Since the invention of something to write with and something to write on, writers—and in this category, we include particularly historians, but also novelists, poets, and the odd journalist—have enumerated the qualities most admirable, and most reviled, in the human psyche. While there is some variance, there are some virtues which appear to transcend culture (and, in some cases, species).
Among these so-called universal virtues, courage may be the most popular, for the sheer volume of words spent defining, refining, and offering examples of it. The ancient homeworld sage Aristotle posited that true bravery requires a man to be aware of the consequences of his actions: to whit, he must face threat of pain and death, knowing those are possible outcomes, and proceed anyway. Courage is neither instinct nor honorable obligation. It is a deliberate choice. While the Kreshti poet-philosopher Kahandir was not the first to note the limitations of Aristotle’s definition, she did, in her collection On Ashes, offer the most compelling argument that the form courage takes is a matter of circumstance, as much as of character: there are situations in which a woman simply cannot act, but instead must wait; and that waiting itself—patience—is itself a form of courage, as important as the moment when action becomes possible.
It is ironic, then, that courage is a virtue most associated with adventurers—knights, princes, kings—and very rarely with princesses and queens, who are expected to be patient, but never brave. It has been noted that none of the fairies gave Rory patience, with no attempt at explanation (fairies defying that by their very nature); but it is perhaps telling (of what, we remain uncertain) that the twelfth fairy’s gift to the tiny princess was courage.
The Vizier’s embassy office did not have a porthole. It had, in fact, very little decoration at all, except for the tastefully inoffensive artwork spaced at tastefully precise intervals to alleviate the otherwise distressingly blank bulkhead. With the exception of a small Kreshti fern (a sullen, disconsolate pea-green) on the desk, there were no personal items. An appallingly neat desk, with the turing at right angles to its access pad, and to the quantum-hex comm globe, and a bound copy of the treaty between the Consortium and the Free Worlds, with well-worn edges. Rory’s own face hung on the wall, flanked by her mother and brother. The official portrait had been taken during her fifteenth year. She noted the remnants of baby fat on her cheeks, and touched the bones in her face. She didn’t look like that now. A window—or a porthole—would have given her something else to look at. Even the ominous void, with the Brothers creeping past, towing their moons and flashing their poisonous atmospheres, would have been a comfort.
She checked the chronometer for the twentieth time (in the past thirty minutes), and heaved a sigh that sent the fern into yellow stripes and lavender polka dots.
Zhang eyed the fern, and her Princess, with equal alarm.
“Fine,” said Rory. “Try Thorsdottir again.”
Zhang nodded. She hesitated anyway, giving Rory a good looking over. Probably checking for nosebleeds, or other indications of brain hemorrhage or whatever it was Zhang imagined happened to foolish arithmancers.
Then she looked at her pocket comm. “Nothing yet, Princess. No response.”
“Thank you.” Rory stared at the fern. The edges of its bottom leaves turned bright yellow. As it happened, brain hemorrhage was a possible, even probable consequence of mixing alchemy and arithmancy, a little more than halfway up the scale of catastrophe. At the mild end, headaches. At the other, the explosive rupture of ophthalmic tissue.
Rory elected to keep that knowledge to herself.
Despair sloshed against the back of her throat. She had exhausted her options. She had no Vizier, no Grytt. She had avoided arrest and incarceration, for the moment, although the Regent could decide to take her into protective custody. She was a minor under Thorne law, and the treaty stated her marriage must wait until eighteen, but she guessed the Regent would lobby for an earlier date, in light of recent circumstances. Her mother would lodge a protest, but with Grytt’s murder of Tadeshi personnel and the possibility of a renewed war, Rory did not expect Samur to intervene beyond a diplomatic protest.
At which point she would marry a clone, endure a short marriage, endure a longer period of official mourning and widowhood, and then, as soon as was decent, be compelled to marry again. The alliance between the Consortium and the Free Worlds required royal participation, not the stop-gap union of Regents and Regent-Consorts. But more vitally, the peace required heirs. Assuming Ivar did not succeed in siring any—and Rory supposed he would not, or could not; Moss would see to that—she would need to choose an acceptable husband and produce offspring.
How long she survived after that depended on what Moss knew, or suspected. Accidents happened, out here in the void.
Rory entertained briefly the fantasy that Ivar was fine, that he would break their engagement, that he would sign a peace treaty in perpetuity and require nothing more of her than a brief bi-yearly conversation. Then she dismissed that fantasy. Happily ever after was for children’s stories. What her happily ever after would entail, she had not yet considered. She had a civil war in her possession, after all.
She had the documents proving the Regent’s treason, if she could get anyone to believe them. She suspected those files would survive in the turing exactly ten seconds longer than the Regent’s initial realization that she’d read them. She had separate copies, of course. She debated trying to send one set to her mother through the quantum-hex, and discarded the idea. Diplomatic communication was supposed to be secure, but no one believed that. And if she tried to hex it, then she would only be giving the Regent’s arithmancer a puzzle to solve before he learned what she knew.
Rory wished Thorsdottir would check in. She was becoming increasingly concerned that something untoward had befallen her, and she was uncertain that her composure could withstand a second personal loss in as many days.
Then Zhang’s pocket-comm chimed, and they both jumped. Zhang reached for it, while Rory made useless fists and failed at patience and the fern acquired periwinkle spots. It was not tradition for princesses to carry pocket-comms, for privacy and security and a host of reasons dreamt up before the existence of pocket-comms. Rory decided the tradition’s days were numbered.
Zhang keyed in her pass-string and frowned at the tiny screen. “She’s at the flat. She’s sending Stary to get us.”
“What? Why? Is she hurt? Is Franko hurt? Did she find Jaed?”
Zhang tapped obediently. The comm murmured and chirped to itself. Then it chimed again. “She’s fine, Franko’s fine, and she acquired the target. She says Franko’s standing guard duty.”
“On guard duty? Since when do we need a guard?”
Zhang sighed, faintly, and typed, and frowned more deeply. “She says . . . don’t ask. She’ll tell you when you arrive.”
The fern turned bright scarlet. Rory held out her hand. “Give me that.”
Zhang held out the comm as if it were a live, particularly unappealing insect. It chimed, just as Rory took it. A new message flashed up. Rory read it. Then she returned the comm to Zhang, who also read it.
They looked at each other for a long moment. The fern, unable to process the emotional morass, turned itself taupe and attempted to blend in with the desk. Rory picked it up.
“Right,” said Rory. “We’ll wait for Stary.”
Thorsdottir, as it happened, did not much enjoy waiting, either. She enjoyed it even less when she anticipated the end would be less pleasant than the waiting itself. She did not require Zhang’s confirmation to know that the Princess was angry. Rory liked no as much as any teenager, and she was unaccustomed to hearing it from Thorsdottir. It was a miracle, or a testament to the Vizier’s tutelage, that she had agreed to wait for Stary.
Stary and Franko hadn’t liked what Thorsdottir had said and done so far today, either, but their chain of command was clear enough in this instance.
“Hope you know what you’re about,” Stary had said. Franko had been less succinct and more profane in his response. But they hadn’t argued. Truth was, neither of them wanted Thorsdottir’s job.
Thorsdottir didn’t want it, either. She wanted Grytt back, in the same fierce and futile way she’d wanted wings when she was four. She’d gotten a pony, instead: a beautiful, stubborn animal with a talent for self-destructive behavior and well-aimed kicks.
Things hadn’t changed all that much.
Thorsdottir read Zhang’s last message and flipped the pocket-comm off. She set it carefully on the desk, as if it were a grenade with a loose pin.
“The Princess is on her way,” she said.
Jaed Moss looked at her from the very farthest corner of the divan as if he wanted to recede into the gap between the cushions, to take refuge among the loose coins and stray fountain pens.
“She’s angry, isn’t she?”
“Oh. Yes.” Thorsdottir tried, and failed, to summon up any words of comfort. Instead, she heaved up a sigh, met Jaed’s anxious gaze, and said, “Wait here. Don’t touch anything. Don’t even move. I’ll meet her outside. Talk to her first.”
“You mean, take the brunt of the yelling. I deserve that, not you.”
“Yes, you do. Don’t worry. She’ll have enough for both of us.” Thorsdottir tried to retrofit her grimace into a smile. “She probably won’t yell. And she won’t deny you asylum, either. But I suggest you use the time to consider exactly how you want to tell her everything. And you do have to tell her everything.”
And so it was that the Princess of Thorne arrived at the tiny cul-de-sac of Thorne sovereign territory, gripping a small Kreshti fern (wan yellow) tightly in both hands. She was preceded by Stary, who was armed to the limit of treaty, and followed by Zhang, who had resigned herself to feeling underequipped for the day’s shenanigans. Franko was, true to Thorsdottir’s warning, standing guard just inside the corridor’s threshold. He had a long-barreled ’slinger propped on his shoulder, and a helmet that made him look a little bit like a beetle. His uniform creases looked sharp as axe blades.
He saluted. “Princess.”
Rory paused. Another day, she might have returned the salute and wrested a smile out of him. Now she glanced past him, further down the corridor, where Thorsdottir waited in front of the flat, unarmed and out of uniform. She recalled what Grytt had told her about the various personalities of their tiny garrison, and about pointing a weapon if you didn’t mean to shoot it. Or in this case, two weapons. Franko on guard, armed like this, was no matter for levity.
“Any trouble?” she asked.
“No, Princess.”
“Good.” Because if there had been, there would be pieces of it spattered across the decking. She looked at Thorsdottir again. “Stary, stay with Franko. No one comes in without my order.”
“Yes, Princess.”
She continued the remaining seven paces, Zhang at her heels. The fern in her hands still throbbed scarlet.
Thorsdottir glanced at it, and at Zhang. “Princess.”
“Our guest is an unwelcome complication.”
“I’m sorry, Princess.”
“No, you’re not. Why is he here?”
“He told Grytt that the Vizier was being moved. He was supposed to tell you, to prompt some sort of reaction. Clearly he didn’t. I thought—by now his father probably knows what happened, or what didn’t happen, and so he’s probably in trouble. So he asked for asylum.”
The fern shivered. Orange lines crazed the red.
“He asked, or you prompted?”
“I suggested it. My judgment, Princess.” Thorsdottir let that hang between them, for a beat. “I also told him he had to ask you before it’s official. I also told him to tell you the truth.”
“Which you’re telling me now.”
“Only the parts I know.”
Rory closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her mouth worked around what was either a pair of angry badgers or the grandmother of all reprimands. Then she let go of her nose and her breath.
“Fill Thorsdottir in on the morning’s events,” she told Zhang. “I’ll be inside with our guest. Give us at least ten minutes, and knock first.”
Jaed stood up as she came inside. He had his back to the porthole. Cherno’s dark hulk gnawed at one side of his silhouette. Reflected sunlight limned the other half of his hair silver. A shadow bisected his face, giving her one wide eye, the knife’s edge of his nose, a downturned mouth, and concealing the other half.
Appropriate.
Rory set the fern down on the edge of the kitchen divider, and pushed it carefully away from the edge. Then she crossed the expanse of decking in three short strides, neatly angling past the desk. She stopped an uncomfortable less-than-armslength from Jaed.
“Rory,” he said, and stopped. His hands hung at his sides, the tendons ridged over stiff fingers.
“You should have told me about the Vizier. Not Grytt. Me.”
“I was trying to protect you. I thought you’d do something—”
“Stupid? Rash? Who told you about Messer Rupert’s transfer? Oh, don’t bother sputtering at me. Your father did, I know that. You were supposed to tell me, and then betray me.”
“Right. And I didn’t.”
“Which is why you’re here and Thorsdottir’s taken your side, instead of burying you in the arboretum under some unlucky shrub. You know how I found out what happened? I lied to your father this morning. I told him Ivar sent me a message, wanting to dissolve our engagement. I was trying to distract him with what I thought was something too preposterous to be true. Instead, he immediately suspected you of writing it. Why would he think that, Jaed? What have you two decided to do with me?”
Jaed took a cue from the fern, then, and turned two uncomplementary colors at once. “We didn’t decide anything. I thought—he said he didn’t want you and Ivar to marry.”
“He said that so you’d do something stupid.”
“Which, evidently, I am alleged to have done. Writing a letter to you, pretending to be Ivar, trying to break a political engagement? That’s the stupidest thing ever.”
“It’s your father who thinks you’re an idiot, not me.”
“And what do you think I am?”
“Politically naive.”
“Maybe. Yeah. Okay. But I didn’t betray you. My father, yes. My—everything else. But not you.” He gulped a mouthful of air. “I wanted to believe—it doesn’t matter.”
It did matter, very much. The fairy gift was quite adamant on that subject. Rory considered pushing the matter, then discarded the idea. Her head throbbed. She wished for a dark room, a cool cloth, and cup of green tea. Instead, she had Jaed Moss, a political crisis, and an hour before lunch. At this rate, they’d be at war by dinner.
“So,” she said more gently, “your father thinks Grytt is alive. He thinks she escaped with Messer Rupert.”
“Good—wait. He told you that?”
“No, he told me that she was dead. He was lying.”
Jaed shook his head slightly. “How do you know? Were you running a hex on him?”
“No. I just do.” She did not want to explain the fairies to Jaed. “He’s not an arithmancer, your father. He’s just got some good hexwork which, yes, I got around. Don’t ask me—”
“How?” Jaed’s expression made clear he would repeat that question until he acquired a satisfactory answer.
“By poisoning myself. Oh, don’t. I’m fine.”
Jaed looked as happy about that revelation as Zhang had witnessing it. And like Zhang, he did not comment, though it took visible effort. His jaw clenched around recriminations until Rory pitied his molars. “Oh, sit down. You’re making my neck hurt.”
Jaed did, somewhat warily. Rory maneuvered to the other side of the coffee table and perched on the back of Messer Rupert’s favorite chair, feet dangling off the side. She propped her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, so that her eyes were level with Jaed’s and her head felt less like it wanted to roll off her neck.
“I think your father wanted you to make an attempt on Ivar’s life, either before the wedding, or after, when the clone dies. Jealous Jaed murders the Prince. Grief-stricken Regent forced to execute his own son. Which would leave Merrick for me.”
“Thorsdottir said as much.”
“Thorsdottir’s said a lot today.”
He winced. “So will you grant me asylum?”
“Yes. Provisionally. If we’re lucky, your father won’t know where you’ve gone for a while.”
“And if he figures it out?”
“Stary and Franko can hold that corridor for a while.”
“Rory.”
“I’m not serious. Shut up and let me think.” She cradled her forehead in her palms. Her brain banged on her skull like a prisoner on a locked door.
“You are not all right.”
She heard him get up, a too-loud rasp of clothing on couch cushions. She sensed his hand hovering over her shoulder: an artifact of the alchemy, perhaps, that made him buzz like an exposed tesla coil. It was as if she could hear his aura, and feel it. Perhaps she was turning into a Kreshti fern.
His voice was blessedly quiet. “Can I get you something?”
The door chimed, just then, with a shriek like a thousand cats thrown simultaneously into a blender, or a single blast of the Lanscottar pipes.
“Get that,” she said. “It’s Thorsdottir and Zhang, anyway.”
She listened to the boom of his footfalls, and the metallic howl of the door on its slide, and the rumble of a barbarian horde—three people, all speaking softly, a room away—preparing an invasion. Then another set of footsteps emerged, thumping across carpet and ringing off the deckplate underneath. Thorsdottir’s boots appeared in the circle of Rory’s vision. Thorsdottir’s agitation buzzed across her skin like live wasps. She squatted down and peered up at Rory. Her eyes were fury and worry combined, and very, very blue.
“You need to go to bed, Princess,” she said. “Now.”
For once, Rory did not argue.
Rory woke to the smell of Thorsdottir’s cooking, and a murmur of voices and the fuzzy chrysalis dark of her chamber, cut only by the patient glow of her turing. Someone had activated the opacity hex on the porthole. Rory banished it, and the stars faded into view. Cherno had retreated for the evening—it was evening, wasn’t it? That smelled like garlic, not breakfast. Her head still felt scuffed on the inside, but her stomach had recovered sufficiently to demand something in it besides the memory of eclairs.
Rory sat up and discovered that although she did not recall undressing, she clearly had, or someone had done so for her. Likely the latter: the clothes she’d worn to see the Regent were absent entirely. There was a bulb of water on the bedside table, and a pair of pills of a more benign alchemy than her earlier ingestion. She took them both promptly, and swished the water around in her mouth before swallowing. She did not feel quite human yet, but her condition was improving.
She swung her feet off the bed, facing the porthole, and squinted at her reflection, which was little more than a translucent afterthought in the porthole’s silicate alloy. A ghost, lost and—she leaned forward. A ghost whose braid was a mess. Rory grimaced and combed her hair out with her fingers. Her ghost self acquired a cloak of pure void in which the stars winked and glittered. A lovely image for some poet or artist. The ghost girl, hair made of stars.
Rory made a very unartistic face at her reflection, and reached for her robe. Then she remembered the political refugee in her living room and reconsidered. There was more modesty in the robe’s concealing folds than there was in her tum’mo leggings and shift, and Jaed had seen her that way often enough; but there was an intimacy to the robe, too, reserved for the household, her sole garment which was not also a costume.
You are a Princess, said Messer Rupert, a hundred-hundred times in her memory, with all that implied. A constant performance of someone else’s script. And on the other hand, there was Grytt, who—
Rory sighed. Grytt would not say anything, because Grytt usually didn’t. But she also wouldn’t stand in opposition to Messer Rupert. She never had. She’d just hand Rory a pair of trousers and a sweater and expect no argument, because to Grytt, Jaed had been, was, and would be forever the outsider, which was half a step from enemy.
Except he wasn’t. He was maybe a fool, sometimes, politically naive. But he wasn’t bad. She liked him, for some version of like. And he was the closest thing she had to an ally on Urse, not because of his personal qualities (or lack thereof) but because he and she had mutual interests. Outmaneuvering the Regent, mostly, and avoiding prison. Or marriage. The distinction was fuzzy.
So, at the moment, was the distinction between Princess and person, and she was tired of playing roles.
Rory shrugged the robe around her shoulders, taking extra care to wrap it close and belt it firmly. She left her hair loose, too, and her feet bare, and, having fortified herself with a breath and a hard stare at herself in the porthole, turned on her heel and marched into the corridor.
The garlic smell was much stronger out here. Rory waded through it, toward the murmur of voices, which, upon closer proximity, resolved into a conversation. The subject appeared to be a recounting of an event from Thorsdottir’s youth, in which a basket of stolen eggs, brothers, and practical jokes figured prominently. Jaed was laughing and stirring a pot, while Thorsdottir wielded a substantial cleaver in pantomime, and Zhang smiled and arranged cutlery on the table.
At that moment, Rory missed Grytt and Messer Rupert with a ferocity that quite stole her breath. It should be curry in the pot, not stew. It should be Grytt muttering, and Messer Rupert fiddling with a turing, and herself wielding the spoon. Thorsdottir and Zhang would be across the corridor, and Jaed would be avoiding his father and brother elsewhere on Urse. But that normal was over. Gone. Even if Grytt and Messer Rupert had survived—and Rory chose to believe that they had—they could never return to it, even if the Regent turned into a ball of blue smoke and they were permitted back on Urse. Too much had happened. Thorsdottir and Zhang and Jaed.
And Rory could not regret it, not really, because in that normal, Messer Rupert and Grytt had intended she marry Ivar. Now Rory had different plans, new plans, and for the first time, an opportunity to act on them. She was no longer their Princess. She was becoming her own.
Though what those new and different plans were, well. She didn’t know yet. She needed to think of them first.
Zhang noticed her, then. She absorbed Rory’s informal attire, the loose hair, the bare feet, with a raised eyebrow. Then she offered one of her small, spare smiles.
“Princess,” she said, exactly timed for one of the pauses in Thorsdottir’s story.
“Princess,” echoed Thorsdottir, looking up.
“Ah.” Jaed also observed Rory’s attire, and found something very interesting to examine in the depths of the stew pot.
“Sorry,” said Thorsdottir. “We’re almost ready.”
“No, go on. Finish your story. Tell us how you outwitted Sven and got out of the loft and recovered the eggs.”
Thorsdottir snorted. But she continued, narrating a successful scaling of the old barn wall with bare feet and hands (“Didn’t you get splinters?” “Oh yes. Shed-loads.”) and the rescue of the eggs and the subsequent descent and flight across the farm, with Sven in pursuit, the recounting of which lasted until the bowls were on the table. Rory was grateful for Thorsdottir’s excellent sense of timing. She was spared any need to make conversation, or to respond to someone else’s attempt. After a day in which she had been the center of everyone’s attention, in a lifetime where that was often the case, Rory found anonymity at her own supper table to be a welcome thing. It left her time to think, and to see to the ingestion of her own supper for a few spoonfuls.
Knowing what the trap was, how it would close, was no help if she could not also see a way past it. The Regent had outmaneuvered everyone. There was no way to undo his maneuvering. She could endure, at least for a while, and hope an opportunity presented itself. Except endure meant marriage, first to a doomed clone, and then to Merrick. It was what a Queen would do. What her mother was doing.
Rory realized, with her spoon halfway to her mouth, that she did not want to endure marriage.
Nor, for that matter, did she wish to endure monarchy.
It was a startling realization.
What good was the thirteenth fairy’s gift, if it showed her a truth she could not avoid?
Messer Rupert would have remarked on her silence by now, reminding her that stew is for eating, and eating is best accomplished by conveying the contents of the spoon into one’s mouth, rather than reorganizing it in the bowl. Neither Thorsdottir nor Zhang did so. Nor were they likely to do, having no history of prompting princesses to eat. So it would fall to her to direct the conversation, and to jeopardize everyone’s enjoyment of what really was an excellent stew. Messer Rupert would have found a graceful way to do so, an anecdote or an observation to segue naturally into the topic at hand.
Rory had exhausted her own supply of grace for the day, though hopefully not cleverness. Still, she thought she should save that for the actual plan, rather than spend it on pretty preamble.
“So,” she said, and waited for three sets of eyes to find their way to her face. “I think some clone of Ivar is going to arrive on Urse very shortly, and my wedding will happen even more rapidly thereafter, and we need to see that it doesn’t. The wedding, that is.”
Jaed blinked. Thorsdottir and Zhang looked at each other. Then Zhang squared her shoulders.
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. I was hoping you had some ideas.”
Thorsdottir stirred her soup as if the answer floated somewhere among the potatoes. “If you don’t marry Ivar—or some version of him—the treaty could fail.”
“And if I do marry him, I’m a widow in two weeks and Merrick’s wife in twelve months and the real Ivar dies, if he hasn’t already. Look. If I thought marriage would save us from Moss, I’d do it. But I think my life won’t last much longer than the arrival of my first heir. Then I’ll have an accident, or I’ll end up on Beo while a series of my clones legitimizes another round of Moss sovereignty.”
“You could always challenge the Prince to a duel. That was my original plan.”
Rory sat up a little straighter. “What?”
“It’s an archaic law, I know. Barbaric. Bloodsport to settle an argument. Or in this case, an engagement.” Jaed twisted his face into a self-deprecating grimace. “I thought it’d get you out of the marriage, but it’s a stupid idea. Thorsdottir pointed out why it wouldn’t work.”
Rory rescued her spoon, pinching it between thumb and forefinger. She examined it as if there might be gems encrusted on the handle. There were not; but she was beginning to see something better than gems. She was beginning to see a move the Regent wouldn’t be able to counter.
And so the littlest fairy’s gift worked its magic, unnoticed and unacknowledged, as the most powerful magics so often do.