An Imperfect Princess (20 page)

Eneria shook her
head.  “Konkast is another world, a militaristic empire of high technology. 
They are not Lathlian, and not related to the Lathlians, unless you count one
incomplete marriage to my cousin Vazeria.” 

“So what is to
be done?” 

“We have to
leave,” Aijo said firmly from her jar.  “Every moment we stay is a moment we
endanger you.  We’ll find a cave or something to hide out in where they can’t
detect me.”

“No,” James
disagreed sharply, the stubborn jut of his jaw indicated that he would brook no
argument.  “I have agreed to offer you my protection.  You are not going
anywhere.”

“James, you don’t
understand.”  Eneria got up and paced, agitated.  “The Konkastians have weapons
that can vaporize you from miles away.  They will stop at nothing to kill me. 
I am the only witness to the cold blooded murder of Gordani and Everiza d’Tar
by Prince Xyling.  If they kill me, they can whitewash history as they see
fit.  I’m also the only witness alive to confirm that the wedding was
incomplete; Vaz never said her vows, and her signature on their certificate was
a forgery, with her fingerprint included while she was passed out entirely.”

“And there is
nothing you can do?”  Clarissa rubbed her temples, trying to comprehend what
was going on around her.

She shook her
head sadly.  “I can leave.  They can’t detect Aijo anymore, so maybe I can
blend in elsewhere.  I am only grateful that we did not give out my real name,
or else I’d be dead.  But they can still find out I am here.”

James gripped
the back of his chair, his face impassive. “Clarissa, Marilyn, you are
dismissed.  I need to talk to Princess Eneria alone.”

Clarissa looked
grateful to leave.  Her world had just been completely inverted, and she needed
to sleep off the effects of the alcohol before she could make sense of it all. 
Marilyn was a bit more disappointed, but left the room, and it was only after
they left that she realized Marilyn had taken a trapped Aijo with her.

She was actually
alone
with James, once again.

“I have to go,”
she repeated, crossing her arms stubbornly.  “I will not endanger anyone in
your house anymore.”

He looked at her,
a pained expression on his young, noble face.  “Enny, do you think that when I’ve
finally found a woman like you, I’m going to let her go that easily?”

She sat very
still, forcing herself to breathe.  She wanted to cry again, but this time she
was as dry eyed as Vaz had been on her wedding day.  She had allowed herself
that weakness once in his arms.  She would not allow it again.

“You will have
to, James,” she said softly.  She stood up and embraced him.  The tingling toes
and the electricity were still there, but this time they didn’t bother her. 
She rather enjoyed the sensation. “Do you think when I have finally found a man
smarter than I am, I’m going to let the enemies of my world kill him?”  She
cupped her hand on one of his cheeks and kissed him gently on the other.  Then
she tried to pull away, but he held her fast.

“Enny,” he said
hoarsely.  “I don’t want you to go.”

And then he
kissed her full on the mouth.  It was the kiss she had been waiting for in his
study back in Cornwall, full and passionate.  He gripped her arms, and she
melted against him.

If she was going
to have to leave the man she loved, she thought miserably, then she would
demand one sweet memory to take with her.

He broke away
from her just long enough to lock the library door, and then went back to the
business of kissing her.

“I have wanted
to make love to you for weeks,” he murmured against her mouth.

This was
madness.  It was completely improper to both of their cultures.  She ought to
stop this right away and go back her things and go back to Cornwall and camp
out under the lead shielding until Vaz came to rescue her.

“I hope our
anatomy is compatible,” was all she could think to say as he fondled one of her
breasts.  She looked at his hand, cupping her through her dress, and whimpered
as he brushed his thumb over the sensitive nipple.

“Oh, I believe
it is,” he said, pressing his hips against hers.  She was shocked at the sudden
change; he was firm against her body, and the hardness caused her toe tingling
to intensify dramatically.

“You look like
you’re about to pop the seams on your trousers. They fit so well before,” she
said lamely.  “I suppose they weren’t designed for this.”

“It’s very
uncivilized,” he agreed, and he began to carefully undo the buttons on his
shirt.  She watched in fascination as he carefully undid his cravat, then
disrobed, exposing a solid muscular chest with a crisp pattern of dark hairs. 

She reached out
to touch them, fascinated.  Lathlians were only lightly dotted with hairs; she
didn’t think her brother had any chest hair at all.  It was so primitive... and
so exciting, too.

He stripped down
to his pantaloons before he began to undress her.  He deftly undid the many
buttons on the back of her morning dress and kissed the nape of her neck, not
daring to take her long hair down from the complex coif Anna had pulled it
into. 

She felt a
little exposed as he carefully undid the stays on her corset.  The exoskeleton
was a pain to get into, but she was grateful to be out of it and exposed to his
eyes. As he stood there admiring her, she began to wonder if she had been right
to be jealous of Vaz’s lithe body all this time.

Then he kissed
her hungrily again, lifting her up to sit on one of the library tables.  He
pressed her down, his hard member demanding attention from her.  Instinctively,
she wrapped her legs around his hips and tried to pull him even closer through
their remaining garments.

“You have a very
unfashionable chest,” he murmured against the plump globes.  “That is to say,
you are too well endowed and all the ladies who determine what is fashionable
are jealous of you.”

“I never really
thought about them as anything more than a nuisance,” she said, as he slipped
one hand down her belly into her drawers, creeping toward the junction in her
thighs.  “I have trouble finding underclothing that fits–oh!”

He had found the
nub of tender flesh between her legs, and she gasped at the intimate contact.
He began to kiss his way down her stomach, lower and lower, until he pulled her
drawers off entirely, leaving her naked before his eyes.  Then he began to kiss
her in a place she hadn’t even known could be kissed.     

Eneria was
beyond coherent thought as he began to tease and stroke her woman’s core with
his tongue.  Oh, they had compatible anatomy, all right.  He knew exactly what
she wanted, even if she had never before been able to describe it.

“I’ve never done
this before,” she said in between breathless gasps.

“You’d never
even been kissed before either,” he chided, returning to his work.  She threw
her arms wide and gripped the edge of the library table as he brought her to
the edge.  She squeezed her eyes closed, wanting the torment to stop, but
afraid what would happen when it did.

Suddenly, a
rushing feeling blossomed from inside her, and she felt herself cresting.   She
moaned, unable to stop herself, and breathed heavily for a few moments,
completely dazed.

So
that
is what all that toe tingling is leading up to, she decided, once she could
think again.

“We’ve only just
begun, princess,” James said, smiling in satisfaction as she started to recover
her senses.

He slid her up
further on the table and held himself above her.  She reached up with one hand
to touch his cheek, not daring to believe this was real. 

He eased himself
into her, gently, and Eneria hissed a little when her final membrane was
breached, but it wasn’t so bad.  It stung a little, and he rested inside her
like that, letting her get used to the fullness.

“Love me,” she
murmured, and he began to move again.

It was
beautiful, she thought, as he slid inside her and out, staring over his
shoulder at his broad, naked back.  She buckled a few times as his manhood
touched close to her own most sensitive spot, which still throbbed from his
attention earlier.  She closed her eyes and groaned as waves of pleasure washed
over her.  She could feel something deeper as well, although it wasn’t until he
began kissing her neck and her breasts again that she believed it was in reach.

“It’s all
right,” he murmured next to her ear as he reached down between them and stroked
her core again.  “You can relax.”

“Ah!” she cried
suddenly, and he covered her cry with more kisses as she crested for the second
time.

She lay there,
dazed, as he changed his rhythm to something more purposeful, seeking relief
for himself.

A thought
occurred to her. “You don’t have to worry about consequences,” she said
thickly.  “I’m not human, after all.”

He grunted, she
guessed in assent, and continued to focus inward, until he too gasped in
release.

He breathed
heavily for a few moments, propped above her on his arms, then gently eased
down onto her pillowy bosom.  His breath tickled her neck.  She held him
tightly, determined to enjoy this one time.

For it could
only be one time, if she was going to leave him as Aijo said she must.

“That was a very
foolish thing for us to do,” he whispered after a few minutes, kissing her
again.

“No, please don’t
say it was,” she replied, clinging to him.  “It would be foolish for us to have
pretended we didn’t both feel this way.”

“So there can be
no consequences?”  James looked almost disappointed.  “I suppose it’s for the
best.”

She shook her
head sadly. “Humans and Lathlians may look similar
—
”

“All over, it
seems.”  He pressed himself further inside her to prove his point.

She bit back
another sigh of pleasure. “But people from different worlds can never conceive
naturally.  The Pharinae, when they establish themselves on a world, work with
whatever animal is the most promising, molding it in their image over millions
of years if need be.”  She squirmed a little; he was getting heavy, and the
table beneath her was rather hard.  “According to your own cutting edge science
research, you are primates.  Well, Lathlians are related to something else. 
Our relatives look mostly like the family of
Ursidae
here on Earth.”  He
raised one eyebrow. 

“Bears? That is
rather... strange. But your cousin, Vaz, was going to marry someone from
another world, was she not?  What of royal issue?”

She shifted a
bit underneath him again.  He took it as a sign to remove himself, and he stood
upright, then pulled her to a sitting position on the table. 

She crossed her
arms and her legs, although it was a bit too late for any sort of modesty.

“Konkastians and
Lathlians are even farther apart than you and I are.  However, the Pharinae are
rather clever at manipulating molecules, especially those of life.  I do not
believe your language has a word for the chemical language of life yet–you
heard Aijo use the term DNA earlier.” He nodded, and he started getting dressed
again.

It would be an
odd choice of pillow talk for any other couple, but for James and Enny it felt
perfectly natural. They were both bookish people, after all.

 “They will take
two otherwise incompatible people and alter the genes of one of them so that
the resulting offspring is viable.  Usually that is done in a glass tube.   Vaz
was the sole heir of the house of d’Tar, so it was Xyling’s genes that would be
altered to match hers, and then hers to his for a second child, one for each
world.  It’s complicated and would have taken some time, but it is actually
fairly common.”  She shrugged.  “It makes paternity and maternity tests
completely foolproof, because there will be a special signature attached within
the chemicals.”

“You’re right,
it sounds complicated.”  He placed his hand over her lower stomach briefly,
before handing over her chemise.  “But if we had those alterations done, we
could have children.  Can Aijo do something like that?”

“She could,
given enough time... But I have to leave you anyway.”  Suddenly Eneria jerked
to attention.  “Oh my, that’s actually a really good idea!”

He looked at her
askance. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave.”

She clutched her
corset to her bosom and looked at him with hope in her eyes.

“I may not have
to.”  She gripped his hand.  “I’m going to ask Aijo to make me into a human!”

“No.”  Aijo’s
answer was flat and final, even from within her crystal prison.  She probably
knew exactly what had gone on between them below stairs in the library, but she
said nothing.

“Why not?  Just
because you don’t like him?”

“Because it can’t
be done.  It would take me years to alter every single piece of DNA in your
body.  And you could die from my tinkering.  It’s a project for a team of
experts, and I’m a language specialist.”  Aijo looked grim and serious, her
tiny golden face scrunched into a frown.  “I won’t take that risk, and you’d be
caught and dead by the Konkastians long before I finished.”

Eneria was
crestfallen.  She had dressed hurriedly–with James’ help, proving him to be a
surprisingly competent lady’s maid–and rushed upstairs to discuss her plan with
Aijo.  It had never occurred to her that Aijo would say
no
, but she was
right.

“What are they
saying?” Clarissa asked Marilyn, as Eneria pleaded with the tiny fairy.

“Don’t know,”
Marilyn replied.  “Aijo hasn’t taught me her language yet, although she said
she could if I wanted.”

If the two
younger girls also had suspicions about what had transpired below stairs with
their guardian and the princess after they left, they kept it to themselves. 
Eneria had been presentable, no buttons undone, no wisps of hair out of place,
but her eyes had been sparkling with excitement as she accosted Aijo with her
impossible suggestion.  Now, though, the sparkle had died.

“Then nothing
can be done,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air.  “We have to run. 
And no matter where we run, they will find us.”

“Well, there is
one more option,” Aijo said, looking away as if she didn’t want to think it at
all.

“What?”

“We can fight
back.”

Eneria took over
Marilyn’s school room and with the aid of James, explained the plan to Marilyn
and Clarissa.  Aijo was inside her jar, which was to become her carrier from
now on.  James was too big for the tiny chairs, and he had commandeered an
ottoman from the nearest guest bedroom instead.

“First off, we
need to line the bedroom I am staying in with lead.  That will allow Aijo to
move around freely, as I need her help.  It will also block all scans.  The
window will need to be replaced with leaded crystal as well.”

She paced
around, her mind working furiously.  She wished her brother was here.  He had
been the planner of the family; he had been the one to engineer their escape
off Lathlor, according to Seth.  She was just a jeweler.

“We are going to
be armed with weapons, special weapons that do not harm humans, but can disable
electromagnetic waves.  Essentially, it will kill the machines they use to
detect Aijo and I, as well as their weapons.”

“So we’re trying
to even the playing field?” Clarissa volunteered, looking silly at the child’s
desk she was sitting at. 

“Exactly,”
Eneria said with a nod, turning back to the chalkboard.  “The second part of
the plan is to make them believe I died.  James is going to float the rumor
that the person who was found on the ship off his coast was dead.  Oh, I do
hate lying.”  She paused, looked at the chalkboard, and realized she was
writing in Lathlian.  It was unintelligible to the humans in the room.  She put
the chalk down sheepishly.

“I needed to report
the shipwreck to the Crown anyway.  I never got around to writing those
letters.” He trailed off, looking chagrined.  Eneria had learned that paperwork
was not his forte.  “That is the best place to do it.”

Eneria nodded. 
“Aijo and I will lay low in the house until we determine that the Konkastians
have left.”

“What makes you
think they’ll leave?”

Eneria paused
for a moment.  It was a good question.  “Your world is rather primitive
compared to what they are used to.  The Konkastians are even more dependent on
their technology than the Lathlians were.” She shuddered.  “They have wires and
circuits implanted into them at birth so they can communicate directly with
their computers.  It gives them an advantage when they are under normal
circumstances.”  She grinned.  “When their computers are down, however, they
are at their weakest.  If they believe that the planet itself is shutting down
their computers, they are going to want to leave as soon as they have
determined their quarry is gone.”

“How do you make
these weapons that can disarm them instantly?”  James said curiously.

“It’s not
difficult,” Eneria said, holding up her laptop.  “It can be done with the same
sort of materials you kept in your lab in Cornwall, if you have the right
instructions. Fortunately, I have a small electronics manual on hand.  Are you
up for some more exercise, James?”

She was quite
glad she’d convinced him to bring the velocipede along.

She ordered
large sheets of expensive lead and quantities of copper along with an assortment
of chemicals, and then settled down to make small, portable machines that would
disable any electronics within a twenty foot radius.  She designed them to look
like innocuous bracelets, but pressing the jewel would disable any electronics
in range.  Clarissa and Marilyn had been impressed with her laptop, and she had
set up a game for Marilyn to play when she wasn’t using it. She inadvertently
made this planet’s first computer game addict. Marilyn started playing it
constantly, reluctantly surrendering the laptop only when Eneria needed it.

The lead lined
room allowed them to work in secrecy, but it meant that Aijo was locked inside,
trapped.  It also meant that they had no idea where the Konkastians were at,
since Aijo was the only one that could tell them apart from normal humans.  And
Aijo could not be anywhere around the electromagnetic pulse weapons unless she
was in her lead lined jar; they would disable her faster than starving her of
sunlight.

The Season was
in full swing, but Clarissa, James, and Eneria were no longer interested in the
petty social gatherings of the evenings.  Clarissa went to a ball at Almack’s
and was finally given permission to waltz, and James accompanied her to other
social events, but they had a greater purpose now.  Everything they were doing
was for show.

“Plan A,” Aijo
had said, “is to lure the Konkastians out.  I’m afraid we’re going to have to
do this at the expense of Marilyn’s pride, but there’s no other way.  My lord,
you’re a member of scientific circles, correct?”

“Yes, I’m a
contributing member of the Royal Society.” He coughed.  “Well, I’ve been trying
to become one, anyway.”

“You need to put
out word to your colleagues that Marilyn has caught herself a fairy.”

The lecture room
at the Royal Society’s Somerset House was full to the brim with old men. 
Eneria had never participated in scientific discourse at university level on
Lathlor, so she could not compare what she saw here to her experiences as a
child, but there seemed to be an absolute lack of women, except for the
occasional wife.

James called the
room to order from the podium.  On the table was the crystal jar, lined with
molten silver and lead for extra protection for Aijo–and opacity for visual
secrecy.  Eneria, Marilyn, and Clarissa stood behind the jar, adding an aura of
mystery to it.

“So Courtland,
what is this all about?” one of his peers called from the back row.  He was a
portly man, gently aging, and he looked a little put-upon to have been seated
so far away from the action.  “You say you’ve caught a fairy?”

“I didn’t, my
niece did.”  He pointed to the jar.  “Just last night, it was flying around the
room.  Being the clever girl she is, she caught it in this crystal jar.”

“That’s funny
looking crystal.  It looks like a mirror.”

“It’s lined with
silver so it can’t escape,” James said, and Eneria was glad he didn’t mention
the centimeter of lead behind the silver coating. 

“Before we
unveil the fairy, however, I want to introduce to you some hard science. 
Recently, I witnessed a startling phenomenon out in Cornwall; one of Faraday’s
electrical dynamos seems to be spontaneously shut down by nature under certain
extraordinary circumstances.”  He proceeded to illustrate on the chalkboard. 
“A bolide collided with the sea not far from Cornwall, and it completely
destroyed my engine.  I’ve determined that it is a phenomena with the
atmosphere that seems to happen fairly regularly.  We’re due for another such
example any minute now.”

“Over there,”
Eneria whispered to Clarissa.  “See those blood red uniforms?  Those are
Konkastians, I know that uniform.  I wonder who they’re pretending to be that
they are allowed to travel in uniform, undisturbed.”

“They’re quite
handsome,” Clarissa replied, a note of surprise in her voice.  “The way you
described them, I thought they’d be demons.”

“Oh, they are,”
Eneria shuddered.  “Don’t let looks deceive you.  They’re genetically modified
as a species to be stunningly beautiful.”

“I’m not sure
what that means, but now that they are here, we should probably enact our plan,
yes?”

“Yes.”  Eneria
took a deep breath and double checked the lining of the jar to ensure that Aijo
was secured.  “On three.  One, two–”

The two girls
pressed the gems on their bracelets simultaneously.  Nothing happened, at least,
nothing that any human noticed.  But both Konkastian soldiers winced
immediately.  Eneria suspected their personal computers had sent a high pitched
whine into their ear pieces before dying.  They’d have to be surgically
replaced on their spaceship.

At that moment, James,
was explaining how one of his experimental electric machines had suddenly
ceased to work and upon examination, had been fried through what he presumed
was static electricity.  The topic had been Aijo’s suggestion, based on what
science knew, what reality actually caused, and what they needed the
Konkastians to believe.

“Good job.”

The audience
clapped politely at his presentation.  It was definitely an interesting
phenomena, although many of them would be reluctant to deliberately destroy
their precious electricity experiments trying to replicate it.

“And now that
the boring part is done,” James said, turning to the glass jar, “the fairy I
promised you.”

On cue, Marilyn
opened the top of the jar. 

“Come out,
Aijo.”

Of course, Aijo
did not actually show her face, but the whole group watched the air in front of
the jar, tilting their faces upward, as if the fairy had flown toward the
ceiling.

“Can you see
it?  It’s so faint, it’s almost invisible,” James intoned as they tilted their
head in coordination.

“There it is!”
someone from the audience shouted at a cobweb in the corner.  From there, the
room descended into chaos.

While they were
chasing an invisible fairy, Aijo
had
actually slipped out of the jar at
her dimmest level and was hacking into the otherwise dead computers of the
Konkastians.  Although their electronics were fried to them, she was able to
merge with the remnants of the system and slip into the network.  Since their
computers were disconnected from them, they had no idea they were being passive
carriers for a very sophisticated hack job.

Even though Aijo’s
specialty was organic wetware and languages, her native environment was any
electronic system.  It was as easy for her as breathing to slip into the system
and navigate it back to their ship’s mother computer.

Aijo worked
quickly and got the information she needed.  Then she flew back, teasing a few
people by flashing for a second just out of eye shot, and then ducked safely
back into the jar.

After some time
it became apparent that there was no fairy, much to everyone’s disappointment. 
The room began to clear out, the person who had harassed James before the start
of the lecture was talking with him at the podium.

“You know, the
destruction of a dynamo from static electricity itself would have been an
interesting enough presentation without you having to resort to that prank,” he
said testily, mopping his balding head with his handkerchief.

James beamed at
the older man, pleased that his work had been praised in such a roundabout
way.  “It was an indulgence for my niece.”  He pointed to Marilyn, who was
staring rapturously inside the jar.  “Although there really
was
a fairy
in that jar, if you looked close enough.”

“Well then,” the
older man said with a guffaw, reaching over to pat Marilyn on the head.  “I
look forward to seeing your paper on the subject published soon.  That is
exactly the sort of work I expect from a fellow graduate of Trinity College.”

“Of course, it
probably won’t be for a while, since my laboratory is in Cornwall.”

“Aha.  Well
then, I shall see you around, Courtland.”

James looked so
happy that Eneria wondered what had just happened.

She poked him
and asked.

“That was
Spencer Compton, the Marquis of Northampton.”  His grin grew even wider.  “The
President of the Royal Society himself, Enny!”

They regrouped
at the townhouse, crowded inside the lead lined room to hear Aijo’s report.

“Good news and
bad news,” Aijo said, fluttering around her cage, agitated.  “The good news is
that they only intercepted the origination of the code, not the destination. 
They knew you sent it through the wormhole, but they couldn’t tell where you
were sending it to.  And since it was being broadcast with a Lathlian secret
code, they haven’t decrypted it yet.”

Eneria breathed
a sigh of relief.  Just because the Konkastians would not attack Montares didn’t
mean she wanted to endanger her mother or Vaz.

“The bad news
is, right after you jumped into warp, they followed you. I don’t think they
came as far as Earth, but they noted the wormhole exit you used.  And right
after you sent the transmission, they sent a whole squadron.  It’s Captain
Kordan again. They’re hiding on the moon.”