An Imperfect Princess (25 page)

“I’m so sorry,
Enny,” Aijo said, her voice soft.  “I’m going to neutralize what I can, but
they used some really nasty stuff on you.”  She prepared to enter Eneria’s body
to try to heal it, but one lone Pharinae had no hope of stopping a deadly
poison, and Aijo’s skill sets were definitely not in healing.

“Don’t bother.” 
Eneria closed her eyes.  She was beginning to feel tired.  She knew if she fell
asleep, she’d never wake up.  But she couldn’t fend it off any longer.

“Enny?”  Aijo
said, panicking.  “Not yet.  Oh no, not yet. Enny!”

Eneria didn’t
answer.  The blackness had overtaken her. It was too late.

The group on the
lawn had started their way down to the beachfront, now that the Konkastians had
left, but they paused when the formerly diffused Aijo had suddenly burned much
brighter.

Aijo, having
watched her ward die in front of her, was honor bound to commit suicide, in the
spectacular way of her people.  The tiny people of light were essentially
miniature suns, conducting controlled fusion on a quantum scale, and as such,
they could intentionally overload their reactors.

She was turning
into a very small supernova in front of them.

And then,
everyone heard a tiny sigh, like the whisper of the wind or the sea itself. It
said to them within their minds,
Stop.

Aijo’s reaction
immediately ceased, and she dimmed back down to a normal level. 

There on the
beach, in front of Eneria’s body, pinpricks of light were coalescing into a
form.  Before long, a shimmering being with the look of the Pharinae but the
size of a human, started to light up the beach as bright as day.

“It’s an angel!”
Marilyn said, voicing their thoughts aloud.

The group resumed
their way back down to the beachfront, leaving Mrs. Thomas behind on the lawn.

“You’re a
Pharinae!” Aijo said to the angelic being accusingly. 

“Yes, that is
what we were once called,” the being said, looking at the tiny fairy.  “We came
to this world over three million years ago.”  The beautiful woman, wrapped in
robes of light and gold, reached out to touch the tiny fairy.  “But as we lived
here, we too evolved. We are too old. Now we sleep.  But your anguish awakened
me.”

She saw the
group approaching her tentatively and turned to them.

“Greetings,” she
said, nodding to them.  “I am called Brigid in your language.”

James sucked in
his breath.  “The Celtic goddess of the sea,” he told the others in a low
voice, but the woman before them heard him.

“We have been
called gods, angels, devils...  we are none of those things.”  She crouched
onto the beach and reached down to touch Eneria’s forehead.  “This girl is not
of this world,” she said.  “She does not belong here.  Tell me, little Child of
the Stars, why should I let her live?”

Aijo was
startled at the unusual description of her people.  But to these giant beings
of golden light, perhaps they did still appear as children.

“She was an
innocent who did not deserve to die.”  Aijo said.  “You can review our lives in
moments, I suspect.”  Aijo fluttered down and landed on Eneria’s head, in her
favored spot.  “If you can save her, I beg of you, please do it.”

“I will save
her, but she will have to leave this planet.  We do not want any interference
from the outside world until the humans here are ready.”
James interrupted her.  “She wants to become a human,” he said, kneeling down
to clutch Eneria’s lifeless body to his chest.  “She wants to stay here with me
and have children, and never go to her world again.”  He looked imploringly at
the glowing woman, whose eyes softened with compassion as she saw the naked
grief on his face.

The goddess
paused for a moment, and then reached out to rest one hand on Eneria’s rapidly
cooling cheek.  “I feel the truth in your words.”   Brigid closed her eyes and
held her hands up to the heavens.  She grew silent, but streams of light began
to emit from her form.

Aijo whispered
to James, “She’s communicating with the other Pharinae–or whatever they call
themselves now.”

“How can you
tell?”

Aijo grinned. 
“They’re no longer hidden from me.  I can feel them now, all across the world. 
Thousands of them. They took on their present form nearly five hundred thousand
years ago.”  Aijo winced, her tiny face slightly pinched in embarrassment. 
“They’re... um, a lot more powerful than I am.”

After a few
minutes of silent communion with her kind, Brigid lowered her hands.  “All
right.  We will save this woman, and we will make her a human, but in exchange,
we will bind her to the planet.  She will become one of ours.”  She looked
tenderly at Aijo.  “You asked what we call ourselves.  You may refer to us as
the Fae.”

The goddess
knelt down again, and kissed Eneria’s forehead gently.  Her body was enveloped
in a golden light, and from the rest of the world, dozens more of the Earth’s
Fae appeared on the beach, all in the form of men and women with wings.  Aijo
looked rapidly at them, perhaps more overwhelmed by them than the humans around
her.  The level of power they held was almost incomprehensible.  They were
stars, and she was a planet.  They were trees, and she was only an acorn. 

They were gods,
and she was just a fairy.

The glowing
beings before them were arrogant and proud, and they looked slightly perturbed
to have been woken up by Aijo’s attempted suicide.  But there was something
familiar about the way that they appeared.

“The Pantheon?”
Marilyn said questioningly and Clarissa patted her on the head.

“Close enough, I
suspect.”

The team of
gods–for to the humans that was what they had always been called–worked
together to change every cell in Eneria’s body.  Her DNA was analyzed and
rewritten from the base pairs up.  A few times her body buckled under the
stress, but the Pharinae were always meticulous and careful in their work on
their carbon based counterparts, and the Fae were no different.

“What they’re
doing would have taken a team of my people two months to complete,” Aijo
whispered to James, overawed.

Eneria’s body
had been lifted off the ground in the process.  When they seemed to be done,
she was gently set down, and James rushed up to catch her.

The other gods
then faded away into the ether, leaving only Brigid in a corporeal form.

“Thank you,”
James said to her.  “I have never believed in supernatural things or magic...
but I believe now.”

Brigid smiled
and chuckled a little.  “You are wondering if we’re true divine beings.”  She
shook her head, her flowing golden hair shifting in the process.  “We are
merely another type of mortal of this world.  Nothing magical or fantastical at
all.  We do not want to be worshiped–we only wish to be forgotten now.”  Her
face was wreathed in sorrow for a moment.  “Every time we have appeared before
your people, wicked and evil men have distorted our words of peace and love and
used them as an excuse to kill.  So we have decided to stop appearing, and instead
become mere myths.”  She smiled again at Aijo.  “But I could not ignore the cry
of this little one.  Your name is Aijo?” 

The tiny fairy
trembled.  On the scale of evolution, these massive beings were to her as the
humans on the beach were to tiny rodents on the ground. She had never before
thought of Pharinae evolving
further
–their race hadn’t changed in
millions of years throughout the galaxy.

Except on this
planet, it seemed.

“Aijo, of the
Lathlian Merjorna colony,” she said, trying to sound normal.

“Little Aijo,
there is no place for you in this world.  When the time comes, you should
leave.”  Brigid’s gentle face grew firm.  “We will allow this girl to stay
here, as she wished, but your home and family are waiting for you.”

Aijo nodded
bleakly.  “As long as Eneria lives, I am bound to her,” she warned.

“The woman you
knew before is gone.  You should consider your contract terminated.”  Brigid’s
face grew gentle again.  “But please, no suicide.  You woke up every one of us
on the islands here.”

“How many
Pharinae are there here...?”

“We here prefer
the term Fae.” She smiled again and shook her head.  “Hundreds on this island
alone, and many thousands throughout Earth. They are known by other names in
other tongues, but we are still all one people.”

Aijo nodded,
still clearly overwhelmed by what had just happened.

Brigid waved
goodbye to them and began to fade.   “Please forget about me, and all of us. 
The gods no longer wish to be known to humans.  Let us return to our slumber.”

Eneria began to
stir sleepily as Brigid left.  She and Mrs. Thomas had both missed the
encounter entirely.

The first word
she said in her newly human body was more of a moan.  Then she muttered, “What
a horrible head ache,” in English.

James, not
caring that anyone saw him do it, found himself crying as he held her.

“Why are you
crying?” Eneria murmured.

“I almost lost
you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.  “I’m so happy.”

“You’re just
like me then,” she said, sighing.  She snuggled into his chest.

Just like that
morning months before, he carried her up the stairs in banks of the beach back
to the house.  It was almost completely dark, and Aijo found herself acting as
a lamp for them to avoid tripping over the dewy grass.

They found Mrs.
Thomas on the lawn, still out cold.  James sent Marilyn in to fetch some
servants and smelling salts.  They took her upstairs to her room once she was
roused, and told her she had fallen asleep and had strange dreams.  It was
probably best if she didn’t find out what she had missed.

They all
gathered together in his study, Eneria lying on the couch, still weakened and
in pain, but alive. 

“I want to talk
about what happened out there,” James said, leaning against his desk.  “I
believe, as part of the bargain for saving Enny, Brigid asked us to stay
silent.”

Marilyn and
Clarissa, sitting on matching chairs, nodded obediently.  No one would believe
them, anyway.  The gods and goddesses of ancient lore were apparently once
fairies from the stars.  It was too fantastical to comprehend.

Eneria managed
to sit up, still groggy.  “I’m not sure what happened.  Who is Brigid?  Why am
I still alive?”

Aijo swooped in
to hover around her face.  “Brigid is a Fae.  They’re like Pharinae, only
bigger.  And she’s a thousand times more powerful than I am.” The tiny fairy
made a face.  It was rather humbling to encounter a being so much stronger than
oneself.

“And she saved
your life,” James said, giving her a tender, crooked smile.  “She also made you
a human.”

Eneria’s eyes
widened.  “She
what?”

Aijo pirouetted
nicely in the air.  “She neutralized the poison and altered your DNA.  She did
what I was unable to do.  You’re no longer genetically a Lathlian.”  Aijo had a
sudden realization; that is what Brigid had meant.  “That means you’re also no
longer of the House of d’Munt.”

Eneria shook her
head.  It was too much to comprehend, but the general fatigue and malaise she
felt was consistent with the operation to change genetics at the cellular
level.  She had been ripped apart and put back together.

She held up one
hand and looked at her fingertips.  The whorls were still the same.  She pulled
down a lock of hair and was relieved to see the blue iridescence was still
there. 

“The Konkastians
believe me dead?” she asked Aijo, but she was looking at James.

“Yes,” Aijo
confirmed.  “They have no reason to suspect you lived through their
neurotoxin.  And you
did
die... I don’t think the Fae could have worked
on you so quickly if you were actually still alive.”  She dimmed for a moment,
but then brightened.  “And since you’re human now, they won’t sense any
Lathlians on this world ever again.”

“Then I am no
longer Eneria d’Munt.  As the last known heir to the House of d’Munt, we have
lost our formal designation as a house of the Triumvirate.  I am now merely
Eneria Munt.”  She pursed her lips.  “What a boring name.”

“In two weeks
you’ll be Eneria Holding, which is less boring, I hope,” James offered.

“It is,” Eneria
said, giving him a pained smile. Having one’s genes ripped apart from the
inside out hurt like hell.

She was carried
back upstairs to her old guestroom, to stay there until she recovered from her
second major ordeal.  James had been nearly as happy as she was that her hair
still had that unusual kiss of blue in it.  It was part of who she was.

She woke up the
next day to Aijo’s frantic mental tugging.

“Wanna sleep
some more,” she murmured, burying her head into the fat fluffy pillow.

“You have to get
up, Enny,” Aijo insisted.  “Another ship is coming.”

“What?”  Eneria
struggled to clear the fog of happy dreams from her mind.  “I thought the
Konkastians weren’t coming back!”

“It’s not them,”
Aijo said, her tiny golden face splitting into a grin.  “It’s Vaz.”

This time, the
ship that landed was a large, modern freighter that bore the signature of the
trading company Perihelion. Eneria stood on the lawn with James and was glad it
was on stealth mode–none of the household suspected there was yet
another
alien vessel landing nearby.

Once it landed,
the stealth shielding went translucent, and the outline of the freighter was
visible. 

“It’s huge,” he
said, squeezing her hand, staring at the giant vessel before them. His eyes flickered
as he absorbed each detail.

“Actually, all
you’ve seen are small ships.”  She looked up to the sky, which was once again
growing overcast.  Clear skies never lasted for long in Cornwall.  “In space,
they can sometimes grow to the size of entire land masses.  The space station
this one came from is a giant city floating around its mother planet, like a
moon.”

The gangplank
melted down, and Vazeria d’Tar, last living heir to the House of d’Tar, bounded
down it.  She was dressed in the pure white robes of the Cartorian Order of
Montares, her severely cut blue hair streaming behind her. 

Eneria found
herself taking a few steps toward her, then she running almost as fast as Vaz
until they nearly bowled each other over.

“Enny!” Vaz
cried.  She spoke in Lathlian. “Oh Enny, I was so sure I was too late.  You don’t
know how difficult it was to get to this place.  It took us weeks and weeks
just to sneak outside Montares.”

“You
are
too late,” Eneria said, pushing her cousin and best friend away playfully.  Vaz
was a little shorter and a lot more slender than she was, and her long hair
unbound as it was made her look much younger.

“The Konkastians
had termination orders,” Vaz argued, her eyes flashing.  She had always been
the more aggressive of the two cousins.

“And they
already killed me,” Enny said with a grin.  “Any DNA scanners–or Pharinae–would
be able to tell you there are no Lathlians on this planet besides yourselves.”

Vaz took a step
back and eyed Eneria critically.  “You don’t
look
very dead to me,” she
said finally.  “Although you look as though you’ve totally gone native.”  She
looked over Eneria’s shoulder.  “A handsome man is approaching.” 

“He’s mine,”
Enny warned.  “You can’t have him.”

“Jeez, Enny! 
You failed to mention an alien boyfriend in that transmission of yours!”

“It just sort of
happened,” Enny said sheepishly, smiling at James as he reached them.

She switched to
English.  “James, this is my cousin, the last heir to the House of d’Tar,
Vazeria d’Tar.”

“Their hair
really is blue,” he said faintly, but he bowed formally to the other princess. 
“Of all the fantastic things I’ve seen in these last few months that was the
one I never quite believed.”

 “Hah!” She
flipped back to her native tongue effortlessly and took Vaz’s hand.  “I just
introduced you formally in the local language.  His name is James Holding, and
he’s a landed noble.”

Vaz snorted. 
“On a primitive world a thousand light years away from the Local Cluster.”

“Well, my father
is dead, so he has no say in it. And he’s met all my conditions.  We’re getting
married in two weeks.”

Vaz’s eyebrows
shot up.  “Whoa,” she said, looking at James thoroughly, just as she had
studied Enny moments before.  “I’m not sure if I like this idea.  I’m supposed
to be rescuing you!”

Over Vaz’s
shoulder, she saw more people disembarking the ship.  Her eyes nearly popped
out of her head when she saw a familiar head of ridiculous corkscrew red
curls.  “Seth?” she asked, and Vaz nodded.  “Are you two...?”

“No,” Vaz
interjected quickly.  “But when I asked around for a trip to rescue you, he
volunteered.  I guess he still feels responsible for us, in his own way.”  Vaz
paused for a moment, and then turned to look at the gangplank.

“I should warn
you, your mother is here.”

Just then, Emerita
d’Munt descended down the gangplank, with the dignity befitting a queen. Her
brilliant blue hair was shot through with silver beneath her veil and wimple,
and she also wore the white robes of her order.

Eneria felt her
knees go weak.  James caught her and looked at the woman who was walking slowly
toward them.  She was too young to need a cane just yet, so her gentle sway was
an affectation, designed to maximize her presence.

“That,” Eneria
said to James in English, her voice cracking, “is my mother.”  She cleared her
throat.  “Emerita d’Munt, Third Queen of Lathlor, wife of the late Narin d’Munt,
Third King of Lathlor.” 

Unlike the
exuberant greeting of Vaz, Emerita’s pride prevented her from calling out
before she was nearly upon them.  She stopped directly in front of her
daughter.

“Greetings,
Mother,” Eneria said, biting her lip.

“I greet you,
daughter,” Emerita said, her voice firm.  “Are you ready to end this nonsense
and join us in the safety of Montares?  We went to great lengths to find you
here.  I am only grateful we did so before the Konkastians arrived.”

Eneria was
already shaking her head.  “I can’t go,” she said, sighing.  “It’s a very long
story.  I think we’re going to have to go inside and get some breakfast first.”

The staff was
all aflutter at the sudden arrival of Eneria’s family.  The two women from Montares
had their hair mostly hidden by their white veils, and in the darkness of the
house, it appeared a dark enough black that no one noticed it.  Eneria warned
them to wear their veils tightly outside on this world, as cobalt hair was
definitely
not
a normal shade.

They used the
excuse that they had arrived for the wedding, from their country on the
Continent.  The larger ship was completely hidden on the lawn, and they
pretended that they had arrived from a boat in St Ives.  Eneria disliked the
dishonesty, but she dared not tell her mother that they had lied about who they
were.  She’d be pulled by one ear and spanked as if she was ten.

Sometimes,
language barriers were a blessing in disguise.

After they’d
eaten a large, noisy breakfast with conversations in two completely
incompatible languages, they settled into the sitting room of the house, which
barely had enough room for everyone.

Eneria found
herself acting as the interpreter.  She started out telling Vaz, Seth, and her
mother the story of what had happened to her.

“So I was on a
routine smuggling trip to Yertarf,” she began.  “And I got bugged.  They chased
me and clipped a wing. We panicked and did a blind dark matter jump.”

“Very
dangerous,” Seth interjected, his green eyes alight with interest. “But
probably the best thing to do if you were getting chased.”

“We ended up
here,” she said with a wave of her hand to indicate the planet.  “But when we
got clipped, it also nipped the steering fin, so we crashed.”

Her mother said
there impassively as she went through the whole tale.  The crash course in
English with Aijo.  The trip to London, where they discovered the Konkastians
had hidden out as well.  Their attempts to dodge them, to no avail.  The final
showdown on the cliff, where Eneria was shot with a chemical gun and died.  And
finally, the encounter with the Fae, who did in a few minutes what would have
taken a Pharinae several months.

She left out the
passionate sex in James’s library.  Some things her mother didn’t need to
know.  She had a feeling Vaz would be able to fill in the blanks anyway.

“So you see,”
she said, picking up a buttered scone from the tea tray.  The raspberry jam no
longer tasted like a deadly bitter poison to her–her physiology had been
changed to that of a human too.  Aijo had verified that her organs had been
rearranged, although the Fae had managed to cobble together her genetic
propensity for bluish hair somehow.  “I’m getting married to James and I’m
going to stay here.”

Her mother said
nothing.  She had eaten nothing either, and Eneria suspected she was afraid of
catching a disease.  Her order believed firmly in purity of body and mind, and
the result was that of a finicky and fussy group of nuns.

“After all the
trouble we went through to rescue you, that’s a bit of a letdown,” Vaz
complained.  She was merely a ward of the order and had no restrictions on
diet.  She had found that the scones were tasty, but the raspberry jam was as
nasty to her as it had been to Eneria.

“He has met my
conditions,” Eneria said sharply, looking directly at her mother, who did not
waver from her gaze.  “He is as intelligent as I am.  He’s also kind and witty
and gentle and was willing to marry me even if I could not bear him children.”

“He is a fool
then,” her mother said, sighing.  “You should not marry for love.  Men are
deceitful creatures.  Without legitimate children, you would have no control
over him at all.  He will abandon you when you need him the most.”

She glanced over
at Seth, who looked very uncomfortable at the conversation.  It made sense; he
too had abandoned Vaz when she needed him the most.

“Well, I’ve been
changed to this species genetically now,” Eneria argued.  “So now we will have
a dozen children and that will not be a problem.”

“Grandchildren I
will never see, then.”  Emerita looked sad.  “I do not believe I can stop you. 
If he has met your conditions and he is a landed noble, your late father would
have no objections to him.” 

Eneria looked at
her mother, and for the first time, she saw a glimmer of maternal love. Emerita
had
been badly used. She had traded a life of tranquility on Montares
for a life of sorrow on Lathlor.  Her unfaithful husband was dead, her son was
dead, and her daughter had been transformed into another species entirely.

“Will you at
least stay for the wedding?” Eneria asked.  “It’s only in two weeks.”

“I believe we
can do that,” Seth interjected.  “The Konkastians have no reason to suspect we’re
here.” He looked dourly at Aijo.  “Unlike you, we don’t have a computer hacker
to try to change their orders.  That doesn’t work, as you already figured out. 
It just kept them coming back.”

Aijo looked
down, a bit ashamed.  She was the one that had caused a lot of the problems.

Eneria switched
back to English again.  “James, my family is interested in staying for the
wedding.  We will be able to accommodate them all until then?”

“I suppose I
have no choice,” he answered with a smile.

Aijo did a
language dump of English for Vaz and Seth.  Emerita firmly refused, saying that
her mind was already stuffed full of enough useless things. 

Eneria found
herself walking along the formal garden path with Vaz, who had fitted quite
handily into one of Clarissa’s dresses, making Eneria once again feel like a
horse compared to her cousin’s lithe form.

“I never would
have thought I’d marry before you,” Eneria said, touching one of the flowers of
the garden.  Whatever genetic tinkering the Fae had done to her, she no longer
had the mild case of hay fever that had plagued her on Lathlor in the spring. 

“Well, for all
of us, fate got twisted around in unexpected ways.  Your James seems like a
nice enough fellow, and he looks at you with the most puppy-dog worshipful eyes
I’ve ever seen.  Even Seth always seemed to be laughing at me from some
level.”   Vaz lost her balance in her fancy slippers, also borrowed from
Clarissa, but she gracefully recovered.   The large hat and scarf she had worn
to cover her hair was making her top heavy.  But Vaz had always been the more
athletic of the two, and she was rapidly compensating to the style of dress on
the planet.

“How are things
between you two?” Eneria asked, curious.  “You said he only agreed after he
heard it was me that needed rescuing... how did you work that out?”

“I contacted
your shipping company using a courier message.  They asked around their pilots,
but no one was willing to risk the wrath of the Konkastian Empire if they were
caught.”  Vaz sighed.  “Being the last of the Lathlians on the run makes them
want to catch us all the more.  Xyling referred to us as ‘the rats.’”  She
shuddered.  Eneria knew that Xyling wanted to catch Vaz alive and pin her under
his thumb like a butterfly, crushing her spirit as his ultimate trophy for the
conquest of Lathlor.

Something else
bothered her.  “Kordan said that Lathlor didn’t actually ‘have what they
wanted.’  Do you know anything about that?  What were they actually after?”

Vaz stopped and
looked out at the distant horizon.

“Aside from
another inhabitable planet, you mean?  No one knows.  But I heard Xyling, in
one of his many odious communications to me, say that I was a ‘bonus’ to the
conquest, and not the aim of the war in itself.  And Seth has heard rumors that
instead of sending colonies of their species to Lathlor, as would have been the
logical thing to expect, they instead did massive excavations of the
wilderness.”  She shrugged.  “And then they left.  Whatever they were after,
they didn’t find it on our world.”

“So it was all
for nothing.”  Eneria felt deflated.  “They destroyed our entire world for
nothing.”

Vaz started
walking again.  There was nothing more to add to that sentiment.

“Well, at least
you’ve found yourself a new world here,” the younger girl said brightly after a
few moments, trying to change the subject.  “It’s quite a nice place too.  A
little small, a little overcrowded, but very pleasant.”

“We’re in the
summertime here.  We’ll be getting snow in the winter.”

“Oh nice.  I
miss the snow.  The Cartorian Order is located in a tropical rainforest.”

“Another reason
I never wanted to join,” Eneria muttered.  “How long are you going to stay
there?”

Vaz shrugged. 
“As long as they can guarantee our safety.  Auntie Emmy believes that will be
forever.  But I have my doubts.”