It is assumed, by those who claim maturity (which should not be conflated with wisdom), that a rational adult wants stability, predictability, routines. It is further claimed, by those same mature folk, that one of the markers of youth is adaptability, a flexibility of mind and spirit which enables a person to acclimatize to changes in routine, circumstance, and habit. Those who can endure, and eventually overcome, the instability, are admired for their resourcefulness.
Those individuals who seek this instability are deemed fools, children, or adventurers; and it is generally assumed that an individual will either grow wiser, grow up, or expire.
Stationers, like most people, live and die by schedules. Urse was no more or less typical of that than, say, Thorsdottir’s farming family. But where Thorsdottir’s youth had been marked by celestial motion and season, and had been subject to, and victim of, random acts of meteorology, Ursan time was marked in arbitrary shifts, in which there was no visible variation. Oh, perhaps a planet might swing past outside a viewport, or the constellations might shift through their accustomed patterns; but life inside the station did not vary. There was no weather, no sunrise, no sunset, no clouds. The rainshowers in the arboretum did not count, since they occurred on a precise schedule (like everything else) designed for the optimal health and well-being of the botanical residents. When an inspired horticultural arithmancer attempted to hex the plants through seasonal cycles, producing changes in foliage color and profusion, so many complaints and queries were filed that the Minister of Education was forced to conduct a public symposium on the impact of planetary motion on plant life, including invited botanists from each the Free Worlds that supported vegetative inhabitants, native or immigrant. The symposium ran for three days and at rather substantial expense, the results of which were an uptick in the number of students studying botany, an increased consumer demand for houseplants, and general apathy from the general public, who were relieved that the garish new leaves would soon fall off and grow back a proper, predictable green.
There are rumors that the arithmancer was removed from her post and exiled to Lanscot, doomed to spend the remainder of her career studying various subspecies of a particularly tenacious shrub that did not mind the dismal conditions. There are other rumors that place her in the Tadeshi embassy on the mirri homeworld, where the flora was small, round, and extremely toxic; and still a third set of rumors have her fleeing to Kreshti, where she assumed a new identity and achieved a comfortable living growing ferns. The precise details of her fate are less important than the actual fact that, shortly after her experiment with seasonal hexing, she no longer resided on Urse.
This fact mattered to several people. Three of those four were her friends and colleagues. The last one was a child—and, as such, still curious, bored, and seeking instability—who spent as much time as possible (excessive amounts, by his father’s reckoning) in the arboretum. The arithmancer had discovered him one afternoon in the stand of ornamental cherry trees, collecting the fallen petals and weeping; he was convinced that the trees, in losing their flowers, must be dying. He was a very small boy, and shy, and rather weedy himself. His affinity for plants seemed rather natural to the arithmancer; and having found an audience interested in the habits of ornamental flowering trees, she waxed loquacious on the subject. She thought, when the boy finally departed, that he would not return.
She was wrong. He returned the following day, just after midmeal on the first shift, and she introduced him to orchids. On the fifth visit, they had moved on to Kreshti ferns. Soon the boy knew every plant species in the arboretum, and had amassed the sort of obsessive expertise in a subject only possible for children and doctoral candidates.
The boy’s father, newly risen to the post of Minister of Energy, did not share his son’s newfound fascination with flora, nor did he encourage the boy’s declared intention to study botany and become a horticulturalist, at the least, or an arithmancer-horticulturalist, which was his highest aspiration. His father insisted, rather, that he play sports and achieve some measure of physical formidability. The boy resisted strenuously, first overtly, and then covertly. The father, preoccupied with his career and his elder son, who was altogether less disappointing, declined to expend the energy required for a sustained conflict.
For a time, it seemed that the boy might achieve his goal after all.
But then the incident with the seasons happened, and the arithmancer disappeared, and a new horticulturalist—one with no skill in arithmancy—took over the care of the ornamental cherries and the orchids. The new horticulturalist owed his appointment to recommendations of, and favors from, the Minister of Energy; so it was also unsurprising that he was uninterested in further encouraging the boy’s interest in plants. He was quite firm, quite clear, and quite unkind when he asked the boy to please, let him get on with his work, he had no time for a child.
It was then that Jaed Moss—no longer a small boy, but still weedy—ceased regular visits to the arboretum and instead developed an apparent interest in more appropriate pastimes. Vernor Moss had not yet imagined Regency in his future, but hoped that his sons might cement their influence with the young Prince, who was more fishy than weedy, and not especially inclined to physical pursuits, either, though the King was working on that. Minister Moss did not bother to ask his younger offspring the reason for the change, assuming that it was his influence behind it and that his son was, in fact, growing up, wiser and less curious all at once.
Which was how Jaed Moss came to frequent the station’s elite recreational facilities with the same zeal with which he’d once frequented the arboretum, and how it was that Zhang and Thorsdottir encountered him there with sufficient regularity that his schedule figured into Rory’s plans for freeing the Vizier.
Unfortunately, Rory was unaware of Jaed’s earlier interest in either arithmancy or horticulture; had she known, she would have approached him as a natural ally instead of as a challenge to be surmounted and saved them both some distress. But such information is not stored in turing archives, and Jaed did not maintain a close circle of friends from whom one could glean such information. Rory instead spent days plotting with Zhang and Thorsdottir how best to make contact and then manipulate events to her advantage.
The opening moves of the plan involved an encounter with the Regent—the predictably ineffective diplomatic protest of the Vizier’s arrest, followed by a predictably ineffective personal appeal. A second (ineffective) personal appeal followed, this time in public, following a “chance” encounter between the Regent and the Princess on the very populated thoroughfare in front of the embassies. Observers—and there were many—made note of the Princess’s obvious distress and of the Regent’s apparent impassivity and, his critics noted (for the Regent did have critics on Urse), even impatience when he refused her request to “at least let me see him!”
Various media outlets reported the encounter, accompanied by opinions and editorials and several heated comment threads. There was even ’caster footage, and a few still-shot 2Ds, in which the Princess’s features were scrutinized for signs of stress and grief, and at least one insisted that her “eyes were red” and she had “obviously been crying.” The commenter, in that case, seemed sympathetic.
Grytt, who was spending her days in exile down in the detention wing, prevented from seeing the Vizier by two sets of locked doors and a somewhat nervous set of security personnel, watched the reports on the detention block ’caster and smiled, which made the security even more nervous.
Rory, when she saw the ’casts, shared a tight little smile with Thorsdottir and Zhang.
“Now,” she said, “the game gets interesting.”
On the eighth day of the Vizier’s incarceration, Rory made her first visit to the recreational facilities. Although her visit went unreported by the official media, private residents did make note, and thus Rory’s appearance was semi-public knowledge as rapidly as those residents could connect with the turing.
The Regent was informed very shortly thereafter that the Princess Thorne was in the main recreational facility, among the citizens, practicing tum’mo by herself on a rug in the corner of the main studio while her guards—the same two young women—batted each other about in one of the practice rings. It was a break in routine which the Regent assumed was meant to irritate him and to garner favorable publicity in hopes of swaying public opinion in her favor. She was succeeding in both cases.
Although the Regent entertained the possibility that the Princess’s new public presence could tempt an assassin, he did not divert any extra security of his own to see to her safety. He was far more concerned with the Kreshti body-maid on near permanent installation in his detention block. He was concerned, too, that he uncover the depths of the Vizier’s transgression, which meant a slow and thorough sifting of the turing for all arithmantic meddling by his chief arithmancer, and reading the subsequent daily updates. Monitoring those situations was a better use of his resources, he was certain, than a teenage girl who, for all her histrionics, seemed unlikely to attempt violence and whose growing popularity with the Ursan citizens limited the likelihood of violence attempted against her.
By the time the Regent realized his mistake, it was far too late.
Though she was no soldier—having never experienced anyone screaming profanity into her face, among other distinctions—Rory was well-versed in the handling of ’slingers, staves, and small bladed weapons, as well as the basic hand-to-hand skills taught to all Kreshti at puberty. On Thorne, Grytt had overseen her training—an unpleasantly rigorous regimen of calisthenics and a regular repetition of drills—as far as a Princess’s schedule would permit. But even that had ceased, upon arrival on Urse, when the Vizier deemed the practice inappropriate and suggested Rory confine herself to her practice of the one hundred eight tum’mo, which one could perform on a small rug in a relatively small area in one’s quarters.
You mean a Princess isn’t supposed to sweat.
Not in public, Rory.
Or fight.
Not—
—in public, yes, I understand.
Not merely in public. Fighting leaves marks, and you will be scrutinized whenever you are in public. People will wonder about bruises, and they will usually wonder exactly the wrong thing.
Rory’s martial competence, therefore, was only a fraction of her guards’. She had discussed with Thorsdottir and Zhang the advantages of resuming that training now, and damn decorum.
Thorsdottir was horrified. “We can’t just hit you.”
“Grytt doesn’t suffer from that concern.”
Zhang raised an eyebrow in an uncanny imitation of their subject, and said, somewhat ironically, “We are not Grytt.”
“And we can’t just let you win, either. Anyone who knows anything about fighting would see what we were doing, and that would not help you.”
“Or us. It cannot be seen that the Princess’s guards are—”
Rory raised her hand, then, and interrupted. If Thorsdottir or Zhang had possessed Rory’s particular gift, they would have heard I am so tired of proper I could spit acid or cry or cry acid.
Instead, they heard only, “I understand.”
Rory followed their advice, the first several visits, bringing her tum’mo rug and ensconcing herself in the corner where the mirrored walls afforded her a good view of the room, and afforded everyone a good view of her. She practiced her tum’mo, all one hundred eight postures, while Thorsdottir and Zhang collected bruises, sweat, and no second looks as they tossed each other around on the mats. Zhang, Rory noted, was quite good. Quicker than Thorsdottir. But Thorsdottir was strong and patient, and willing to take a few hits to land one.
Useful information, Rory thought. Meanwhile, anyone observing her—the Regent’s security, at least—could dismiss her as a competent tum’mo practitioner, with all the threat that did not imply.
Also useful. She reminded herself that it was better to be thought less than more, though her pride prickled and her tum’mo suffered. She had never been self-conscious before. Now she was painfully aware of everyone watching-but-not-watching, out of the corners of their eyes, in the edges of the mirrors.
Practice, she told herself. Breathe.
And she did, as the days crawled past. The Plan, which had taken on capital letters in her mind, passed into its second stage and stalled there.
There was no sign of Jaed. He had either broken his pattern, or changed it entirely or—
Practice. Breathe.
Rory practiced, and breathed, and sweated (in public), and began work on Plan B. She had formulated a method by which she might use her harp to strike notes approximating the frequency of the alloy comprising the station’s interior walls, and hex that approximation into an exact match, and use that to weaken the detention block walls around the Vizier, so that when she crawled through the ducts and appeared in the cellblock, she would be able to get him out of the cell itself, when Jaed resumed his schedule.
Rory, Zhang, and Thorsdottir walked into the main studio and there he was, grimacing at his own reflection while he swung a single, metal ball in an arcane pattern around his torso.
His eyes, a shade greyer than his father’s methane-ice blue, flickered toward Rory and lingered. The line between his brows, which might mark intense concentration or severe myopia, deepened. He sat up a little straighter on the bench. Rory, attuned through her recent, constant, vigorous tum’mo to the body’s myriad ways to carry tension, noted a sudden tightness in his shoulders, a stiffness in his spine.
She noticed, too, that his gaze settled on her exactly as long as it took to ascertain that yes, she was looking back, before he looked away.
She rearranged her grip on the tum’mo rug, and remained exactly where she was. She considered the plans thus far. She was supposed to proceed to her corner of the room and commence with her practice. She was supposed to cease and desist shortly after Jaed himself was finished, and from there, contrive to encounter him in one of the corridors near the equipment storage areas, while Thorsdottir and Zhang ensured that the corridor remained empty for the duration of the conversation.
Rory was, as previously noted, rather short on patience.
“Go on,” Rory murmured to her guards. “It’s all right. I’ve got this.”
Thorsdottir and Zhang looked at each other. Thorsdottir considered taking the Princess’s arm, or bodily moving in front of her, or something. Instead, she said, “Please, Princess.”
Rory looked at her, and for a heartbeat Thorsdottir thought she had succeeded in preventing whatever it was Rory was about to do. Then Rory winked.
“Trust me,” she said, and lifted her chin, took a tighter grip on her rug, and walked straight across the room. There was no doubting her destination.
Several other patrons in the facility also noticed the Princess’s trajectory. Heads turned, with varying degrees of subtlety.
Thorsdottir groaned, very softly. Zhang said several words in a combination of such creativity that Grytt, had she been present, would have been impressed.
“What do we do?” whispered Thorsdottir.
Zhang shook her head. “Nothing. Watch.”
“This will be all over the station in an hour.”
“Optimistic.”
“Grytt’s going to kill us.”
“Certainly.”
Jaed, too, noted the incoming Princess. He froze, mid-lift, for several breaths, and blinked. Then he set the kettlebell down on the bench, stood, and turned.
“Princess,” he said, while she was still several strides away. A greeting. A query. The first touch of blades in a fencing match. He bowed at the waist, which, while entirely appropriate for formal events, looked absurd in its current context.
And not just the bow. All of it. Everything. Rory was suddenly struck by their reflection: the Princess of Thorne and the Regent’s son, wearing exercise kit, which in neither case left any doubt of their wearers’ physiques and exposed large swaths of skin, and yet they were both armored in etiquette and plastic smiles as if they were stuffed into lace and velvet.
Rory stopped at a radius that indicated she wished for quiet voices and private conversation. “Jaed.”
And with that, she broke five rules of protocol. Or seven, if one was adhering to Sangeline’s The Proper Princess, which Rory had been given as a child (by a distant, well-meaning relative) and which she had promptly buried in the garden.
Every head in the room, except those of Thorsdottir and Zhang, ducked back to its business, although the noise and clang of the usual pursuits seemed strangely muted as everyone strained to listen.
Jaed looked down at her. His eyes were a little wide, his mouth pursed and puzzled. Off-balance, Rory thought. A little nervous. His face was flushed, from recent exertions or embarrassment or a combination thereof.
“Princess,” Jaed said again, firmly. “What a
unwelcome interruption
pleasant surprise.”
Rory had been about to apologize for interrupting him. She reconsidered, with fairy truth ringing in her ears. She wondered, suddenly, if Jaed had someone else who might also hear about this meeting. She had assumed—and what had Messer Rupert told her about assuming? And Grytt?—that he would want her attention. Instead, her presence might be as unwelcome to him as his was to her. Perhaps that was why he’d been so awkward that first encounter, speaking rudely about his Prince and examining her physical attributes without subtlety: he’d been trying to discourage her or assure himself that she would choose Merrick, when she chose.
When. If. There was a danger in thinking that the Regent’s plans would come to fruition, that she would remain here, lending legitimacy to an upstart sovereign while his father ruled the Free Worlds of Tadesh. That she would have to marry one of his sons. This son.
She was taking too long to respond, she knew that: standing there, mouth partway open. Jaed misread the delay. She watched as suspicion hardened his features. His eyes narrowed, and a smirk snapped into place on his lips like a shield.
“The customary response is no, the pleasure is mine, your Highness.”
choke on that and lie to me
Fairy gifts collided with etiquette, knocking Rory’s words sidelong against the back of her teeth. He was angry already—at her, perhaps. At the situation. The gift was not clear. Years of courtesy and courtiers tried to reassert themselves, offering apologies and excuses. She had offended, well and true, and whatever she thought of him, she needed to repair that offense. She needed his help. Soothe the temper, stroke the ego.
lie to me
She shook her head, and took a breath, and shot a quick glance at Thorsdottir and Zhang, in the mirror. Then she drilled a glare at Jaed with such force that his smirk shattered.
“Where have you been?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I’ve been looking for you. Here, every damned day.”
He stared at her. Reflex tried to rebuild his smirk and failed, settling instead for a half-melted scowl.
“I bloody well know that.”
“So you were avoiding me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His lips thinned. He cast a glance around the room, at heads bent to their particular exercise, at necks stiff with the strain of holding heads tilted just so, to catch every word. He leaned down, close enough that Rory could see the sweat of his interrupted exertions, collected in beads along his hairline. Close enough that she could smell him, skin and sweat, and not the chemical propriety of perfumes and soap.
“You want something,” he said, in a tone that would have been intimate if it had not been so brittle. “And you want me to get it for you. So you can save your breath. I won’t help you.”
“Won’t, or can’t?”
He considered that. “Both.”
Truth. Rory folded her arms, and noted that this time, Jaed’s eyes didn’t leave hers. It was a point in his favor.
“Why not?”
His lips pressed flat. The expression made him look older, pushing him into the grim twenties, out of the borderland of nineteen.
“Because my father doesn’t take advice from me. He definitely doesn’t do favors for me. Whatever my father’s got on your Vizier, it’s worth more to him than I am.”
Truth again, or at least he believed that it was. The bitterness was palpable.
Rory’s eye caught movement in the mirror: Zhang, cutting a graceful path across the room, managing to look as if she weren’t at a near jog. Thorsdottir hovered near the door, wearing a grimace even Grytt could envy.
Jaed noticed Rory’s distraction and turned to look. And so they were both watching, as Zhang arrived and inserted herself into their conference.
“Perhaps this conversation would be better continued less publicly, your Highness. Or.” She paused and bowed slightly. “More quietly. Your Highness.”
Rory nodded at her. “Thank you, Zhang. Will you walk with me, Jaed?”
“No. Your Highness.”
She blinked. “What?”
“Not accustomed to hearing no, are you?”
“And you’re not accustomed to being able to say it.”
He shrugged. Temper flickered through his eyes, like heat lightning behind clouds. “I can’t help you. I said that.”
“Your Highness. My lord,” said Zhang, a little desperately.
Across the room, Thorsdottir closed her eyes, squared her shoulders and her jaw, and (having reopened her eyes) started across the room with a great deal less grace and a great deal more force than her partner. Jaed’s eyebrows rose. “Is she going to drag me away, Princess, or you?”
“Possibly both of us.”
His smirk battled gamely for possession of his lips against the flat line of real anger. “What did Merrick say, that made you desperate enough to try me?”
“I haven’t talked to Merrick. Why? Would your father listen to him?”
Jaed’s face went through contortions that seemed to indicate a mouthful of sour marbles or a live mouse. “He might. Why didn’t you talk to Merrick first?”
“Because I knew where you’d be, and I knew you’d be alone.”
Jaed laughed soundlessly. “Well then. I’m
never anyone’s
your first choice. What a surprise.”
Rory’s stomach turned on itself. For the first time, she thought the thirteenth fairy might have cursed her, after all. She decided that the shreds of propriety were not worth preserving, nor was pride, and laid her hand on Jaed’s bare wrist. His skin was warm, damp, and a little sticky.
“Please, Jaed. My lord. At least talk to me.”
He stared at her hand. At Thorsdottir, incoming. Then he offered a small smile, wary and crooked, neither weapon nor armor. “Fine, then.
already in trouble, make it count
We’ll walk.”
“Thank you.” Rory removed her hand, carefully and deliberately. Her palm tingled. She wanted to scrub it on her pants or make a fist of it. Instead, with the same care and deliberation, she permitted it to hang back at her side.
She turned just as Thorsdottir arrived. “We’re going for a walk,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s going to interrupt your exercise.”
“Your Highness,” said Thorsdottir, and bowed. The look she cast her partner was grim; the look she dropped on Jaed was of such severity and delivered from such proximity—they were of a height—that he let out his breath in a little surprised gust.
And so they left together: the Princess of Thorne, her guards, and the Regent’s second son. Notes were made of the marching order (the larger guard first, the smaller last), how the Princess and Jaed walked abreast, how they looked at each other (not at all, while they walked), how the guards looked (unhappy), where they walked (out of the main room, and then out of the facility altogether), the Princess still carrying her rug and wearing her tum’mo kit, the Regent’s son bare-armed in a shirt whose hem was curled and frayed with age and abuse and damp with drying sweat.
At least twenty illicit 2Ds were taken on personal communication devices, all of which appeared on the turing net within a quarter hour. Versions of the conversation—of which only snatches had been overheard, however public and obvious the expressions—found their way into personal correspondence and board postings, and at least one anonymous gossip column attached to the major media outlet on Urse.
About these developments Rory knew nothing and would not for some time. She was, however, conscious that their perambulation was accreting attention in the same way an avalanche gathers snow.
“Shall we go to the arboretum?” she asked. “It’s somewhat secluded.”
“No,” Jaed said, rather too sharply. And added, under his breath. “I hate that place.”
The fairy gift said otherwise. Rory tucked that contradiction away for later examination, carefully, mindful of the sharp edges.
“Then where?”
He looked down at her and shook his head. “Let’s just walk. It’s harder to listen in on a moving target.”
Since her arrival on Urse, Rory had learned a great deal about the limits of ’bots, which, being stationary, had a fixed radius in which their surveillance was effective. For her, the knowledge was a matter of necessity, if not for survival, at least for privacy. She hadn’t expected Jaed to know it, or care about it . . . or need to care about it. Another bundle of knowledge, then, stashed for later.
They passed, at that moment, in front of the observation porthole which overlooked the passenger terminal. The porthole itself was huge, easily a dozen meters long, a strip of transparent alloy, the production of which was a trade secret in the Free Worlds, as it was a major export, as well as a testament to the skill of its alchemists. Bielo hung blue and baleful in the upper corner, casting cerulean shadows across the ships tethered to the station, reaching cold fingers into the station itself. One of its moons—Beo, perhaps?—swung over the equator, a single dark dot marring the blue.
Rory stared back at Bielo, and tried not to think about the vastness on the other side of the porthole and the great swaths of unbreathable, unbroken void between her and Thorne, with exactly as much success as one trying not to think of pink elephants when one is instructed not to do so. She drifted to a halt, her brain determining that, with no one to oversee the placement of her feet, it was better to simply stop.
Jaed made note of the Princess’s expression. He would have smirked, a quarter hour ago, with the void-born’s contempt for the provinciality of the planet-born, and offered insincere (though sincerely delivered) platitudes: how awesome the view, how frightening, and oh no, you never got used to seeing that.
Now he held his silence, and his smirk, and watched the Princess stare, unblinking, at Bielo’s icy curves. After a moment, he said, “You had no choice, coming here.”
“No.”
The silence returned, but this time it was a softer thing, and warmer. Rory looked past the planet, into the ghosts of herself and Jaed Moss in the portal. They appeared only as shapes, dim lines drawn on the black, with no eyes or discernible features. They might have been any two people, admiring (grimly facing) the view.
But of course they were not just anyone.
She shook her head, and blinked the planet away, and resumed walking. She expected Jaed would follow her, though she did not look back and check. She considered what she would do if he did not, if she would turn around and return to him.
Then she felt him arrive at her shoulder: the movement of displaced air, the smell of his sweat, the sense of another person closer to her than most people could, or would, approach. A princess did not just go walking, did not take casual strolls with her friends, because a princess did not have friends. She had body-maids, guards, teachers, viziers.
She had never thought of herself as alone, until now. It was a revelation.
It was easy to imagine that Jaed Moss might share that same sense of isolation. The fairy gift hinted at it. That isolation might become a place of empathy, a shared condition of their rank. A patch of ground in which friendship might grow, if one were exceptionally optimistic or under the impression that the neat reality of stories is also true.
But she did not like him, and although she had not tested her theory against the fairy gift, she thought he did not much like her, either.
Well. Like was best confined to food, not politics.
“My lord,” she said. “I did mean it. I do need your help.”
“Jaed,” he said. “Call me Jaed. Princess—”
“Rory. Please.”
“Rory.” He inclined his head. “Assuming I can help you—and understand there’re limits to what I’m able to do—it won’t come free. I think we need to be clear about that.”
Rory closed her eyes, trusting the invariance of the decking under her feet and Thorsdottir’s broad-shouldered presence on point to keep her walking straight. She forced breath past the cold weight in her chest, like a solid stone where her heart should have been.
“Of course.”
She would have been five kinds of fool, on whom all of Grytt’s pragmatism and Messer Rupert’s careful tutelage had been wasted, if she had come to this encounter without imagining—in her own mind, not sharing with Thorsdottir or Zhang—what Jaed Moss’s help might require, and what she would be willing to pay.
At least Jaed was honest, saying that. A princess could do worse than honest.
That she did not want to bargain with Jaed Moss (or any Tadeshi) was as true as the First Principles of Arithmancy. She wanted (wished!) to free Messer Rupert, and from there, to break her betrothal, to go home.
But even a princess, or perhaps especially a princess, knows the futility of some wishes.