There is an old adage, among generals and schoolteachers, that no plan, however well-constructed, survives contact with the enemy. While this maxim can be seen as one part cynicism, two parts irony—since of course both battle and lesson plans do in fact survive engagements, and people either die or learn, accordingly—the proverb’s underlying wisdom is sound. No plan, however thorough, can be guaranteed success. The enemy often will behave in a manner unanticipated, and random elements can skew the scenario. A wise general must, then, be flexible, able to adjust in the moment. They must, in other words, be ready to react.
It is an uncomfortable position.
A Regent, too, must possess some degree of flexibility and foresight, particularly if he wishes to wrangle a headstrong Princess into marriage before her majority as delineated by treaty. He must have reasons why the ceremony should be hurried, and responses to the inevitable objections, and responses to the next round of protests. But the Regent of the Free Worlds of Tadesh despised reaction. He preferred to act, and to keep his opponents reacting. In his mind, it was forever better to be on the attack than on the defense, and he had considerable pride in his strategic skills. He had, after all, engineered the death of two kings and one queen on his path to power, and removed his political enemies, and repurposed potentially benevolent research into what would, were it widely known, provoke outrage both within and without the Free Worlds. He considered himself a success, and predicted more of the same for his future.
He was not, therefore, pleased with two surprises in as many days. The loss of the Vizier was unexpected and inconvenient, and Grytt’s participation in that loss was entirely unforeseen. On the one side, it removed two of Rory’s most irritating allies from play. On the other, he did not control them and, in fact, had no idea where they’d gone. The missing shuttle had not turned up on Beo at its appointed hour. Nor had its wreckage been found in the system, despite extensive sweeps and searches. It appeared to have vanished utterly. The Regent did not require an advanced degree in astronomy to understand that the void was a big place, and the ways in which a small shuttle with two fragile biological entities could disappear were many, varied, and lethal; he had employed some of them to rid himself of the Queen, after all. So when his advisors assured him that the Vizier and the body-maid must be dead, he agreed. In private, he stared at system maps and brooded.
The second surprise—the stupidity of his younger son—offered both greater immediate vexation and a simpler path to resolution. He knew how to solve that difficulty: he would confine the boy to the Moss family apartments, until Rory’s marriage, widowhood, and remarriage—in short, until the public forgot him—and then send him to some inhospitable, inconvenient corner of the Free Worlds—Lanscot, perhaps—with a political position just barely befitting his rank.
The problem was that he couldn’t find Jaed.
The Regent was not the sort of man to focus on frustration. He dispatched a missive to his distant wife, informing her that circumstances required a more rapid union of their kingdoms than anticipated. His fool son, rumors, and so on. When Samur responded, insisting on a real-time quantum-hex conference, he acted the part of the embarrassed father (which required very little acting) and the diplomat concerned for maintaining the peace (which did). Samur, to her credit, requested a conference with her daughter, which the Regent could not find sufficient grounds to forbid. But since the only equipment for quantum-hex conferencing lived in the Tadeshi municipal complex, he was not concerned that mother and daughter might conspire to surprise him. The conversation would be monitored.
He dispatched a second shuttle to Beo, with orders to prepare his Highness for a wedding. And he sent a messenger to Rory, requesting her presence to discuss “matters of import to the Free Worlds and the Thorne Consortium.” He included a specific date and time, allowing her three days for preparations, tantrums, or frantic (monitored) calls to Samur.
Then, with the important business in motion, the Regent turned his full attention to finding Jaed.
“He wants to tell me about the wedding.” Rory grimaced. “I wonder how he managed to move it up a year. What if I refuse?”
“You can’t.” Jaed had not expected the twin knots in his stomach and his throat, upon hearing Rory pronounce the word wedding.
“I most certainly can. I can have feminine complaints. I can have a cold. I can have five days of indigestion.”
“He’d send his alchemists and his chirurgeons to treat you personally. Rory.” Jaed leaned forward and fixed upon her a stare of such mingled earnestness and vexation that his face threatened to crack under the strain. “I’ve been living with my father my whole life. He doesn’t make a move like this unless he knows he can win. You don’t want this to come to a fight. Do you?”
“Of course not. And of course I’m not going to simply defy him.” In truth, the last thing she wanted was the Regent or any of his personnel coming through her door to compel a conversation. Better to meet him on his territory.
“What concerns me more,” she added, a little snappishly, “is that he’s going to find you. He’s running out of places to look. The rumor that you’re here is all over the network.”
“There’s a rumor he’s holding me under house-arrest, too. So much for rumors.”
“Yes, but he knows that one’s not true. The only reason I can think that he’s not banging on the door already is that he doesn’t believe we’re that stupid.”
“Or I’m just not that important. There won’t be any scandal if I’m found here. It’s not like the Free Worlds require virginity in a Princess.”
Rory cast her eyes heavenward. “I’m not worried about my reputation. I’m worried what your father will do when he gets hold of you. Which he will, if you stay here.”
“Do? Probably confine me to my room, under guard, and thus render true the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers, forced apart by cruel political circumstance. He won’t execute me, Rory.” Jaed sat up straight, of a sudden. “Wait. If I stay here—if? Where else would I go?”
Rory held up a finger, forestalling the next utterance. “I promised you asylum, yes. I have very few options for enforcing that, except hiding you from your father, and we can’t do that indefinitely. Even if the Regent won’t storm our doors, he will be monitoring our household expenses. Our water consumption alone will alert him. Never mind the increase in groceries.”
Jaed’s face embarked on a journey from shocked betrayal, with brief layovers at hurt and resignation, before stopping at surprisingly thoughtful. “Okay. So you have an idea. Tell me.”
“I do, and I will. But first, tell me, Jaed. What is the state of relations between Lanscot and the rest of the Free Worlds? Specifically the relationship with your father?”
Rory knew the answer already, of course. She had pored through the histories herself. She had read a half-dozen treaties late into third shift, sipping tepid coffee and acquiring a legendary backache. Lanscot had been an independent colony, later absorbed—badly and bloodily, through a war of occupation and two generations of civil resistance—into the Free Worlds, with the marriage of their Princess to the second son of the Tadeshi King.
It was not an unfamiliar story. The Lanscottar Princess had not fared well, accused of treason before her thirtieth birthday and executed, leaving behind heirs to be raised as Tadeshi. Since that time—some two hundred years, give or take—the Lanscottar had sulked and suffered at the margins of the Free Worlds, fiercely independent and, at the same time, marginalized as an archaic curiosity. They had produced, along with a surfeit of animal-derived textiles, the economist-philosopher deCharry, who had spent a full third of his life imprisoned for sedition, and whose treatise on the feudal roots of contemporary customs of employment and remuneration spawned no fewer than six reformation movements, two of which had succeeded. It was deCharry’s fault, if one could use the label, that the Tadeshi King must share governance with a Council of Ministers and that he was accountable to public constituents. It was that very system, in fact, that had enabled Vernor Moss to rise from relative obscurity to Regency in fewer years than deCharry’s imprisonment.
Messer Rupert had always said that history offered the best prediction of future events. Rory interpreted the Lanscottar Princess’s tale as both cautionary and, if she did not act, prophetic. She had no intention of toppling the Tadeshi monarchy, or of instigating another Lanscottar rebellion. She wanted only to ally herself with a people who took pride in their defiance, and use that pride to secure a safe place for Jaed.
She had a plan.
That very afternoon, at precisely fourteen-hundred, Ursan standard time, two Thorne guards were observed by the ’bots across the corridor from the Thorne compound exiting the premises. The ’bots dutifully recorded their images, which the bored junior arithmancer minding that particular feed then dutifully attempted to identify. There were only four guards, after all, and their faces were well known; but they had all taken to wearing full uniforms, lately, including the antiballistic visors, presumably so they could use their internal, crypto-hexed communications and thus thwart any monitoring by Ursan equipment.
The junior arithmancer knew very well that her superior could hex his way into Thorne HUDs, if he so desired. She also knew he had been given no such directive, because she had no feeds from the HUDs on her own console. Such information would have identified the guards instantly. Instead, she was compelled to guess, based on body-type. The woman of the pair was easy. Zhang was smaller than everyone else. The male, however, was more difficult to identify, Stary and Franko being almost of a size. The apprentice settled on Franko, finally, and made a note in her logs.
She followed the pair’s progress through the ’bot-feeds. It was unexciting. They stopped at several grocery establishments, one cosmetics shop, and a patisserie before arriving at the door to the Lanscottar embassy. After a brief exchange at the door, they were admitted.
So engrossed was she in the progress of the Thorne guards that the apprentice failed to notice that the feed from the ’bot watching the Thorne compound flickered for a period of three seconds before it stabilized. She failed to notice that a man’s black boot passed through the bottom edge of the screen and that three seconds later, that same boot reappeared in the same place and repeated the same trajectory, and repeated the process exactly every three seconds thereafter. It was exactly the sort of motion that a person in front of a bank of monitors all displaying various grainy moving images would not notice, unless she was particularly astute.
Astute individuals, however, are not assigned console-minding duties.
The not-particularly-astute junior arithmancer made another note in her logbook. The visit from the Consortium to the Lanscottar was somewhat unusual, but also not without precedent. At least one exchange of sweaters and brightly colored plants had already occurred, shortly after the formal presentation of the Princess to the Prince. That was a customary first move in further diplomatic relations. This visit was probably an invitation to some dreary social event or another. The junior arithmancer considered adding that to her logbook, then discarded the idea. Her supervisor did not approve of personal speculation.
At fifteen hundred twenty, the Lanscottar embassy doors opened. At this point, the ’bot watching the doors suffered a malfunction. Its visual feed turned entirely pink, with pixelated infusions of lavender, orange, and yellow. The junior arithmancer followed procedure. First, she struck the console with the flat of her hand. Gently, once, and then harder. When the visuals failed to resolve, she turned that ’bot off, waited three seconds, and turned it on again.
The feed resolved. Five minutes later, the Thorne guards exited the structure, and proceeded by a more or less direct route home. This time the apprentice did observe a flicker in the Thorne ’bot’s feed, but before she could follow procedure and hit the display, the image steadied. The Thorne guards had returned and, laden with their packages, re-entered the premises.
The black boot, and the three-second span of video in which it had been the sole actor, did not reappear, and was never noted in the logbook. The presence of the hex which had produced that repeating segment was also not recorded.
And so Jaed Moss passed into Lanscottar custody, and with him, copies of Prince Ivar’s medical records. Rory had hesitated over sending the latter, before finally deciding that the only independent copies should not be kept in her residence. The records were her best evidence of the Regent’s perfidy, but only if they remained hidden. The moment he knew she had them, he would move—against her, the Lanscottar, Ivar, the Thorne Consortium—to protect himself. Rory reckoned that he would destroy the physical evidence, fabricate other documents, arrange a catastrophic accident on Beo—in short, that he would do nearly anything to protect his power.
In that, she was correct.
Where she erred, however, was in her assessment of the Lanscottar, and particularly, Dame Maggie.
When the Tadeshi security arrived the following morning, encountered Franko standing sentry at the mouth of the narrow corridor, and demanded entrance, Rory thought at first that they had come about Jaed, and congratulated herself on having moved him the day before. Her demeanor, therefore, was calm, even a bit smug, when she went to meet them.
Her calm slipped a notch when she noted the formality of their uniforms, and the bulk of body armor beneath it. Either they were expecting a fight, or they wanted her to believe that they were. Franko had stationed himself exactly in the corridor’s center, symbolically and suicidally, should it come to actual conflict. Rory gauged the tension levels on her side to be high, with increased chance of violence, and their side to be oh yes, please start something.
Decorum said keep walking and pretend to notice nothing. Prudence said dive back into the flat and bar the door. Rory compromised, stopping precisely where she was and pretending to adjust her sleeves, which, being attached to a Lanscottar sweater, required very little adjustment. It was an obvious stalling tactic. Rory just as obviously did not care.
“Thorsdottir?” she said. “Get Zhang.”
“Yes,” said Thorsdottir, and whipped around with equal parts precision and desperation and did not quite dive back into the apartment. Ten seconds later, she emerged with Zhang, at which point Rory appeared satisfied with the disposition of her sleeves. Together the three of them walked up the corridor.
She was considerably less sanguine when the leader—the same medium blond fellow from her last encounter—declared that she was, per section forty-two-dash-seven-dash-one of the Treaty between the Free Worlds and the Thorne Consortium, hereby remanded into custody of the Free Worlds of Tadesh, and that she must come with him for her own protection.
He was serious. His companions were serious. And heavily armed. Rory thought she could see a small hedge of similarly outfitted security waiting just beyond easy eyeshot of Franko’s position.
Sweat prickled along her scalp, under her arms, across her palms.
“Do you have orders to take me into custody by force, sir?” she asked, while her heart made a credible attempt to crawl up her throat. It was one thing to know what the Regent was capable of doing (anything, really) and to prepare for such an eventuality. It was quite another to experience the effects firsthand.
Grytt had been right: she would be a fool not to fear Moss. Rory began to suspect she had been a fool, lately.
“I hope that will not be necessary,” the medium blond security man said. That, too, was honest, and no comfort at all.
Be calm, she wished her heart. It retreated obediently, leaving her throat clear, and resumed pacing the confines of chest and lungs. She could not bluster her way through this situation, but she could perhaps paralyze with politeness.
The smile slipped into place, old armor, well-practiced. “Against what threat, exactly, am I being protected?”
“The Regent will explain. Please, Princess. If you could come with us.”
The small hedge was moving, in Tadeshi threes, into more visible, and strategic, positions. Franko had noticed. Rory took note of the absolute rigidity of his spine, and the bleached knuckles gripping his ’slinger. She felt, rather than saw, Thorsdottir’s gathering tension to her right. Behind her, Zhang was as still and silent as aetherless void, which meant Zhang was also upset, prepared to act, and waiting for a signal.
It was a moment in which wars could be (re)started. The Regent had to know that. He was perhaps trusting her to respond diplomatically. He was also perhaps hoping she did not; if she did resist, he would still take her into custody. She recalled the Vizier’s arrest, and what Grytt had said about stray bolts. If she fought back now, she would lose, and she would truly be alone.
“Stand down,” Rory said, and laid a hand on Franko’s arm. To her distress, she did not have to feign the tremor in her hand. “I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I must ask, sir, what provisions have been made for my personnel?”
The medium blond’s face relaxed a fraction. His smaller companion let go a visible breath. The largest continued to stare on a vector that suggested he and Thorsdottir were eyelocked and stalemated.
“Your body-maids are welcome, too, Princess. The remainder of your guards might prefer lodging in the embassy’s guest quarters.”
So. The Regent’s men were here to search both apartments, under the thinnest of political shields, and to effectively take her prisoner. A spike of anger joined the prudent terror, hot and cold by turns.
“May I at least pack some belongings?”
“I have no orders to that effect.”
There was a small crowd gathering now. Rory considered rushing among them, throwing herself at the certainty that the Regent’s men would not engage in public violence, and at the hope that the crowd might help her. She reconsidered, when she got to asking herself what help, exactly, she expected. The Regent would gain access to her quarters, and he would take her into custody. A civilian gathering armed with nothing more dangerous than pastries and personal communication devices would hardly risk themselves for what was, in essence, their favorite celebrity of the moment. It was her job to entertain them, not theirs to defend her.
All right. Entertain, she would.
“I will be happy to accompany you,” she said, a little louder than was strictly required by etiquette and proximity. “But I insist one of my body-maids be permitted to pack for me, and that the other accompany me to whatever custody the Regent has prepared. It is not at all proper to have strange men in my chambers, unobserved.”
Her voice remained steady. Her hands shook, where they pressed against her thighs. She resisted, only just, gathering fistfuls of sweater. If they refused, there was nothing she could do.
“I.” Medium Blond looked like he wished he had someone to consult. He scooped his gaze sideways, at Large Blond, who was still engaged with Thorsdottir. Then he dredged up an ill-fitting smile. “Of course, Princess.”
“Thorsdottir,” Rory said at once. “Please oversee the packing with Franko. Advise Stary to see to the rest of our equipment, and to instruct the embassy to prepare suitable quarters for himself and his partner. And Thorsdottir. I’ll want my fern at once.”
“Princess,” said Thorsdottir. She peeled away in a smart slapping of boots, breaking her staredown with Large Blond with a nearly audible snap. Her long legs took her to the flat’s entrance, and through it, before the Tadeshi could react.
Rory employed a method learned in youth, on Thorne, when Messer Rupert had taught her how to gauge a storm’s distance. Count, he had said, the seconds between lightning and thunder. The shorter the count, the closer the storm.
One purple tree-rat. Two purple tree-rats. Three purple tree-rats.
That quantity of tree-rats, of whatever hue, would ensure Thorsdottir sufficient lead-time to get inside the flat and secure the most sensitive materials.
Medium Blond’s expression said he was well aware of what Rory had done, and that he saw no particular harm in it, which meant that the Regent was not particularly worried. That was not surprising. His security would go over every centimeter of both apartments, and likely an arithmancer or two with them. The capabilities of the Princess of Thorne to conceal anything from him was, apparently, of no great concern at all.
That realization restored Rory’s calm. The Regent was expecting her to behave exactly the way she was behaving, which meant she had been a very convincing leaf. And now he was about to bring the mantis-lion into his territory, which sounded much better in her head than its physical reality, because in truth, a mantis-lion is a small insect, vulnerable to large boots and casual swats unless it is very, very careful.
While she waited for Thorsdottir to emerge with the fern (and, presumably, a small bag of essentials, that a Princess would need until the balance of the baggage could be assembled, transported, spied upon, and delivered), Rory, conscious of her several audiences, clasped her hands together in front of her, and rolled her shoulders in, so that the Lanscottar sweater seemed even larger.
You see? said that posture. I am no threat at all. Little me, drowning in all this wool.
Then she raised her chin and stared with studied indifference past the security, allowing her gaze to wander across the crowd. A great deal of curiosity there. Some sympathy. And even—though she did not stare, lest she draw attention—some shaking heads and frowns.
Thorsdottir re-emerged at that moment. She handed the bag—a military-issued duffel, rather more stuffed than a Princess’s immediate needs might suggest—to Zhang, and glared so forcefully at Medium Blond that he snapped his lips closed on a comment. To Rory, she handed the fern, which promptly divided its efforts between vermillion and magenta.
“Thank you,” said Rory. “Franko, help Thorsdottir pack my apartment, please. Go now.”
She waited two purple tree-rats, then said, “May I have your word, sir, that my body-maid and guard will be permitted to pack my belongings without interference?”
Medium Blond looked as if a sudden crop of nettles had materialized in his small-clothes. He could not very well say, “No, Princess, our own personnel will sift through everything.” He was no longer certain they could, without incurring a conflict that he was under strict orders to avoid. He settled instead on a, “Yes, Princess,” that earned him a sharp side-eye from Large Blond beside him.
Rory recycled her most gracious smile. “Thank you.” She readjusted her hands on the fern. “Then please, whenever you’re ready.”
Medium Blond gestured, and a second trio of security moved to the end of the corridor. This set was more olive in complexion, and both taller and broader. They formed a spearhead, dividing the crowd as neatly as a boat’s prow slices through water. A third triad, medium brown of both skin and hair, fell in behind, effectively surrounding Rory and Zhang with a fence of black uniforms. Rory was uncertain if she should feel like a prisoner or a precious commodity, and decided that she was both.
The Regent certainly didn’t mind parading his prize through the station. They took the main thoroughfares, drawing stares and crowds where they passed. Word of her coming spread ahead, so that by the time they reached the diplomatic plaza, a small audience was already waiting. The Thorne embassy staff had turned out, nearly en masse, in an ominous clump. Rory feared (and hoped) for a moment that they would stage a protest, shout and surge at the Tadeshi, but they did not. The embassy guards saluted. The civilian staff bowed, male and female alike.
Rory risked the ire of her escort and stopped to wave, to smile, to offer reassurance that she fervently hoped no one believed. Surely a message had been quantum-hexed to her mother by now. Surely that. Although, on reconsideration, Rory imagined the quantum communications might be suffering outages today, or intermittent service, or just simply fail to work in the Thorne Consortium’s embassy. Samur had been silent on the matter of Messer Rupert’s arrest, which Rory had taken as evidence she’d been arguing with the Regent behind the scenes—but what if she hadn’t known at all?
“Please,” she said, and thrust an arm between the two halves of her escort. She walked up to the Acting First Ambassador of Thorne, who bowed a little more deeply.
“Please welcome Stary and Franko, when they arrive,” she said. “And please don’t hesitate to assign them duties, as you see fit.”
“Majesty,” said the ambassador, which was not technically correct, as Rory was not yet Queen; but it was a declaration of loyalty, and unexpected, and Rory’s eyes stung and threatened her composure. She blinked hard and rapidly, and retreated into her escort—which was, predictably, scowling at her, at her embassy, at the fern—vivid orange, now, with spatters of furious pink—and permitted them to take her the rest of the way to the municipal complex.
The sound of those doors, when they whisked shut behind her, was the loudest thing Rory had ever heard.