Yours, still in possession of functioning internal organs (and also a brand new wank fantasy, if I’m honest),
El
* * *
Dear Sami,
Unexpected side effect of monarchy: I’ve got peasants.
Imagine that said in either the tones of “I’ve got pubic lice” or “I’ve got a firethrower.” The way people speak about them to me is usually one of the two. Unfortunate nuisance, or useful resource!
And look, it wasn’t unexpected, it’s just that what with all the fancy dresses and the terrifyingly beautiful women kneeling and swearing their loyalty, I’d forgotten that this country runs as every country has ever run: on someone’s sweat. They took me on a pre-coronation grand tour of the surrounding villages and farmland today, and there was the kind of nodding-and-smiling you get when shoving a phone camera in someone’s face as they exit a polling booth: I’ll pretend that this isn’t an annoying interruption to my day, because I don’t know how much power you have over me.
Only here they do know.
It all put me in a foul mood, which I took into an afternoon of party planning. Sorry, coronation logistics. Dominica was clearly bored to tears by the entire thing and nearly glared a hole in a saucer when I, foolishly, asked her to help me choose between two near-identical tea services.
“The green pigment of Hurst porcelain is a byproduct of dangerous mining practices and is toxic to the children who do most of the detail work,” she said, with far more repressive and princessy hauteur than I’d managed so far.
The Keeper of the Plate (I wish I was kidding) looked as if someone had farted.
“What?” I said. “Children?”
“Dominica,” said Jonty. “I'm sure it’s understood that Her Highness is not to be bothered with such things until after the coronation.”
Rental property to be left in the condition you found it, in other words, and directed at me.
But... child labor and toxic paint. Come on. I chose the gilt-edged pink plates instead and asked for a report on Hurst porcelain to be prepared by the next morning, and we moved on to menu planning.
At dinner tonight Dominica did her usual iron-faced act, but she also interrupted to usher me away for a Very Important Thing when the Baron Wilhelm spent ten minutes going down the list of his sons and daughters in the clear hope that I might like the sound of one of them and agree to be betrothed on the spot. He was very patronizing and very drunk. Dominica put her hand deliciously in the small of my back as she steered me to my Very Important Thing, which turned out to be complimenting the kitchen staff who’d constructed the enormous chocolate swan. I was handed a small silver axe and asked to decapitate it, which is more violence than I’m accustomed to in my desserts.
Then I took the head away on a plate and prodded it with a tiny fork, trying to convince myself it wasn’t looking at me accusingly. I kept thinking about the children in the fields, and children with paintbrushes. The chocolate was cloying on my tongue.
“Dominica,” I said, because we were alone. “Do you know...”
She stared at me as if I were another gilded saucer, and I heroically managed not to whimper please step on me.
“Do you know why people want to kill me?”
Another long stare. It’s safest for her to think I’m some sort of deeply sheltered sugared-rose-petal of an idiot, who’s simply never thought to ask about whether people might be dying in her mines or suffering to make her pretty tea service.
“Was that a serious question, Your Highness?”
I nodded.
Dominica said, “You’re different from what I expected.”
Which wasn’t an answer to my question, and at that point I was swarmed by Jonty and Moritz and Luisa clamoring for me to come and dance, so we didn’t finish the conversation. But I haven’t forgotten it.
Yours,
El
* * *
Dear Sami,
I’m ninety percent sure someone is reading this, or at least trying to. Remember in high school when I proved my parents were reading my diary? Same tricks apply. And same method of making it a useless endeavor for whoever’s snooping; raise a glass to Nanny Tilda, the one tolerable member of my godawful family, and her work as a secretary in the days when shorthand was a useful skill.
I still remember you learning it from me in two days flat—I was thrilled—and the look on Mr. Dunn’s face when he intercepted a note and tried to read it aloud.
I’m all the way sure that something is going on with Jonty. He keeps changing around my other attendants’ schedules at the last minute and vanishing during meals, and now he’s come down with a sudden attack of piety and begged leave to attend midnight service at the palace chapel, which Honor says is unusual for him.
I got Jonty alone and asked him outright if something was wrong, if the Agency was having issues—if maybe Princess Elinor had fucked up something about my life, and they were trying to keep it from me? But he just put on his most placid and smirky face and told me that I had nothing to worry about.
He’s going to chapel tonight.
I’m going to follow him. (Don’t look at me like that, it’s a mystery, I can’t help it.)
Jonty’s also done a complete about-face on the subject of Dominica, which I find even more suspicious. He still treats her as barely one step above a servant, but he’s now providing more and more excuses for us to be alone together: acting all concerned about the stress of the upcoming coronation, and I look peaky, and wouldn’t I like to rest quietly in my chambers? With my personal guard?
If he were a normal sort of attendant I’d think he’s noticed my epic crush—frankly, it wouldn’t be hard—and is tacitly encouraging the crown princess to have a hot fling before the inevitable political marriage looms.
During one of these The Princess Has A Headache interludes, Dominica was teaching me how to cheat at a card game that’s popular among the guards, and we got onto the subject of how she came to be on my personal guard. She volunteered for it in her twin brother’s place, after he died; they grew up very close, their mother never told them who their father was, and then the brother died last year in a skirmish which—reading between the lines—was the royal army bullying farmers in the northern towns when a blight meant they couldn’t produce the usual crop yield.
“Sending a single unit up against desperate people with farm tools and nothing to lose,” she said, very bitter, looking up to meet my gaze from the winning hand she’d just laid on the table. “Someone’s bright idea.”
I waited for the usual respectful addendum—Forgive my outburst, Your Highness—but she just kept her chin up, as if seeing if I could take it.
I wanted to say, Neither of us are what we’re supposed to be, are we?
Instead I said, “My best friend died a few months ago.”
“Oh?”
“I’d known her since we were—really young. I still feel completely lost when I remember she’s gone.”
Like the world is a different world. A shift for the worse in the multiverse. It hurts so much. I didn’t know how to tell her how much it hurts; I was absolutely sure I didn’t have to. She tilted her head and firelight reflected off the polished sweep of her hair, and her mouth was the softest and most careful I’ve seen it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I'm sorry about your brother.”
...God help me, I think we might be friends now. She answers all my questions and bullies reports out of bureaucrats, and we’re in the midst of a fragmented lecture series entitled Why People Might Want To Kill You. Some of the religious sects approach it from a woo-woo perspective—full of mutterings about bad omens and prophecies—but I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that the revolutionaries, the ones involved in violent social protest, have a real fucking point. Frankly, Ruritania is a mess. And what am I supposed to do when I hear about a local lord tyrannizing a village, or an entire edict slapping down the right of peaceable assembly, or a charity h
ospital in the city about to close for lack of funds?
Answer: write a letter to that lord under my personal seal, and flounce my way into the Privy Council chambers to repeal the edict—changed my mind, so sorry, what a flighty girl I am! I even sold some of the ugliest pieces in my vast jewelry collection to raise money for a personal donation to the hospital, which went into embarrassing royalist spasms and instantly renamed itself in my honor.
Jonty looks more constipated by the day. He can’t exactly contradict me in public, though.
And maybe the Crown Princess Elinor will come back and reverse it all again, but maybe she won’t bother, and at least I’ll have left the rental property with a well-weeded garden and a more nicely arranged linen closet. Better than I found it.
I miss you,
El
* * *
Dear Sami,
Fuck. All right. Fuck.
I roped Dominica into the “go and see what Creepy Jonty is up to” plan, because I’m not a complete moron and there are, as established, plenty of people trying to kill me. Plus it’s very difficult to sneak, as a princess, and I needed an ally.
The main chapel is a glorified wing of the palace, high-ceilinged and hushed. It was dense with candlelight as midnight service began. We were a long way from Jonty’s heels, but saw him slip into a side chapel, and Dominica took hold of my arm when I went to follow him. She pointed at a narrow set of stairs tucked in a corner. I did have a brief moment of wondering if I was about to be thrown down from a height and turned into an exciting corpse in the middle of the mosaic floor.
But the stairs led to a middle gallery shrouded in wicker screens—a kind of service corridor—and when we crouched, we ended up with a reasonable view down into the chapel where Jonty stood. Alone. I’d assumed some sort of conspiratorial assignation. I’d even have settled for a licentious assignation, simply to know what was going on with him, though voyeurism in combination with desecration of a chapel is a bit heavy-handed on the kink even for me.
And then Jonty pulled a multiverse gate opener out of his pocket and fired it up.
Dominica’s hand was still gripping my arm. I assume she didn’t trust me to be quiet. When the gate opened, expanding from speck into perfect circle with a quiet thwop and a shimmer of that sickly yellow-green, her fingers went tight as a vise.
The person who stepped through the gate was me.
Dominica inhaled hard and I dug a warning elbow into her side. It was the Crown Princess Elinor, obviously, wearing my favorite pink skirt and a denim jacket I didn’t recognize. It seemed unfair. Why did she get to come home for a visit?
Then I remembered all the jewelry-selling and edicts and other parts of Ruritania that I’d merrily been tampering with, and swallowed a great big mouthful of something that probably should have been guilt. Wasn’t, though. I don’t regret any of it.
“What is taking so long?” Princess Elinor demanded. “The revolutionaries have been slowly coming to the boil for months. We allowed that Ruys woman to infiltrate the guard, and the general assured me that the rest of them would be vanity placements—next to useless. Everything was poised for a successful attempt. Why isn’t she dead?”
It actually took me a moment. The startled fascination of seeing someone with my face, in my clothes, was still sinking in. Dominica's fingers tightened even further before she snatched them abruptly away. When I looked at her, all I could see was the wide whites of her eyes. Then it hit.
She. She was me. I was meant to be dead.
“Dominica Ruys is the problem, Your Highness,” Jonty was saying, beneath us. “I’ve given her plenty of openings for violence, but she hasn’t taken any of them. I think she’s become friendly with the replacement.”
“Friendly.” Spoken as if holding a dirty tissue at arm’s length. “This is unacceptable, Jonathan.”
Jonty bowed deeply. “There was always a risk of this, Your Highness. The Agency’s contract did stipulate—”
“Oh, do shut up. How much could this tourist really have done in—” Princess Elinor cut herself off and rubbed at her forehead with two genteel fingertips. It was a gesture totally unfamiliar, totally unlike me, and somehow that eased my heartrate down from rabbit levels. “Very well,” she said. “We move to the backup plan. Inform the general. It will take a bit more work, but he should be able to pin her death on the revolutionaries. Produce a convenient confession from someone defiant and idealistic. Then we proceed as planned. Use the excuse to round them all up for deplorable violence and high treason, produce me bruised and shaken but miraculously alive, and the threat is eliminated before the crown is even on my head.”
Jonty closed the gate once the princess had stepped back through, and he left the chapel. My head was spinning and one of my feet was numb and tingling from my crouched position, but I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
The Agency.
What a good business model theirs is, after all, taking money from both sides. Fantasy holidays for young people estranged from their families and gone reckless with irritation and grief. And a useful service for Ruritanian royals all over the multiverse: could you use a doppelganger? No doubt some of them really are just looking for a two-week escape in another world before assuming their royal duties.
But some of the others....
What’s the saying—if you’re not the consumer, you’re the product? Looks like it’s possible to be both.
I braced my hands on the screen and managed to stand up. Neither Dominica nor I spoke as we scurried back to my chambers, but we exchanged looks that said: once we’re safely shut in the bedchamber, it’s going to be a fucking race as to who gets to shout at the other one first.
In the end Dominica won because she cheated by shoving me up against the door the moment it closed and getting her face really close to mine. My brain and my heart and my ladyparts all short-circuited at once in a combination of leftover fear and inappropriate lust. That gave her enough time to speak.
“You’re not the real Princess Elinor?”
“My name is Elinor!” I protested, like an idiot. “And can we agree that I’m not the worst person that you’ve seen tonight wearing this particular face?”
“That’s not what I...” She shook her head, looking frustrated. I’d no idea how much of what we’d seen she’d actually understood, but it turned out: most of it. Because she said, “This is our life, and it’s all just a joke to you? A holiday?”
Solid hit. I swallowed. “It’s not a joke.”
Dominica’s grip on my shoulders loosened. She was still frowning. Emboldened by her pause, I continued: “And don’t think we’re not going to talk about the fact that you were going to kill me.”
“I was not!” she said. “Not after the first three days. My main job was to sound you out; none of us had been able to get close enough, before, and we thought it was good luck that I managed it.” Sounding bitter. She was as much a dupe in this as I was. “We’d only ever judged you—the princess, I mean—on her actions and her speeches, and they were... troubling.”
No doubt. Poisonous entitled little shit, my Ruritanian counterpart. Pity I’m not still working for the senator; she’d have fit in just fine on his staff.
“I was meant to find out if you were a completely lost cause. And if so... yes. I would have done what was necessary to protect Ruritania from your rule.”
“You swore to protect me, on the first night,” I said accusingly. “Before you knew me at all. You knelt down and everything. I remember, because it was unspeakably hot. Was there even any poison?”
Her face colored on hot and then colored some more. “Yes, but I added it to the cup after I’d knocked it away. And there was only a single drop on the napkin I used to wipe your mouth, so that your lips would tingle. It was a quick way to gain your trust.”
“Revolutionary elements,” I sighed. “I was warned, I suppose.” I looked at her more closely. Unknown father. Brother dead under maybe-suspicious circumstances. “Dominica
, are you sure you’re not a princess? A secret heir? I don’t think anything else could surprise me tonight.”
“I am not royalty.” She looked as offended as if I’d accused her of whipping puppies for fun. Which I kind of had, given the standard for royalty in this place.
“Narrative causality,” I said, in apology. “It’s—let me explain.”
I rang for someone to fetch hot chocolate from the kitchens, and Dominica and I sat on my bed and drank and talked and planned, and I was pathetically excited by her bare feet when she deigned to relax so far as to remove her boots and socks. Her sword stayed within arm’s reach even though there was another guard on duty outside; Dominica’s only the daytime shift, usually, and sleeps when I sleep. Maybe she, too, had the words vanity placements still dancing uncomfortably in her mind.
She’s asleep now, on a couch in the outer room. I should try to sleep myself, but my skin is still buzzing. Writing this instead. We have a terrible, foolhardy plan that’s likely to increase the Narrative Causality Index of this universe all by itself, if we pull it off.
I’ll take whatever luck you can send me,
El
* * *
Dear Sami,
I’m writing in a cabin in the mountain woods, with a thick blanket draped over my knees. There’s a view through the small window down to the city, where the lights are dimmed and bells are calling mourning every hour. The Crown Princess Elinor is missing, presumed dead.
Sometimes you have to shove a stick into the trap and let it slam shut. Or in this case: if a real assassination attempt is on the horizon, sometimes you have to let a fake one happen first. Dominica got quick word to her revolutionary allies, and they staged a very dramatic scene with an explosion on a barge. Thank fuck for just enough years spent in Scouts that I learned how to swim in heavy clothes.
As expected, the general and everyone else in Princess Elinor’s conspiratorial faction raised a great fuss and called for the arrest of all known revolutionaries, but given said revolutionaries were pre-warned, Dominica tells me they’ve all vanished into countryside retreats like this one by now. And it’s nighttime, and winter. Nobody wants to be racing around in the dark when they think they’ve had victory handed to them unexpectedly.
Silk & Steel Page 6
