The King’s mouth opened. The Consort kicked him, visibly this time, and his jaw clicked shut.
The Vizier heard himself speak. “You’re saying—you’re saying you are the reason the Thorne line runs to boys?”
The cobalt fairy’s cloak rearranged itself in what might have been a shrug, or soundless laughter, or the first gestures of a world-ending curse. “You thought it was numerical coincidence? Two hundred years, and not one daughter. That can only be magic.”
The King stepped out of range of the Consort’s beskirted feet. His knuckles were white on the pommel of the ceremonial sword. “Then why change it now? Why change it for me?”
The first fairy looked at the Consort. “A mother’s wish is its own magic.”
The Consort blanched. The King turned and stared, but the Consort wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the thirteenth fairy.
“Please. Don’t kill her. Don’t curse her. Help her.”
“I can’t be kind. It’s not my nature.” The thirteenth fairy’s eyes were sad above her jagged smile. She leaned over the crib.
The Consort snatched for the King’s ceremonial sword. He grabbed her wrist with both hands.
“Wait. Stop!” he shouted, which was equally applicable to both the fairy and the Consort, and equally ineffective.
And so no one heard the thirteenth fairy’s wish except the other twelve, and Rory herself.
The thirteenth fairy said this: “I curse you, Rory Thorne: to find no comfort in illusion or platitude, and to know truth when you hear it, no matter how well concealed by flattery, custom, or mendacity.”
Then she straightened. She looked at the twelfth fairy, and her eyes were hard and hopeful. “Your turn, sister.”
The littlest fairy nodded. She picked up her skirts, dodged a stray foot, and darted up to the cradle. She hooked her fingers over the side and tilted up on her toes. She leaned down and planted the tiniest of kisses on the baby’s forehead.
“Well. My sister’s ruined any chance you have at easy happiness, unless you sustain a massive head injury in your childhood. How about it?” The fairy paused.
Rory blinked. Then her face collapsed in on itself like a dying star. Her mouth stretched into an event horizon of preverbal rage.
“Good,” said the fairy. “I didn’t think so.” She wiggled her fingers, and a cascade of sparks rained down into the crib. The sparks turned into tiny butterflies (homeworld, not local) and fluttered around the baby’s head.
Rory stopped mid-squawk.
The littlest fairy smiled. “All right, then. Here is my gift, little princess: that you will always see a path through difficulties, and you will always find the courage to take it.”
Which is how Rory Thorne became the woman who destroyed the multiverse.
CHAPTER TWO
Of Skinned Knees And Birthdays
Human beings are fascinated with time. They measure it out according to celestial motion and ecclesiastical cycles, parse it into increments that accrete or divide to bracket the experience of living.
And they tell stories about its passage, the speed of which is said to vary according to the quality of the experience. The reality, of course, is that time, for all its relativity and proportional relationship to velocity and gravity and physics, marches along at exactly the same pace. Moments of heartbreak and joy, birthday parties and skinned knees, are all temporally equivalent, slotted into weighted categories of memory labeled unpleasant and pleasant. Sometimes, those categories overlap—a skinned knee might happen during a birthday party—injecting a brief tragedy into a much longer joyous experience.
To Rory Thorne, however, the brevity of the skinned knee would have been pure proof that interesting moments passed too quickly. To her, a skinned knee meant an adventure; but a birthday party meant an ordeal, involving a guest list as long as Messer Rupert’s leg (she printed it once, to check), most of whom were adults, all of whom were invited for her father or mother’s sake. The few children in attendance, like Rory herself, were stuffed into clothing more suited to formal events than enjoyment. There was cake, yes, but it came at the terrible cost of sitting still.
One did not acquire skinned knees by sitting still. One did not, in Rory’s experience, accomplish anything by sitting still except a sore bottom, especially at birthday parties. The great carved chairs to which she was consigned during formal meals had been made for adults, and her chair—carved with long-snouted bushy-tailed beasts with triangle ears and lolling tongues—had grooves in the seat that rubbed her in exactly the wrong places. Squirming didn’t help. Squirming, in fact, attracted attention. Deme Grytt, sometimes, would flash her a sympathetic unsmile and shake her head very slightly. Or Messer Rupert would gather his eyebrows over his nose and draw his lips into a little wrinkled raisin of unhappiness and whisper at her to sit still.
At least he said please.
She had asked, at her fourth birthday party, why they had to sit in these chairs.
Her father had leaned across the table—so he could see past the Duke of Somewhere and the See-Eee-Oh of Something and some ambassador who looked human and therefore boring—to look down at the end where his daughter’s head only just cleared the table’s rim. And he had said, in his too-slow, too-loud voice that he always used on her in front of company,
“Because they’re family heirlooms, my dear.” And he’d smiled. All teeth. No eyes. “Do you know what that means?”
Rory was a smart child. The fairies had seen to that. So although she did not know what an heirloom was, she did recognize when someone else wished she’d be quiet and disappear into the scenery. She knew her father’s smile meant shut up, Rory. She also knew the other adults to whom she was not related and with whom she did not live were amused by her question. The See-Eee-Oh was smirking, and the ambassador leaned sideways and whispered something to her nearest companion, who snickered.
One of the gifts Rory had not gotten from the fairies was a particular eagerness to please.
“No, Daddy. That’s not right.” She knew she was talking too loudly for the table, but she had to be louder than the ambassador. “You want people to be as miserable at these things as you are.”
The See-Eee-Oh laughed out loud. The ambassador covered her mouth and coughed. The King’s eyes rounded like eggs and his cheeks purpled like that vegetable Rory didn’t like except when it was fried.
She hadn’t gotten any cake, that birthday. And she’d learned there were more ways to get a sore bottom than sitting in uncomfortable chairs. The next year, she didn’t ask about chairs or customs. Smile, Deme Grytt said. Say nothing. Messer Rupert had sneaked her tablet to dinner, in the endless folds of his court robes, and slipped it to her so she could read under the table, if she propped her napkin up just so.