That had worked for her sixth birthday, too, only that year it had been her mother who’d smuggled the tablet to the table, when her father had accused Rupert and Grytt of conspiracy.
This year, her seventh birthday, the tablet had been forbidden outright, and Mama was very pregnant and very grumpy and no help at all. The third prong of the triumvirate of awful came when Deme Grytt stuffed Rory into a dress with laces and boning and a much higher potential for discomfort than the chairs presented.
Rory was not happy. “I command you to stop this, Grytt!”
Deme Grytt had been her mother’s body-maid, before she’d come to
protect
serve Rory. She knew all about stupid clothing. She also knew all about tempers.
“Hold still, Princess. And you will call me Deme until you’re big enough to beat me at spear-throwing.”
Rory thought it would be years before she could physically best Deme Grytt at anything except hiding in small spaces. She tried a new approach. Made her eyes big and sad and said, high-voiced, “But Deme, I hate this thing. It’s stupid and tight and uncomfortable. Daddy must hate me.”
“Yes, it is, and no, he doesn’t.” Deme Grytt made it a practice never to lie to Rory. She never lied to Rory’s mother, either, but she had come to the Consort’s service when they were both almost adults, so it was a matter of respect between them. The Princess, however, had an uncanny knack for picking out unspoken truths, and a very long memory for people who lied to her. So Grytt took a wrap on the laces, and a deeper breath.
“It’s meant to be all those things, but mostly it’s supposed to make you look pretty. Now, hold your breath. Okay. Wait. There. You can breathe, now.”
“No, I can’t.” Rory frowned past Deme Grytt at the girl in the mirror. She looked like a sausage, in that stupid dress. “Pretty for who?”
“For whom. Some princeling and his self-important father.” Mirror-Grytt made a face at mirror-Rory. “Probably some boy they’ll want you to marry, someday, for galactic peace and favorable trade routes.”
“My father will want that, you mean. Mama wouldn’t.”
Grytt sighed. There was honesty, and then there was actually encouraging mutiny. A good body-maid—one who had served the Consort for a dozen years, in this place—knew that the former was a rare gift, and the latter was no favor. “Be nice, Princess. He’s about your age, and I bet he’s not a bit happier to be here.”
* * *
• • •
Rory took exactly two seconds to decide, upon meeting said prince, that Grytt was right. Prince Ivar was
terrified
“—pleased to meet you, and—”
I want Mr. Buttons
“—happy to be here—”
and as uncomfortable in his stiff fancy clothes as she was. He was not a bit pretty, either. He was starched and round and his hair was slicked dark and oily as a tree-rat.
Rory was wiser than she had been, three years ago. She took a fistful of skirt on each side and folded her knees like the paper animals Messer Rupert had taught her to make during Holy Day gatherings.
“I am very pleased to meet you, Prince Ivar.” That was a lie, but it was the kind Messer Rupert called being tactful and the kind Grytt called good strategy. Rory thought they were both right. She also thought that if she’d told Ivar that he was really scared of her and that he wanted—what was a Mr. Buttons? must ask Messer Rupert—he might cry.
Rory herself didn’t cry. Crying was too much like giving up. And she didn’t much like other people doing it, either.
Ivar did not cry. Instead, he made fists of his own hands and stared hard at the floor. His body-man, a small round hairless fellow with deep reddish scars along one side of his face and an artificial eye that glowed like plasma, leaned down and whispered something in the prince’s ear.
Rory stared at the top of the body-man’s head. At the wrinkled flesh where the implant slipped under skin and into bone. The circuits traced under his skin, little metal veins that disappeared under the stiff starch of his collar. She was no stranger to mecha implants. Deme Grytt had some: bolts on her forearm, a plug at the base of her right ear. Lots of people did. So it was not squeamishness or disgust that made Rory recoil from the body-man, or that made her want to get as far away from him as she could manage.
It was fear. Not the sort that crept up on her in the dark, at night, while the palace muttered to itself and shadows against the wall took on the exact shape of the monster from the ’cast she wasn’t supposed to have watched so close to bedtime. This was the kind of fear that made koi scatter into the center of the pool and dive under the broad razor-leaves when a dayowl’s shadow crossed the water. Threat. A sudden strike, a more sudden end.
An older Rory might have hesitated, or examined the impulse. Fortunately for Rory, Ivar, and the universe, Rory was young and quicker-witted than she was wise. She grabbed Ivar’s hand, which felt a little bit like a dead fish. She wanted to drop it, but she didn’t.
“We have a koi pond,” she blurted. “Would you like to see it, Prince Ivar? We can even feed them. They’re very tame.”
Ivar hadn’t decided yet what he should do about his imprisoned hand. He turned an alarming shade of pink. He held the contaminated arm out stiffly, as if he were trying to get as far away from it as possible. At her question, his face had a tiny seizure.
She thought it was supposed to be a smile.
“Um. If it, ah, pleases my, ah, lady.”
No. He was terrified. Of koi. She knew the impatience showed on her face. Heard it in her own voice. Messer Rupert would have been
embarrassed to death, my Princess
mortified, but he wasn’t here.
“Koi are fish, Ivar. You know. Fish? They live in water. Swim around?” She wiggled the fingers of her free hand. Ivar stared at her, very much like the baby koi did. Round. Unblinking. Unaware of the dangers of dayowls.
She seized on a sudden idea. “They’re animals. Like tree-rats, only wet all the time.”
Ivar brightened. He looked at his body-man, who seemed to consider. Head cocked, eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance. A man thinking, except he looked more like one of the guards getting orders from the little earbuds. He was listening to something, or someone, only he had no earbuds.
Rory’s mind shot along half a dozen new vectors. What could she say to convince him, could she just drag this Ivar after her, should she leave him, what could she actually do—
But the body-man refocused on them both. Smiled, a more natural expression on his face than on Ivar’s, and said, “Go along, your Highness.” Then he turned to Rory and bent double at the waist: “It was very fine to have met you, Princess.”