News from the Kingdom is bad.

News from the Kingdom is bad.

I rarely listen. My days start before dawn, breaking ice on the water troughs and fending off goats doing the hunger-dance on my boots. The handles of their feed-buckets split the calluses on my palms. Inside the farmhouse it’s a war on mud in spring and dust in summer. My children are even harder to corral than the goats, and they learn their screeching and squabbling from the gulls whose shadows they chase across the windy fields.

Some evenings though, the wind drops and I stand on the porch for the length of a single cigarette. Long enough to hear the sea’s deep sighs as it rubs away at the headland.

The smoke drifts up to the stars blooming in the sky of a colour I have never been able to name. Unique to Earth, perhaps.

One star is the Kingdom.

That one, in Cygnus, is where I trained and trained. My childhood was dedicated to excellence in the service of a glorious and exacting court. None of that training serves me now. Sometimes, alone under the vast sweep of dusk, I give in to temptation and tab on my implant. My skull fills with a soft hiss and crackle, and distant voices.

Issaya, if you’re receiving this message, call. Issaya, the rumours of reprisals are untrue. I stake my honour on that.

The news is bad. And I, courtesan assassin, once bodyguard to a prince, should bow my head to necessity. It is past time to return. My skills are needed, and so are the secrets I keep.

We just want to know what happened.

I should do something. But I have my addictions.

 

—

 

My husband doesn’t like me smoking, so he rarely joins me for these stolen moments. He’d be trying to hide the look that means he wishes I’d stop, and I’d have to pretend I didn’t see it.

Cigarettes. Dan doesn’t know that they exist nowhere else in the galaxy. This exquisite filling of the self with light and fire, the clarity! I could give up any time, I say (often), but neither of us believes that one. 

Dan is away at a trade fair for craftsmen, so I can smoke undisturbed. But for his sake I consult my implant. Not everything in this world is benign. My internal check finds black globs of tar and treacherous cells on the turn. Yes, he’s right, I shouldn’t smoke. If only Dan knew how easily I can cough up the offending tissue later.

But that would require too many explanations.

 

—

 

I should take better care of myself.

The last smoke wreathes up to where the moon chips a tiny scoop of sky. Lately my lungs feel smaller, heavier. Dan’s right, I could take better care of myself. Exercise more, at least.

I sneak inside to where the girls are heads-together, slack-jawed, pondering a Lego tower. They don’t catch me peeking in their bedroom.

“It needs big windows,” says Arwen, the elder.

“Big enough for the dragons,” says Ella.

“Let’s make them a landing platform.” Arwen pounces a hand into the Lego pile.

They won’t need dinner until they finish, and they’re a few storeys away from that. There’s time for me to go out to the long field and move into the slow forms of the first kata, letting my body flow into as much ease as I can manage these days.

I stretch my arms and leap through the spins of the second kata, the dance that kills. Old habits, old habits, trained into my very bones. What else do I know? I brought little else to this lost and lovely world.

When my husband sees me training he usually stops to watch, even forgetting he’s got a hulk of maple balanced on his shoulder, or half a ton of hay.

Beautiful, he’ll say.

I’ll smile a quick courtesan’s smile that hides my stab of disappointment. If my former classmates could see me now, they’d say different. A swing-uddered cow, slow and undisciplined. But Dan doesn’t know any better. He couldn’t imagine what I was once, first in the ranks of apprentices, my movements flowing and snapping in unison with theirs, all sharp as knives.

The best of you will serve the Royal Family, our trainer would say, making us fiercer than swords in our rivalry, until I proved best of all. So humourless and single-minded, I was. When they appointed me to serve the young Prince he found that most amusing.

Dan thinks I’m a dance student who fled from Tajikistan. My ignorance of common things is because I was raised in a cloistered world that’s lost to time and politics. My original identity was buried in a mire of hostile bureaucracy left over from the Iron Curtain. A woman with no past.

Rather than a past I can never tell.

 

—

 

I’m breathless by the time I’ve finished chopping and kicking the mild evening air. This end of the field is bounded by trees. Coming as I do from a kingdom of creeping lichens and giant fungus, trees amaze me. My world is covered in low soft growths, lobed and frilled and many-coloured. Trees don’t try nearly as hard to impress; they just stand there being green and holding up the sky. I will always be stilled by their stern wild presence. And they harbour birds, those swift bright sparks of life. A wonder and a lightness to me even after all my years on Earth.

They’re settling with last soft coos and secretive rustlings, and I could walk for hours in the darkening aisles of the forest, imagining warm featherballs tucked among the boughs, soft as breath. I would count them both among my addictions.

I lie for a moment on the chill grass, letting my breath settle. Above the tall finials of the pines, I might watch the stars’ slow turning, and dream of the roads between them, open to me if to no-one else.

But the girls will be hungry. The lights of the farmhouse remind me.

Ella brought me a bird once, cupped in her hand. So that’s how I know roundly they sleep.

 

—

 

The Dowager Empress Speaks

Ever since the crash, my implant is faulty. It switches itself on at random times. As I cross the rotten porch boards into the house, a voice breathes in my ear that nobody else can hear.

Please, if you’re out there.

A worse fault: the only person it links is the Dowager Empress.

What did he want? Why did he run off?

Inside my skull, the implant crackles. The voice winds its intimate threads into my skull. Where is the Crown Prince? Our last hope… please, if you’re out there…if you know…if there’s anything you can tell me. Help, or it will burn, all of it. The barbarians are at our gates…

—

 

That voice first found me three years after I got here. When it happened, my mouth opened in shock, and my mind too, ready to tumble out words. My own language, old yet warm as new bread, full of things that couldn’t be said in English. All I had to do was twitch my mind a certain way and I could open the connection and speak.

This link isn’t broken, said the Empress. I know you’re alive, Issaya. Somewhere.

I had such terrible news for her. Surely she’d guessed? Did I have to be the one to tell her? I’d seen those clawed hands of hers, loaded in silver and jade, strike the bearers of bad tidings. Even though I was light years away, I was stiff with the fear of her presence carried in that familiar hoarse voice.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Dan said next morning, after that first time my implant woke up. “In another language.”

Back then it was new for me to wake in a bed rumpled with love or desperation or whatever made me claw at Dan sometimes like a drowning swimmer, as though he was my rock in an ocean of me-alone. I held myself away from him then, though, hugging tight my fear as I ran through my implant’s communication logs. I hadn’t replied to her, had I? I hadn’t opened the link in my sleep?

I hadn’t.

“Tadjik,” I said. “I was dreaming of Tajikistan.”

—

 

The Dowager Empress keeps talking as I peel potatoes for dinner.

I picked you out of the crowd, you know. Always so serious. Studious. If you’d stayed, I would have taught you more. Power is moved by many levers. The assassin-bodyguards are more than just shadowy figures at the margins. A woman of subtlety, close to the throne but out of scrutiny, can put her hand to those levers.

I had my eye on you from the start, she says.

Come back. Your place will be discreet, but powerful. I have so much to teach you.

 

—

 

As I lay out dinner, the girls thunder into the kitchen, drowning out the Dowager Empress’s voice.

“Where’s Daddy?” they cry. I remind them about the trade fair. Arwen gets a calculating look.

“And you’re not to go in the workshop while he’s away,” I add.

“But I want to maaaaake something,” she wails.

“You always want to make things, but you won’t bloody learn to do it right!” I say, then shut my mouth before I explode. Last month she got into a store of recycled teak that Dan had spent months hunting down. Ruined. And we’re still paying off the lathes she wrecked when she was little more than a toddler.

“Well, you can’t,” says Ella smugly, and their brief Lego truce is gone. “Daddy banned you ‘cos you drew on the cherrywood table.”

“I didn’t hear about that!” I say.

“You said you wouldn’t tell!” Arwen screeches at Ella.

“I said you shouldn’t touch Daddy’s stuff, and I said that first, so it counts more!”

Arwen’s reaching for something she can smash down on Ella’s plate — her vengeance is often around food, but it’s the plates that suffer. I grab Arwen’s wrists and send Ella to eat in the bedroom.

I don’t understand how it’s come to this. The way they tear at each other, at me, why I allow it, why I stay for more. Like an addiction.

 

—

 

Later when I’m washing up, the Dowager Empress tries again. Sometimes I wonder if she’s going senile, or whether she calls when she’s resting from her other plots. Drinking, I imagine, something sharp and sour and complex from a diamond glass. Her voice is never slurred, though. She bites off each syllable like the click of a miser’s coins.

Oh, she says, I was sorting through my grandmother’s jewelry. She was the old Irania of Sarnd, you know. How well it would look on you, I thought. You had such lovely skin. The Nereid Sapphires were hers. Imagine those blue stones with your colour, I thought. Only in private of course. The new queen would have to outshine you in public. But these jewels are private things, things from my family, that I would never share with her. If you came back…

Wrist-deep as I am in greasy dishes and water that we can’t afford to heat properly, it doesn’t sound all bad.

I tab off my implant and the voice is silenced.

 

—

 

Tell us a Story

The girls are friends again by the time they get back from school the next day. They find me fixing fences in the bottom field.

“I think this is where Tripsy got out,” I tell them.

Arwen leans heart-stoppingly close to the last ragged tussocks on the cliff edge, chewing her lip. The sea tries its sharp white teeth on the rocks below. “The sea is grumbling. Maybe Tripsy didn’t taste so good.”

“Maybe she flew,” says Ella.

Arwen chews her hair, contemplating flying goats.

“You can’t fly, though.” I haul Arwen back and give her the hammer. She lights up and sets to work. At the end of it the fence bristles like a porcupine with half-bent nails, but I can’t say the girls are the worst offenders. If Dan were here he’d do it in three swift whacks, so easily you’d never suspect it was difficult. Or he’d make what Arwen informs me are called mortise-and-tenon joints.

They’ve been so good, the girls. Later I make them hot chocolate, a treat, which they drink together, close-curled as kittens on the bed.

“Tell us a story,” says Ella.

“First, tell me your stories. What did you do at school?”

“What Arwen did at school today!” begins Ella, and stops short at Arwen’s thunderous frown.

“Oh, nothing,” says Arwen. She won’t look me full in the face.

“What? Are we getting another call from the principal?” I ask.

“No. Yes, maybe! She stabbed Vessa!”

“With a pen,” Arwen qualifies.

“Well yes, a pen. She was clever. Vessa never saw that coming!” Ella’s gaze is worshipful. There’s a little ember in my heart too: my fiery girls! Tiny things, and so defiant! Compared to them, Vessa’s an ox.

“Why?” I ask.

“He bashed her head on a door.”

“And you got him with a pen? Good!” I say, though really it’s pathetic. At their age I was learning the dance of the knife. I was tiny too, but trained to whipcord muscle and death hands. Here, there’s never been the need. My children run wild over the wind-cured turf with live crickets in their hair, or build hay-forts in the barn for their parliament of mice.

If Vessa’s parents come calling…Ham-faced lip-chewers, they’ve spat at me in the streets of our windswept barnacle of a town. All the room in the world, and they still need hatred to clench them hard enough onto life.

Ella lifts Arwen’s hair clear of her forehead, and there’s bruising. “Cor!” she says.

How have I not seen it? I lay my fingers on the mark. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Cos she went in the medicine cabinet again,” starts Ella.

“Just Panadol. And only one, all right?”

In a moment it’ll be all on again. Truce over. It’s like living in a house full of live ammunition. Maybe my girls should learn what I learned at their age. Both the skills to defend themselves, and the restraint that such disciplines demand.

“Be quiet and I’ll tell you a story,” I say hastily.

“What story are you telling us?”

“The story of the prince who longed for the open road,” I say. “He was the Crown Prince and the hope of his kingdom. But the star-lanes called to him, louder than the claims of duty. One day when his duties bored him more than ever before, he came to his younger brother and said, Come on, let’s go. Just us, it’ll be our secret. We’ll go somewhere new…And so they left their palace of gold and jade…”

“Was he a good prince?” Ella asks.

I reflect. Good-looking and no limits on his power, how good would he be? If he’d survived, would the kingdom be falling in ruins about his feet? Or just different people groaning under the clubs of injustice?

That’s not the story my daughters want to hear. They love my tales of adventure in a wondrous kingdom of rainbow mosses and lizard-riding huntsmen, palaces and plots and weddings. Not the truth, but something like it. The truth, I tell nobody.

—

 

We were in the high tower.

We were in the high tower, me showing Prince Evay how I could spin a staff in my hands before sweeping it across — CRACK — to flip a chair off its legs. Evay wanted me to teach him. He’d splintered two chairs and was laughingly pushing me away as I tried to reclaim my staff.

“No stop, look what you’re doing!” I cried. Ruined chairs were not so funny to me. But he wouldn’t let me have it. That I couldn’t force him made him laugh even more. Didn’t want to force him, even, when his canted smile and fine white teeth were so close to mine. I was reflected in his eyes, filling the space between his lashes. I mustn’t read anything into this. The Dowager Empress had warned me, had mocked my blushes before…

“What if I tickle you, my deadly defender?”

He did, and I was doubled over, hot and gasping like I never was in spar training, when his older brother the Crown Prince sauntered in.

He spoke over my head to Evay. “You had enough of the rout downstairs too?”

“I can’t remember all those damned names and titles,” said Evay. “Ma’s venomous about it, but what can I do?” He gave me his wicked smile. I’d memorised everything he needed to know about the delegation sent to arrange Crown Prince Ares’ marriage to the First High Daughter of Inta. All week I’d tried to push their names, status, social customs at him, but he ignored me, preferring the frisson of discomfort his gaffes caused.

“Wouldn’t you like to get clean away?” asked Ares.

“Pfft, yeah! Small chance of that while your Lordship’s nuptials are being arranged. Ma wants us all marvelling at your wardrobe and the piles of gifts you’re getting!”

Ares gave a barking laugh and clapped Evay on the shoulder. “You can do just that! Remember, one of my gifts was a sweet little yacht from Technovance! Let’s admire that together!” He took in Evay’s disbelieving look. “Come on, the actual wedding’s a month away! The Crownies will be off brokering treaties in Scalla and Fenzea. Ma will barely notice.”

“Where d’you want to go?” asked Evay. The idea was rounding his cheeks and putting a glitter in his eye.

“There’s a place called Earth.”

“Earth? Never heard of it.”

“I saw a doco on it,” said Ares. “Steamships and jungles and pyramids and a Celestial Kingdom with a huge stone wall around it. They look like us, too, we can blend right in. It’ll be fun!”

Evay turned to me. “Upload everything you can about Earth.”

I couldn’t even start with what a horrible idea this was. “I’ll have to dump things from my implant to make room…” I began.

“It’s mostly nonsense anyway,” said Evay, tapping my forehead. “Come on, don’t be silly.”

Even those fingertip taps shot heat into my cheeks. They made me ashamed to be a silly girl that squeaked about a few broken chairs or clucked overslipping away under the Dowager Empress’s nose. That was Evay’s charm, that he could make one offense seem no bigger than the other.

What sort of girl wouldn’t want time alone with the two princes, away from the proprieties of court? What else was my training for? Adventures like this!

“What about Kringa? Is she coming?” I asked.

Kringa was Ares’ assassin-bodyguard, as I was Evay’s. A tall, severe woman, she had given me my final training. I owed my current position to her, but I had few fond memories of her lessons.

“Ugh, no!” said Ares. “Don’t you dare tell Miss Prissy Sourmouth about this.”

A shocked giggle slipped out of me.

Evay smiled back easily. I wasn’t a Prissy Sourmouth, was I?

I put up one more bit of resistance. I wish I’d done more, a thousand times. “Is Earth safe?” I asked the Crown Prince. Under his imperious stare — he could turn off amity like a light switch — I stuttered, “It’s just that I’ll be ch-changing a lot in my implant. It takes time before I’m up to speed.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said shortly.

Which is why, when we popped into realspace above Earth, I was crammed against the front viewscreen with the two princes, woozily admiring the teal and gold arc of the coming dawn, and only aware of Evay’s hand holding mine instead of the telltales on the console warning us of the missiles launched at our ship.

“So many lights!” I said fuzzily, and was just beginning to form the thought Too many for a Steam Age planet when our cabin erupted in a different kind of lights, red warning lights, and the mad sirens of imminent impact.

My training kicked in, late and slow, and I threw the wrong prince — or was it the right prince? — into the escape pod, and myself with him.

It’s hard, at this remove, to know whether my implant overrode my choices, or whether I truly hoped to serve the Kingdom by preserving the heir’s life. In that I failed, and when I crawled away from the wreckage and made it self-destruct, Crown Prince Ares’ torn body was lifeless inside.

I wished Evay might be safe in another pod, not shot down like us. Or had he snatched the last moment to fling the yacht back into hyperspace? If that were possible, then I should have done it. I might have saved all of us.

Away from the burning, the dry sweet smell of grass filled my nostrils. I gripped the tough slick clumps and used them to pull myself towards the sky-scraping trees of an alien world.

I should have stopped them.

I should have reported them.

I should have run to the Dowager Empress and told her what her wayward sons were planning.

 

—

 

Black Lungs

When the girls are asleep I go to the bathroom to check Arwen hasn’t taken god knows what from the medicine cabinet. My teeth, in the mirror, are not a great sight. Maybe it’s the spotty glass discolouring them. Or not. Come to think of it, it’s past time to check what’s up with my lungs.

My implant runs a diagnostic check, putting my blood and organs in a ghostly overlay to my vision. Eugh, look. That shouldn’t be there.

There’s another one of my implant’s functions that’s harder to access, and using it means I’ll pay for it tomorrow with a headache and bone-deep tiredness, but I tab it on now. It takes all my focus to guide its nano-healing units to my lungs. After an interval of painful heat deep in my chest, I start to cough. The cough goes on and on, spasming until I want to vomit, but I hawk up nothing, again and again, while the pain grows worse. It shouldn’t be this difficult. Nothing’s happening, and my link to my implant is faltering.

It’s a mercy Dan’s away; he’d never have slept through this.

Finally I hack up a glob of black mucous and some cooked-looking tissue. It sits on the porcelain like a curse. My lungs are on fire and it’s all I can do to stay on my feet. Something’s not right about my implant.

What if it stops?

Then Dan and I will grow old together after all, I guess, yearly becoming greyer and more stooped until we’re claimed by some disgusting illness I could have easily brushed aside back in the Kingdom.

And our children will suffer the same fate.

 

—

 

Dan Calls

The empty side of the bed aches. It needs more than ghosts to fill it. Just before I sleep, Dan calls.

“Hey,” he says, then stops. The phone line hisses. I know his friendly silences. “You keeping warm?”

“Yes.” He’s left us a mountain of firewood. “You? Is it raining where you are?”

“City rain.”

We consider bleak streets and wet traffic together. He’ll be sleeping in the truck’s cab behind the exhibition hall. Then I tell him about the girls’ run-in with Vessa.

Dan’s weary sigh blows down the line. “There’s no point starting a thing about it. You just tell the girls to keep their heads high.”

I used to get wild about how he wouldn’t fight back. Twenty years he’s lived and worked in this town – he was here long before I came – and he might as well be the alien, for all they’ll accept him.

He reads my silence, which is not friendly. “One day they’ll get away from those small-minded bullies.”

If they’re not too crushed.

 

—

 

Prince Evay’s Faithful Shadow 

The girls get themselves off to catch the school bus while I lie in the darkened bedroom with a damp cloth over my forehead. It smells of mould, thanks to the leak in the roof that made the linen cupboard so damp last winter. Fixed now, but the effects linger all about the house.

Of course the Dowager Empress picks this time to harass me. If only my implant’s comms function would break! But no such luck.

You can hear me, can’t you? Evay’s faithful shadow. He still talks about you, you know. I know you’re fond of him.

She thinks she’s holding out a treat. That I’ll step from the outer darkness, saying Yes, yes! Go on!

It doesn’t suit her to remember the truth: that we’ve had this conversation before, long ago back in the Kingdom. She invited me to recline opposite her on a velvet couch, and together we picked at some dishes leftover from an earlier, more formal function. So casual and intimate. I thought I was being folded into her acceptance.

She’d snorted, wryly, dividing a pastry and offering me half, which I took, dazed. She gave me … the Dowager Empress gave me…!

“You’ve made quite an impression. He never talks about his bodyguards like this,” she began. When she’d shared some reminiscences and we’d laughed together about some of Evay’s habits, she put down the bait.

“I think you’re his favourite.”

And when I’d made my stuttering confession, telling her how I loved his wit and high spirits and everything about him, thinking in my fool way to expand her pride with my admiration, she shut the trap, of course. She laughed, head back so the jewels bobbed on that skinny neck I could’ve snapped five ways.

“You young girls! Did you really think Evay would — of course he gets all the girls worked up that way, you’re right that he’s got charisma. But surely you didn’t think?” She gave me a sharp glance that seemed to lick up the hot tears prickling at my lashes. “Oh, so you did! Well, you can stop that right now. You’re just making a fool of yourself.”

Then she patted my hand with poisonous sympathy. “You’re not the first court-girl who’s fallen for him, and I’m sure you won’t be the last. Here, have some cake.”

The Dowager Empress has forgotten that conversation. Now she’s laying out the same bait for me, but I’m a different girl. Woman. Wife.

You were always able to make him see his responsibilities. He’s running wild without you.

Make him talk to me, I rage silently. But the implant has channels, and hers is the only one still working. That’s how I didn’t know that Evay was alive for so many years.

Which is the lie? That Evay had merely charmed me, all those years ago, for his amusement? Or that he’d cared for me then, and cared for me now?

I just want to know the truth, she says.

So do I. I bite into silence.

Is Ares really dead? Or is he still running from his responsibilities?

If I’m ever going to have that conversation with her, it won’t be today. My head is splitting.

Where did you take him? Was it Ares’ plan? When Evay came back alone, you can imagine the rumours. He’d murdered Ares to take the crown for himself, they said.

My head fills with her sigh. Obviously nobody who knows him would think that. Seize power? Evay couldn’t organise a children’s party. Too much effort. He had to be dragged to the coronation!

I bet.

With a mental effort that puts knives in the space behind my eyes, I close down the implant. This time it stays shut.

 

—

 

All morning the sea chews over the same soft word until I fall asleep and dream I’m back in the Kingdom. First I put on the clothes that are sleek and impermeable. Then the jewel-bright ones that drape and trail. Then the little weapons I can conceal about me. There’s a picnic party today. We’ll go out to Thousand Lakes and ride wind-gliders and balloons and other funny mechanical fliers from the Clockwork Age. Most of the guests will be in period costume. My job is to keep an eye on the Prania of Navid’s uncle. He might not be all he seems, and his personal servant has a slink-footed gait that caught my attention at once.

The dream dissolves into worries about an endless corridor of ankle-deep carpet.

“After all, none of us are immortal,” says a voice, and although I try all the doors, the speaker is nowhere to be found.

 

—

 

Eczema

Ella’s not the only one who gets eczema. I shouldn’t have washed up without gloves. My skin’s gone to angry scales. Alone in my bedroom I reach for the implant’s healing networks. Nothing! No flush of hot red pinpoints to show my skin is repairing itself. When I tab on the diagnostics, the images are unclear.

Skin? Suboptimal.

My lungs? Uncertain. Clear of that worrying blotch for now, but for how long?

 

—

There is a phone call from the school

There is a phone call from the school.

Suddenly, acutely, I wish Dan was here.

By the time I get the principal off the line, the school bus is wheezing its hypertensive way to our gate. The girls run up to the house like a war party.

“Show me your work, and I’ll tell you a story,” I say, handing them the pink-flavoured cold drinks that delight them.

Arwen has a sheaf of diagrams. I tune out her laborious explanations (“Then the energy goes down this cable, see?”) while wondering how much, if any, of the principal’s diatribe I’ll share with them.

Ella is learning about perspective. Her drawings of roads receding into half-realised distances suck me into the page. She smiles as I trace my finger to the horizon.

“What’s there?”

“The happy place.”

I look at them. I really try to see them, see past the tangle of hair that needs brushing and the crayon on their nails. “Are you happy at school?”

Silence. Like when you drop a really big stone into water and you think there’s going to be a lot of something, but it’s just swallowed up in one heavy glop.

“You know. With Vessa,” I prod.

“Vessa’s pretty mean,” Arwen says.

“And his friends,” says Ella.

“What do they do?”

Arwen shows her teeth. “I do it back.”

Indeed. Or so the principal said. Somehow it’s more of a crime when Arwen does it. Or Vessa’s general stupidity doesn’t extend to getting caught.

“The girls say mean stuff too,” says Ella.

“Like what?”

There was the sense of things stirring deep underwater. Finally Ella burst out, “They call her goatbutt!”

“They say I smell!”

“We both smell!”

“Ella-smella! Ella-smella!” Arwen chants, but it’s not aimed at her red-eyed sister. “I want to punch them!”

“Stinkhands,” says Ella, holding them up. Her nails are black, chipped, and generally offensive. “They laughed at Arwen, a whole big group of them. What are you wearing? Long shorts, or short longs?”

“That’s not funny,” I say. “What do they mean?”

Arwen thrusts out her legs, and her ankles and half her shins stick out of her pants even though we’ve let out the hems all the way and there’s nothing to the cuffs but fraying. “I hate it! I hate looking like a clown!”

“You don’t look like a clown.” I pull her close and smooth down her hair, which is red and sticks out, all right, like a clown’s.

Ella is curled up on my other side, sob-hiccupping. “I hate it there!” she snuffles.

How had I not seen this? Dan thinks we’re living in some rural idyll, working the land, close to nature, shaping Earth’s bounty into beauty and nourishment. But the girls never voted for it. We all hate chopping firewood and chasing the goats, which are surely the most ornery on all this coast. Ella’s hands curled above the sheets are blotched with the eczema that will crack and bleed all winter.

When they are sleeping I touch their soft cheeks and shudder at how the world will mark them. They deserve better than this.

—

 

Promises from a failing Empire

Does the Dowager Empress ramble at me to relive the times when she could still play Happy Families with her sons? I was part of it, blooming under the civilised chatter and easy laughter, ignorant of the barbs it concealed. But how had she, the consummate politician, missed the fact that her sons hated her? From what I can gather, Evay has passed the years since his return ignoring both his mother and his responsibilities so completely that she’s never found out where we went or what happened.

I can remember you riding fire-darters with the Princesses in Sunland,” the Dowager Empress coos.“You were a marvellous rider. Evay still keeps a stable of them, you know. So I hear. I wonder if you still ride, wherever you are?

Do I? The only thing I ride is a two-seater truck smelling of spilt chocolate milk and crumbs with a heady over-whiff of turpentine and sawdust. But as the Dowager Empress describes that sunny day, the past seizes me so I see it and feel it too. The power of our steeds under us, a thrill. Mine is red and gold, his sleek lizard form all muscle and bright scales and a longing to run.

I imagine my daughters suddenly there with me. How they would love it, how they would laugh! Together we would streak across the endless prairies of emerald moss.

Come back. Evay will listen to you. We just need this marriage to happen to secure the alliances we need. He’d do it if you were here. The Second High Daughter of Inta won’t care, she just wants a grand wedding and an expense account.

I wonder what happened to the First High Daughter that Ares was supposed to marry. Aged out of the market, met an unfortunate end, got a better offer?

You’d be the one he turned to. In private. She sighs pathetically. I’ve been the power behind the throne so long. I’ll show you how it’s done.

According to her wants and will, I bet.

With all Evay’s acting up, he’s still unhappy. He always complained he never got to keep for himself one thing, one person that he wanted, and what was the point of ruling if he couldn’t have that? Maybe he was right. But you’re the answer. You’re the one, Issaya.

What has been going on in the Kingdom? Prince Evay’s refusals go far beyond the capriciousness I remember. What unforgivable thing has his mother done?

Say the word and we’ll fetch you, Issaya.

Oh, but the luxury of that life! Imagine us all head to toe in silk. And my daughters always, always fresh in growth, and me too, the fine lines erased from my face, my limbs always renewed to the first elasticity of youth. A hundred years in strength and beauty. No shadow of sickness, no mourning at the bedside, no long sore hearted goodbyes too soon.

 

—

 

Confidante

The Dowager Empress and her memories are keeping me from sleep. Dan’s side of the bed is cold and empty, and I’m stuck in that distant day when I rode fire-darters with the royal party in Sunland. Evay’s lizard bolted on him, so I chased after. I remember it so clearly! My mount was a sinuous rush of muscular power. We tore through scrub-lichen until we finally caught up with Evay sitting at ease with his fire-darter’s reins loose in his hands. It was a pretty spot, a mossy pool under the tall silvery lichen we called cups-and-fans.

“He’s calmed down quick.” I nodded to his fire-darter.

“Now that I’m not making him run away.” Evay laughed at me, sly and silent, then pulled off his tunic to pour cold water over himself. “You look hot too.”

And I was, in my toughened underlayer and blast-proof over-armour.

“I can’t take it off while I’m on duty.”

“Are you on duty?” He could raise just one eyebrow so I always wanted to put a finger on it and feel how he did it.

“I’m on duty whenever I’m with you.” My voice was stiff, but every other part of me was soft, far too soft.

He knew it too. “I think if I pulled down the fastenings on that tight skin you wear, your breasts would spring out like little buds.” He made a curving movement with his palms. “Longing to be caressed by the spring breeze.”

Oh, they were! But that’s not the reason I remember him so keenly all these years later. Not that, nor the way water trailed over his collarbones to spill down the slabs of his pectorals. Enough time has passed to get over a girl’s infatuation. It was the conversation we had before we rejoined the other riders, once he’d accepted my “no.”

“The last time I came to this place was with my foster brother,” Evay told me. It had been a fostering of convenience, he said, meant to strengthen a political alliance. But they’d grown fast friends, blood brothers in secret. Then one day the Kingdom’s alliances changed, and his best friend was gone with the silent unspeakable night-violence of all such plots. It was old news, Palace gossip while I was still a girl in training. But not to Evay.

His voice was so full of pain. I don’t think he’d ever told anyone else what he’d suffered. His confidences were the first time I felt what I feel when Ella offers me a sleeping bird, a moth, a flower. From then on, though he teased me as much as ever, he also trusted me with his secret self.

I will never know why. I’ll go crazy from not knowing why.

 

—

 

Clarity

It happens the next day. I’m training with knives in the long field, striving for the limberness and power that used to come so naturally. Or not quite naturally: the implant helps. Or used to. Gravity seems crueller with every passing year. I’m losing my struggle with it.

The setting sun is flaring the grass to the same shade as the pinkmoss prairies of Sunland. For a moment my imagination is so strong that I see myself there, lithe as a whip, reining in my fire-darter and waiting for the girls to catch up. They’re riding neck-and-neck. Evay smiles at them. He wouldn’t know anything about children, but he adores them anyway.

Such a stupid fantasy, I should hate myself. I’m leaving Dan out. Do they let him hold the reins sometimes, or carry water for them? But I can’t stop myself seeing the girls riding over the moss-fields like a flash of light, fearless.

Their race is not funny to them. They’re desperate not to be the loser. But it doesn’t matter: whatever happens, here they’re first among equals. There’s no lack of anything, least of all room to fly from each other until they’re ready to be back in each other’s pockets. All the room in the world to grow.

My vision follows me, distracts me as I leap and turn through my exercises. A knife slips, I snatch at it, my ankle turns under me and I’m down among the humble grasses, swearing at the sky.

I reach for my implant’s healing.

Nothing. It’s absolutely dead.

So I must lie there and throb and throb and endure the pain until my ankle will bear my weight. What a way to live.

Above me the sky is bleeding light. If a ship from the Kingdom were to appear right now, what wouldn’t I do to feel once more the ease and power that were mine? In my puff-ankled rage I want to gather up the girls and show them how we were born to dominate the sky. Even I, servant as I was, once had the freedom of the starlanes.

Issaya, comes that relentless whisper.

I see red. My implant won’t heal me but still it receives her voice! I must hear the Dowager Empress plotting and cooing and sighing her regrets while I get older and weaker and sunk in the dirt. There have been a thousand times my resolve might break, but this is finally it. A twist of my mind, and the implant switches to “transmit”.

“My lady?” I say. The habit of respect still clamps my tongue when I might say something sharper.

Issaya! There’s a rush of laughter, almost giddy with relief.

I try to picture the Empress Dowager with a giddy face. Impossible.

Issaya! How long it’s been! Here you are at last! I knew you would remember your duty. That is why I raised you up. You were the best. Tell me everything! Where are you? Are you well? Where is the Crown Prince?

“I’m sorry to have to report…” I begin.

So it’s true… There’s a long pause, and her voice when it starts again is tremulous. I suppose I knew. When Evay wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t admit what happened. But you! I was right to choose you. You’re not afraid to tell the truth.

All these years on Earth I’ve lived a lie. How I’ve longed to speak truly in my own language! But I find I can’t. The long lens of time has distorted everything I know. Everything they did, was it done in seriousness or was it a game? Did they truly love, or hate, or believe that in time they’d make up the difference?

I choose to tell the story as a prank gone bad. The Princes took off on a jaunt, they knew it would annoy her, they meant no harm by it.

Yet my beloved Ares died. Only Evay is left. I need your help. You’ll make him see sense. Tell me where you are. Come to us, and concubine or not, you’ll be honoured. Rows of serving maids all in red bowing, twenty in green to carry your train. You won’t hear a word of reproach from me.

That’s when I know she’s lying. She’s reciting from a story I know too. The Red Queen of Ravelgar, who waited twenty years to get her revenge on the servant who betrayed her family. Once the Red Queen lured her back, the punishment lasted twenty years.

 

—

 

My language has the strongest curses. Strong enough to tell me who I am: faithless, useless, confused, bad in every sense. As I’m grabbing my ankle and spitting black words, I can see how mean my fantasies are. Cheap brass pretending to be gold, or as Dan would see it, thin veneer over plywood. Where is Dan in all this? Living at the Dowager Empress’ sufferance? If he’s allowed to come at all. Do I think that giving our daughters long lives of luxury is any compensation?

Smiling gallant Evay would carry me off to be healed in a trice.

Dan would lay his blunt knowledgeable hands over the pain. He’d have a way of strapping my ankle so I could walk.

 

—

 

The news from the Kingdom is bad. But I owe them nothing.

We have our addictions. Hers is power. Mine is this world, these children, this man.

 

—

 

Return

Most of what Dan took to the trade fair has sold. Before I lean into his arms I take a moment to look into his face. He’s tired but pleased. He smells, like always, of hot sawdust. I want to bury my face in his hard hands that know how to be gentle. Breathe in his resinous smell. It’s the first addiction I learned when he found me, alone and frightened. But there’s no time to enjoy it now; rain is bulleting as we unload the unsold pieces from the truck.

“Was it a good show?” I shout over the slash of falling water.

He pats the pocket of his overalls, grinning. “Lots of orders.”

As we reach the porch I bow to him, hands up as though offering him the keys. Your kingdom, my lord, which I have guarded in your absence.

He’s used to my oddities, and just smiles and ruffles the wet out of my hair.

Deep in TV-land, the girls haven’t heard Dan’s arrival. He leans in their door. “Did you miss me?”

When the girls have stopped jumping and squealing, Arwen picks off a golden wood curl from his hair. “Our Daddy has a crown!” She puts it in Ella’s hair. They giggle.

I leave them to it. I’ll uncrown him later, slowly, in the privacy of our bedroom. Meanwhile there’s the rubbish to take out, and I heft it onto my shoulder. We’ve been lazy and left it and it stinks, ripe rotting fruit and the acrid remains of my last cigarette. The half-full pack is down there too. I won’t smoke again. The Kingdom’s magic has left me and I’ll get no more.

I have only my own imperfect body to love and love with.