Once a Princess

by Sherwood Smith

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Collection took up by the crew.” He blushed even more, if that was humanly possible.

  I took pity on him and climbed out, confining myself to a little wave, and I set out to weave my way through all the busy people on the pier.

  The long pier led me past the capital ships pulled alongside. One had to be the navy’s flagship. I kept my head low, scarcely looking at it, though no one paid me the least heed. But I felt as if eyes crawled over me like bugs as I hustled past its length.

  I slowed a little when passing the prince’s yacht. In beautiful wood carved with laughing dolphins all round the rail was embroidered the power and arrogance of princes. The yacht was a work of art, and it had the best docking spot in the entire harbour. Yet it was obviously empty of any royal butt sitting in its exquisite cabin. Its crew looked bored as they polished the gleaming wood and flemished their ropes.

  I forgot about yachts and princes as the crowd thickened. I’d reached the quay at last. I was finally on my own.

  Ellir was filled with warriors. This was a dismaying sight, all that brown, as they strolled in the crowd. Their hands were usually filled with pastries or drink, but everyone of them carried a full complement of weaponry.

  Whether they were on guard, about to embark in the navy ships I could see anchored in neat rows along the inner bay, or on leave for the academy games, I did not know, and I did not want to find out. I gave myself a mental shakedown as I trod down the warped wooden boards of the long pier, trying to get my land balance back. A good look around made it clear that civilian sailors dress in every imaginable style, tending toward the loud when on shore looking for fun. The career doesn’t select for the delicate and dainty, so there were plenty of women of my size around.

  The one thing that I feared might catch attention was my gear bag. Though I’d rolled it to be as small as possible, the faint sheen of its plastic weave could draw the eye of anyone searching for the unusual, and so I stopped at the very first vendor who was selling baskets and paid what I suspect was a thumpingly dishonest price for a scratchy, loosely woven affair that I soon hated, but it did its job by successfully hiding the gear bag stuffed into its depths.

  This purchase also used up most of the coins in the bag. Either the basket maker was an outright thief or I’d been given enough to cover a day or two’s meals. But that made sense. Sailors would figure a day or so on land, and then one hires out for one’s next voyage.

  Or maybe the purple and orange pirate would give me some more of his ill gotten gains when he met me at the Gold to tell me the local news. Did I want handouts? No. I would cash in some of my gems, or work my way along the road. But I was curious about what he might bring.

  For now, I’d just enjoy the market street, which wound in a kind of slightly skewed crescent along the foot of the rocky ridge. Ellir Harbour, overlooked by the combination academy and garrison, was a jumble of old stone buildings and jerry-rigged tents and claptrap houses, most of the latter painted with bright colours. The stone buildings housed the long term businesses, most sea related. The rest was seasonal trade, set up in colourful stalls and tents between the dilapidated buildings. Half of the market noise as was from these people singing, shouting waving bright colours or sending enticing smells to lure the crowds who made up the other half of the noise as they strolled by, talking looking laughing, flirting, eating, drinking and shopping.

  Once chasing. “Thief!” someone cried and the shout was taken up around me.

  Moments later the hapless pickpocket was brought down by a pair of brown tunicked warriors, almost at my feet. Who would be that stupid or that desperate to try thievery right under the view of that intimidating castle.

  I never saw the culprits face. A crowd of guards immediately surrounded him or her, and muscled the miscreant away presumable to some lockup. It began a train of thought. What kind of courts did they have, and jails, and sentences? I’d asked my mother a few questions over the years but Canardan’s versions of social government might be different from the Zhavalieshins’.

  It was my growling stomach that shifted my attention from the general scene to the specific. I found the moneychangers directly below the gates to the castle, which ought to dissuade all but the most foolhardy and reckless of thieves. There were several to choose from. I drifted along until I spotted a moneychanger where not only coinage was being changed, but valuables of various sorts, including gemstones.

  For the first time in all those years, I pulled out one of the more modest gems from the box and brought it to the biggest tent, where a short, thin, stylishly dressed young woman about my age seemed to be handling stones of all kinds. I laid it down, my fake story all ready.

  She squinted briefly at it. “Colendi cut, what we call the deep water sapphire.” She named a price.

  I’d already noticed that though bargaining took place in many of the market stalls here there was a standard price for pretty much everything. Not wanting to call attention to myself in any way, I agreed. She counted out three twelve sided gold coins fashioned after Sartoran coins, and eleven silver six siders, then a handful of thin hammered coppers.

  I stuffed them all into the bag the ship’s boy had given me, and returned to my shopping. Now to see what this money was actually worth.

  The sun was directly overhead when I finished buying a good pair of shoes, cotton lined greenweave that the cobbler adjusted to fit my feet exactly. I traded in the old mocs, which would be recycled.

  Hunger forced me up the street toward the Gold Inn which was large, loud and the first smells that reached my nose were baking cornbread and braised onions. My stomach growled as I passed inside. It was decorated by sailors—deck prisms in the walls, the heavy, pointed glass gleaming with refracted colours which banished indoor gloom. Old helm wheels high on the walls, bulkhead curving between the alcoves, boots divided off by fences mad of warn oars. The chairs round the smaller tables were all cut from barrels and cushioned with old sailcloth.

  The heavy heady scent of fresh brewed beer underlay the scent of brick oven baked chicken pies and bread, and some kind of pepper and garlic savoury fish chowder. I sat at a long plank table on which cadets and sailors had caved initials and witty sayings I at least three alphabets. A party of weavers took up most of the table, well into a celebration for newlyweds, judging from the toasts.

  The waiter a kid of about ten, tapped me on the arm. “What’ll I bring you?

  “Cornbread with honey-butter, a dark ale and fish chowder,” I said.

  He dashed away as one of the weavers made an obscure joke about damask and brocade, and everyone laughed.

  Two toasts later the boy returned with a tray on which the cornbread steamed, fresh from the oven. The weavers began singing a plaintive song in Sartoran triplets about a wandering silk-weaver seeking the source of “rainbow colours true”.

  A sip of a spicy almost raisin-flavoured ale, a bite of sweet cornbread and I was lifting my spoon to try the chowder when a brief glimpse of a familiar face in the crowd caused me to pause, spoon in the air.

  Elva? No couldn’t be...

  She vanished behind a crowd of sailors who suddenly decided to dance a heel toe stomper right there in the middle of the floor. I dropped my spoon when Elva reappeared, braids flying, brown eyes stark in a face so pale I thought she was going to be sick.

  “There you are.” She clutched my shoulder. “Get out. Get out.”

  “What?” I looked down at my food. “what’s wrong with the...” she pulled my wrist, sending my spoon flying.

  “You’ve got to run. Now.”

  “Why?” I snapped, getting up to retrieve the spoon.

  “Because I followed Owl. I had my suspicions.” She made a terrible face. “He met up with him at the stable..”

  “Him, Zathdar?” I stared at the brewery, but just saw barrels of ale.

  “Zathdar!” Elva repeated scornfully. “Oh you’re in for a storm, right enough, if you don’
t move.” She dropped onto the bench next to me and muttered into my ear, “It was a stable, at the other end of town. Up behind the old castle and the warehouses. I saw him. They didn’t see me.”

  “Saw who? Owl or Zathdar?”

  “Both. But he he he ditched the bandana. And the horsehair wig. He’s got white hair the brown velvet with the king’s cup. Crown over it. Diamond...” she touched her ear where Zathdar had worn his pirate battle earing.

  Heat flooded through me, followed by a sudden and dreadful chill.

  “Don’t you see?” Elva looked wildly around, and while the unheeding weavers sang of love and loss, she growled, “He’s Prince Jehan Merindar.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “I thought so too. But I saw him. He went straight to the castle. The guards on the walls gave him the royal salute, clear as anything.”

  Whoosh! My first reaction was the self righteous fire hot anger of betrayal followed by the sickening almost lip numbing humiliation that comes of realizing one’s been taken for a fool.

  I grabbed my basket and followed her between the tables the singing weavers’ plaintive melody blending into the heedless roar of voices behind me.

  Out in the street glare and the rising dust of early afternoon nearly blinded us. I blinked breathing hard as silhouettes resolved into people, horses, carts, dogs even a family of geese squawking and flapping. Children danced in a ring to the flitting summer melody played upon a pipe. In front of the last booth before to open road, several women teased a handsome fellow in a brown tunic who seemed to be trying to buy an embroidered scarf.

  All oblivious most of them happy, and very much in the way as I scanned and scanned resisting Elva’s tugs. “This way,” she urged.

  I faced her earnest anxious brown eyes and knew that Devli waited somewhere, a transfer token in hand. “Thank you for the rescue. But I think I’ll take off on my own.”

  Her face reddened. “It’s Devli isn’t it? You don’t trust him.”

  “I’m sorry Elva, but I just don’t trust those giving him orders,” I murmured as a cart full of melons rolled toward us, shoved by a brawny fellow not watching where he was going.

  She moved to one side. I ducked to the other side of it so I wouldn’t have to see her reaction and dove into a pack of sailors, several of them wearing battered floppy hats much like mine. I still felt outlined in neon, though so far the few guys in brown tunics around were not searching, merely sauntering.

  All right Sash you got what you wanted. You’re alone. Pick a direction.

  My pack of sailors headed toward the brewery. I stayed with them as far as the door. That sense of being watched intensified, so I slunk round the back of the Gold’s stables and peered out, scanning with care.

  The marketplace lay to my left, a long street of tent booths below the high palisade of sheer rock on which the garrison and academy bulked. The market street crested to the right, below the bluffs on which the academy barracks ended in the furthermost tower.

  The road on the other side of the crest stretched in a lazy arc paralleling the rocky shore against which long breakers creamed and crashed. Lines of wagons inched their way in a string that curved through mellow grassy fields to the horizon, the only tree in sight a single clump of willow growing beside a stream winding toward the shore.

  No cover whatsoever, but at least that road lay outside Ellir and its bazillion warriors.

  I slipped away from my crummy hiding place and headed straight for that high pint, beyond which freedom beckoned.

  But right before I reached the top of the market street, not five hundred yards from the low stone wall that marked the boundary of the city, my shoulder blades itched. My danger sense had gone into the red zone, urging me to turn and fight.

  I just knew I would hate what I saw. But I had to look.

  Past the dancing children. Past the strolling flirts the bargaining marketers with their baskets, past unheeding cadets and warrior obviously on leave, past the dogs and geese and sailors. I stared straight into a pair of familiar blue eyes, now framed by drifting white hair.

  Too late.

  Too late, but I turned on my toes and sprinted for freedom, despite the faster footsteps behind me... much faster.

  When I reached the top of the road the footsteps had almost caught up so I plunged into a crowd of prentices in one last attempt to shake my pursuer, an risked a glance back.

  The stinker was maybe ten steps away. He hadn’t yelled and though some of the people he pushed past turned to stare, and one or two began to call out in protest, stared then quickly backed away no one interfered.

  The oblivious prentices didn’t part for me they shoved past and stampeded toward the brewery, leaving me alone to face the enemy.

  Prince Jehan caught up in an easy step and stopped an arm’s length from me.

  So for a long measureless moment we stood there facing one another at the top of Market Street, the last of the prentices flowing around us with exasperated looks and a wry comment or two that neither of us paid the least attention to.

  All the things I could say chased through my mind. You liar! Go ahead and strike me down, see if I care! And perhaps most useless of all, I hate you! But I said nothing for a breathless anguished eterninty, as the marked crowd walked strolled sauntered pushed shoved talked and and sighed past us.

  Prince Hurricane stood there, waiting for me to speak.

  And so I said “you must really love making everyone look like a fool.”

  He flushed as if I’d slapped him. But then flicked his head, as if repudiating my words, and retorted, “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh so you’re not a liar and poser?”

  “I never lied...”

  “No, Prince my family name is Jervaes?”

  “But it is.” He spread his hands and flushed again when I took a quick step back. “My mother’s name.”

  “Oh.” Well that was a nasty little oopsie, but I ploughed right past. “so you managed to tell one bit of truth. What did it cost you?” take that!

  “Listen just listen.” He half raised a hand in a gesture of appeal, but when I stepped back he dropped it to his side. His side at which he wore a sword. And a knife through is sash. Neither of them touched, much less brandished. Nor had he whistled up his brown coated minions. There were certainly plenty of them about.

  But I couldn’t bear another terrible sickening sense of betrayal, and so without examining the motivation behind that I said “No”

  His eyelids lifted slightly, giving me half a heartbeats warning. Before I could draw a beath to move, or even to yell, a thick winter quilt blotted out the sun and my world was perforce confined to hot enshrouding darkness that smelled distinctly of mold.

  I began to struggle, though it was futile, writhing and kicking until a familiar voice muttered next to my head. “C’mon, Princess. It’s your old friend Owl. You can kick me all you like when we get back to the ship. If you can reach me. But you can’t be allowed to get us all killed.”

  Killed? Say what?

  I stopped struggling as I considered that, but before I could decide I didn’t believe it something efficiently wrapped me up into a giant cocoon and thump! I fell onto something wooden. Thighs thudded round me and a horse clopped. I was in a cart which jerked and rumbled at a sedate pace back down the street, my face streaming with sweat in that suffocating quilt. I was so tightly wrapped it was useless to yell. No one could hear me anyway.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Atanial was considerably surprised to receive a visitor.

  This time it wasn’t night but morning. She’d done a long session of yoga and had emerged from her bath to discover Ananda entering her room through the servants door.

  “Please pardon the intrusion. But this is the only way to have private converse.”

  Atanial wondered how the queen got past the guards on the stairs then suspected illusion magic. More important was the timing of this visit.
“I certainly didn’t have privacy during my intimate little dinner with the king, did I?” she asked with some irony.

  Ananda laughed softly. “privacy? With the entire troupe of players watching the only two members of the audience and one of them is busy staring at the other, caressing her neck? Watched also by the servants who had to stand there all evening with their wine and plates of uneaten food and unused cushions?”

  Atanial had hopped onto her bed. She leaned back against her pillows and crossed her arms. “So I take it I passed some kind of test, and you are here for...”

  Ananda’s voice was sad. “there was no test. I would have come anyway if you had been here alone. Whatever happened. But my message would have been warnings. I am going away, Atanial.”

  Atanial’s nerves prickled with the cold chill of the unexpected. “Going away, as in..”

  “Transferring to a place of safety. What none except the prince knows is that his mother Feraeth Jervaes and I have been friends for many years.”

  Atanial whistled. “Sit down. Tell me more, please.”

  Ananda perched on the edge of the bed. “You know that the Morvende do not have what we would call a government. But they do have leaders whose wisdom inclined others to listen. One such is Tarael of the Eleyad Goliath on the northern continent. He has seen in dreams that Nosunder will move against the world soon”

  Norsunder. Atanial had never quite gotten a grip on the whole concept of a place beyond space and time, controlled by inimical minds who seemed to have lived for thousands of years. She’d defined it to Sasha as a kind of hell, one mostly created by, run by and joined by humans who really really wanted power. Including she was told, the power to live forever. “Soon? As in days? Weeks?”

  “Time is different for the Morvende. It’s useless to ask that question, because they cannot answer with any precision. But it could be this year or next. Or in five. Probably not as long as ten, though, Feraeth told me judging from some troubling events in the world elsewhere. I waited and waited but I think...” Ananda paused, her profile briefly turned toward the window. The sunlight slanting in touched her fizzy hair into a halo of gold.