeling charitable. She inclined her head at the guard and plucked the scroll from his palm.
“Please wait here,” she said. It was not exactly protocol, leaving the man outside, but she did not think Grytt would appreciate a pair of armed Tadeshi inside their quarters. For that matter, she would not appreciate it. Moss would not hurt her, she was (almost) certain; but the large and prominently displayed sidearms on his security did not inspire in her any sense of abiding confidence. These men were Moss’s, she was certain. Not inherited from Sergei Valenko, and thus not even a little bit Ivar’s.
The security bowed again, this time the pair of them, and settled into the professional waiting-on-the-important-people-to-finish-their-business stance.
Rory stepped back and closed the door. Then she locked it, for good measure, and leaned her back against the cool, smooth steel.
“I’ve got a message,” she said, and waved the scroll at Grytt.
“Eh.” Grytt tipped her blue eye at the scroll. Waited. Then: “Just paper. It’s safe to open.”
Rory stared at the scroll as if it had sprouted ten hairy legs and a pair of mandibles. “I didn’t even think of that possibility.”
“That’s why I’m here,” said Grytt. She had righted the table, and was in the process of replacing the things that had been innocently sitting upon it and were now scattered across the deck. “I messaged our people. Stary and Franko are standing by. Thorsdottir and Zhang are in reserve.”
“Good.” Rory shook the scroll out of its case. Her name, complete with title, was scripted and gilded and conspicuous in its solitude on the front flap. Grytt had not been included in the invitation, which was not a surprise. Neither had Messer Rupert, which was.
“He’s inviting me to his office. Moss.”
“About time.”
“Only me. Not Messer Rupert. Shouldn’t he also invite the Vizier to a formal, diplomatic meeting?”
“He should.” Grytt grimaced. “Tells you something, doesn’t it?”
Rory blinked. Frowned at the pretty, formal letters. They looked handwritten. They probably were.
“We should call Messer Rupert.”
Grytt’s grimace deepened and stretched, drawing her eyebrow and forehead into a vortex of disapproval. “And tell him what, Moss is trying to get you alone?”
“I doubt it’s like that,” Rory said reflexively. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was meant by that, or what that might entail, but she was certain Moss didn’t want it. “Maybe he’s trying to be courteous. By seeing me alone, he acknowledges me as an independent representative of Thorne, rather than as a minor under Messer Rupert’s escort.”
“Bah,” said Grytt. “He wants you alone and scared.”
“Scared? Why would I—”
“You’d be a fool to feel anything else.” Grytt gave the grimace one last twist before resetting her features. “You’re not a fool.”
Rory shrugged, one-shouldered. She had already decided that Moss’s real message concerned impressing upon his royal hostage who, exactly, was in charge of the station, and where she ranked in his estimation. Waiting three days. Sending a pair of his own security to fetch her.
“Grytt,” she said. “I’m a minor, by Thorne law, and should not go unaccompanied among strangers.”
It was Grytt’s turn to blink. Then her mouth twisted in a different direction, peeling her lips off her teeth. “Just let me tidy up, Princess.”
The Tadeshi escort blinked, in unison, when Grytt followed Rory out, wearing her body-maid livery. They blinked a second time as they marked her half-chromed skull winking from beneath the velvet tam. They didn’t blink at all when Stary and Franko emerged from their quarters and took up their positions in the corridor, but their eyes narrowed a little.
“Stay here,” Rory told her security. “Grytt will accompany me.”
Rory drew herself up and lifted her chin, prepared to turn all objections, but none were forthcoming. The Tadeshi bowed, again in unison, and turned and led the way through the labyrinthine coils of Urse. Rory kept careful track of turns and steps. She had studied schematics of the station, and so she knew that they were not taking her by public route, which was the way she had come—past the stares of residents and shopkeepers and dockworkers—but rather by smaller, less-populated corridors that seemed to run through upper-class residential areas. The residents here moved aside politely and said nothing out loud, but their stares bored into her back like so many steel points.
There were a great many places a person might vanish, back here. Little alleys. Blank doors. Bulkheads with a paucity of portholes.
Rory looked straight ahead, and didn’t hurry, and wished she had brought her own security. She also wished she had dared to come armed. And she was also very, very glad of Grytt, who certainly had.
Urse had no palace, being a station, but the municipal complex, which spiked the entire height of the station off the primary deck, did a credible imitation. The complex was fronted in a frosted, extremely expensive, one-way hexed diamond compound that glittered in the station lights like an icicle, and its corridors—curved and tangled and not at all like the clean, predictable lines of the rest of Urse—seemed to Rory more like those of a museum than a government facility. Officials flitted the corridors, clustering in alcoves to whisper their business, prancing across the wider rooms to see and be seen. The monarch’s office looked over the docks on one side, and across three glass-sided levels of offices, meeting rooms, and lounges on the other. There were curtains drawn across the windows at the moment, of a purple more related to black than to violet, and of a fabric (probably velvet) that sucked the light like a singularity.
Moss had not built it—that extravagance was King Sergei’s grandsire’s doing—but he had made himself well at home in it. He sat in his padded
throne
executive administrator’s chair in his office for a full three beats after Rory entered the room before rising, which was just south of good protocol. At least two of those beats he spent studying Grytt, as if wishing an aetherlock would open up under her feet and remove her from his presence.
Rory listened to the whisper of the ventilation, a background noise on Urse that seemed, when it was the only sound present, like the quiet breathing of something large and invisible in the same room. She looked around the office: a first quick glance to mark the placement of furniture and other heavy objects (“Always look for cover”), and for any openings not as immediately apparent as the door. Monarchs, even those who lived in void, made a practice of having escape routes in case of emergency. Rory guessed there might be a trapdoor of some sort under the desk. The only other solid bulkhead, to the left of the desk, looked like the offspring of a library and a museum, studded with shelves of books and artwork representing all the planets, stations, and assorted colonies of the Free Worlds.
Then, the Regent having still said nothing, Rory took a second, longer look around the room, which ended, perhaps inevitably, on the Regent himself.
If one could wish the nemesis of all that was good and right in the universe to be possessed of unfortunate features in an unpleasing arrangement, or protruding teeth, or pervasive body odor, well, Rory had already been disappointed. She had seen enough holos and 2Ds of Moss to know that his straight nose and high cheekbones and sharp chin were counted handsome by most standards. In person, he smelled like pleasant, clean, manly nothing.
He was, Rory thought, damn (sorry, Messer Rupert) near perfect. He also had more cosmetic-hexes than she had ever seen on one person, and she wondered if he had performed them all himself (unlikely, but daunting if he had) or (more likely) had a small contingent of body-men to do it for him.
She considered, very briefly, testing her arithmancy against his cosmetics, and seeing if sweaty palms, big pores, or halitosis presented themselves. She discarded the notion in the next breath—not because of any fairy gifts of wisdom or prudence, but because Moss chose that moment to rise.
“Princess Rory.” His voice was pleasant, its Tadeshi accent musical. His mouth arranged itself into a charming smile, confined to the borders of his lips and the dimple on his left cheek. He tilted his chin down in the sort of greeting monarchs give each other, which does not require breaking eye contact or displaying the top of one’s head. “Please accept my welcome, on behalf of Prince Ivar and the Free Worlds of Tadesh, to Urse.”
Rory brought out the smile she had honed to perfection on courtiers since her twelfth birthday. She inclined her head, just a hair more shallowly than Moss. A proper Thorne greeting would have included a curtsy, but Rory was disinclined to bend her knee to Regent Moss, and besides, she was wearing the trousers favored by Kreshti women and Ursan residents of all sexes, which rendered curtseys impractical. Instead, she extended her hand, which she intended both as an offer and a challenge, a handshake being, among humans at least, a greeting between equals.
Moss reached for her hand, and for a heartbeat, Rory thought she might have to revise all her opinions of him. Before that little shiver of disappointment could settle into resignation, the Regent caught her fingertips as if they were live butterflies, tipped her hand palm-side down, and brought her knuckles to his lips. His skin was cool, smooth, like plastic. His lips were tepid. His breath, skating across the back of her hand, was hot and cool by turns, as he held onto it for several moments longer than the duration of the kiss.
“You are,” he said, smiling past her knuckles, “so very much like your mother.”
Rory, with a sense of relief, settled back into her prejudicial dislike like armor.
Grytt stirred, in Rory’s periphery. Moss’s gaze flicked that direction and settled just long enough that his smile shrank and hardened into what Rory thought must be the usual shape of his mouth. Thoughtful. A little cruel.
Then Moss blinked and returned his smile and attention to her. But not her hand, not yet, even as he straightened and drew her arm further over the expanse of the desk, forcing her onto her toes to keep balance. Rory was conscious of the broad expanse of imported wood, with its careful arrangement of tablets and scrolls and documents, a pair of turings, and trio of styluses, arranged by size beside the larger of the terminals. The Regent’s territory, and herself suspended over it, trusting her balance and dignity to the pressure of his fingers on hers.
He squeezed her hand gently. “I am so very pleased to
have you
make your acquaintance, your Highness, and to have you
keep you
here on my station.”
Rory marked Moss’s use of the personal possessive pronoun. Then she plucked her fingers out of his hand and thumped back on her heels. She had to retreat half a step to catch up to her balance, which both irritated (it looked like retreat) and relieved (oh good, another meter between us) her. Thus removed to a safer distance, Rory pressed her soles firmly into the textured deckplate and dropped her chin in a gesture Messer Rupert knew well. Had he been present, he would have stared warning at her with such force as to leave tiny holes in the side of her skull.
In another age, the thirteen fairies might have wished wisdom on the young princess, as it is often a necessity to the happiness of princesses and queens, who must manage their male counterparts. And so the twelfth fairy had intended to grant Rory that gift. But with the thirteenth fairy’s modification on the traditional death-wish, the twelfth fairy had elected to ameliorate the curse with a counter-wish, and to let wisdom happen in its own time, a companion to age and experience. Perhaps she was herself unwise in her choice of counter-wishes, or perhaps she expected Rory’s elders to be forever at hand to guide the Princess through her youth, or perhaps she thought that, in the end, wisdom is wasted on youth. Who can say, with fairies?
Thus it was that Rory—superb harpist, fine singer, as kind as wishes could make her—was, by Moss’s contrivance, without her best and wisest advisor when her own wisdom failed her.
“Thank you,” she said, with the barest sincerity, and three measures too much briskness for proper etiquette. “But where is Prince Ivar? I had expected him here to greet me.”
There should have been at least one your Grace in that query. Her tone should certainly have been, if not demure, then at least respectful. Instead she sounded in that moment like the least fortunate amalgam of her father’s arrogance and her mother’s temper—in other words, entirely like a monarch.
Grytt cleared her throat. The tiniest cough, as if she’d mislaid a bit of air and had to snatch it up again. It was a Messer Rupert sort of noise, and it generally meant think carefully or you just said something stupid. Coming from Grytt, it probably meant shut up and check for cover.
Regent Moss never looked at Grytt. Not a flicker. Instead his Bielo-colored eyes rested on Rory until she fancied that she could see her breath smoke in the chill.
“Prince Ivar regrets he cannot be here,” the Regent said finally, softly, all the music of his accent sunk flat. “He is presently engaged in other activities.”
Truth and truth. Rory nodded. “Go on.”
Grytt sighed.
Regent Moss traded his greeting smile for a leaner, sharper model. “On Beo, as it happens. In your recent reading, surely you came across that name.”
Rory’s mouth, a few steps ahead of her wits, dried up. She swallowed. The fairies had not stinted her intellect or her cleverness. She knew a trap when she saw one. And she realized she had nearly stepped into it with both feet.
“Beo,” she repeated, trying the syllables like a new flavor of sweet. And then she did something she had never done before in her life: pretended to be stupider than she was. “Isn’t that one of the moons?”
To her ears, her lie sounded bright and false as sunlight before a storm. The Regent did not appear to notice.
“Yes, Princess, it is a moon,” he said, as if explaining that Svaro was round and yellow, and also, void is very cold. “Beo belongs to Bielo. It is a cold place. Toxic atmosphere. There are only certain times a pilot can reach the moon’s surface at all, with the gravitational vagaries of its neighbor moons and Bielo itself. And sometimes storms on the planet unsettle the radiation in the area, which makes flying even more hazardous. Your arrival coincided, unfortunately, with one of those storms. Prince Ivar
has no idea you’re here
does not want to risk a pilot, but he did not believe it was appropriate to keep you waiting any longer, lest you think us poor hosts. So he asked me to offer formal welcome.”
Rory swallowed past the thumping in her throat. “Oh. I—oh. It’s just, I was so looking forward to seeing him.”
Moss blinked and frowned, ever so slightly. Then he bowed exactly as far as was proper, one ruling Regent to a Princess who wasn’t the heir to her kingdom, and smiled. “I am certain you will see him soon, Highness. I will do everything in my power to make it so.”