An Imperfect Princess (7 page)

His instincts
continued to tell him that she must be a lady, not a commoner.  Her delicate
bones, tall figure, and soft skin indicated a gentle rearing.  And that
pendant... even if she
was
a thief, she was obviously high born, perhaps
one that had fallen on hard times.

The thoughts she
brought to his mind were none too genteel, however.  She was no girl, but a
woman full grown.  Her figure was full and while she wasn’t plump, she appeared
very healthy.  Robust was the word that came to mind.

“Where did you
come from?” he murmured, knowing she could not hear him.  “Will you ever wake
up?”

She was no
enchanted sleeping beauty.  She’d already been lying there for over a day.  She
was dehydrated and needed nourishment.  Unless she woke soon, she would very
possibly die.

And he would
never even know her name.

He leaned even
closer to her face, entertaining a briefly absurd notion that perhaps a lover’s
kiss would wake her, like the fairy tale.  He was no prince either, but perhaps
an earl would do as well. 

Before he could
connect his lips to hers, a tiny voice behind him said angrily, “Keep your
hands off the princess!”

He whipped
around, looking for the source of the voice, but saw only empty air and the
play of dust motes in the sunbeam.

“Who is there?”
he said to the empty room.

The silence it
returned mocked him.  It must have been the prick of his own conscious, he
decided, although he would not have pegged his own mind to have a metallic
female voice.

Ah well. 
Perhaps it was for the best.  With one final worried glance at the girl on the
bed, he stood and ended his vigil.

For now, the
only thing they could do for her was pray.

“Argh, the nerve
of that man!" Aijo said, emerging from the sun beam that had camouflaged
her.  She fluttered nervously over to her ward, touching Eneria’s forehead with
her gossamer hands and closing her translucent eyes.

“The damage has
almost been repaired,” the fairy murmured to herself, tracing the neural
pathways with her mind with a speed born of instinct.  “It might be safe to
wake you now. But first... I think I’ve picked up enough of the local
language.  Time for a data dump.”

Dropping in a
language was going to take her a fairly long time, and it was probably not a
good idea with Eneria’s mind still recovering from the concussion, but she had
no choice.  They were fortunate to have landed on a planet with apparently
friendly humanoid locals, but the dominant species had no contact with their
own local fairies, which meant that Aijo’s presence was an anomaly.  It was
best to have Enny do the introductions, at least at first.

“Sorry in
advance for the migraine, Your Highness,” Aijo said, and she melted into Eneria’s
brain.

Marilyn was
bored.

Her uncle was
busy with the girl from the shipwreck.  Her aunt was busy poring through
fashion plates borrowed from a friend in London to determine her wardrobe.  The
household staff ignored her, as usual.

She hugged
Galileo to her chest and peeked into the bedroom where the girl lay on the
bed.  The cat understood her.  He endured her with a long suffering patience;
she had had him since he was a kitten and as far as he knew, she was his
mother. No one else was around.  Cautiously, she tiptoed inside, defiantly
standing in the sunbeam.  Her governess would be mad at her for risking her
complexion, but she didn’t care.

“I wonder if Mother
and Father could have lived, like you,” she said aloud, not daring to get too
close to her uncle’s patient. “Maybe they are alive someplace... maybe they
just forgot about me.”  A fat tear escape her and rolled down one cheek.  She
held back and tried not to cry.  “It’s my fault they died, you see,” she
explained, as if the unconscious woman on the bed could hear her.  “They wanted
a home for me in India.”  She took in a deep, shuddering breath.  “Uncle James
and Aunt Clarissa say otherwise but I know they are lying to me to make me feel
better.” 

Cautiously, Aijo
began to leak out of Eneria’s ear.  So that explained the child’s behavior.  Post-traumatic
stress disorder or a psychological reaction to the event.  Unfortunately, the
language the child was speaking hadn’t provided Aijo with the needed vocabulary
to describe those terms yet.  One of the scullery maids had described the child
as “mental” which was perhaps as good as she was going to get. 

The girl
continued to describe how she hated herself and wanted to behave but she was
such a horrible person there was no point in pretending otherwise.  Aijo
figured the girl was just using it as an excuse to behave badly.

She dimmed
herself to her lowest level and tried to tiptoe to the sunbeam where she could
blend in.  Unfortunately, she was spotted by the sharp-eyed girl.

“Fairy!” she
shouted triumphantly, startling the cat, who fled with a yowl.  Her hands free,
Marilyn grabbed a crystal vase off the table.  What ensued was a merry chase
for the girl and a few moments of abject terror for the Pharinae.  Even
shrinking herself to her dimmest level, she was still a glowing mote of
contrast.  She was noticeable in the sunbeam as a motion blur.  Finally, she
took to hovering near the ceiling like a distressed insect.

“I knew I saw
you before!”

Aijo was
silent.  That crystal vase was made with lead.  If she were to be caught inside
it, she would be trapped.  The thickness of lead shielded radiation and
Pharinae were more or less made out of radiation.  Not only would she be
trapped, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“I’m going to
catch you and prove to Uncle James that you’re real.”  Satisfied with this
proclamation, the girl sat down, her eyes never wavering from the corner were
Aijo clung to the ceiling.

Her vigil was
nonetheless interrupted by her governess, who had heard the commotion and gone
looking for her ward, assuming rather correctly that any sort of noise or crash
in the house was due to her. 

“Marilyn Coretta
Holding!” Mrs. Thomas grabbed her by her ear and dragged her out of the guest
room bodily.  She ignored Marilyn’s howls as she marched the girl up the stairs
to the school room again.  “A sick room is not a playroom!”

Aijo breathed a
sigh of relief.  Getting caught in a leaded crystal jar was the last thing she
needed.  She did feel bad for the child, however.  Her governess seemed to be
more concerned with correcting her behavior than in providing an understanding
ear.  It was a completely different relationship than the one Aijo shared with
Eneria and Vaz.  She was their friend as well as their tutor.

“What a mess we’re
in,” she said to the unconscious princess on the bed. She settled on the
pillow, briefly mourning the loss of her comfortable gilded cage on the
dashboard of the ship.  The lord of the manor had opted to leave the ship where
it was on the beach for now, with an oilcloth over it to keep out the
weather.   That was probably the best place for it, until Enny was well enough
to visit it again.

“Your Excellency,
we have an interesting status report from one of the Yertarf patrol squadrons.”

Prince Xyling,
son of the President of Konkast and Emperor of all Known Worlds, swiveled
around in his chair.  The Konkastians were spindly, fair humanoids, with hair
ranging in shades from silver to gold and rarely pinkish or green pastel shades
and skin that usually matched.  They emphasized this metallic color palette
with uniforms of dark red.

“Define
interesting.”

“One of our bugs
was taken off world, as you predicted.  Probably a smuggler transporting
illegal metals.”

“Naturally.” 
The prince tapped his fingers on the chair’s arm, unperturbed.  “Did you catch
the ship?”

The lieutenant who
had been sent to make the report swallowed a little.  Xyling had a
reverse
temper.  No one wanted to be on the receiving end of his deadly calm.

“No, sir.  The
ship made a node-free jump to faster than light speed, after giving Captain
Kordan a fairly unique Lathlian gesture.  What was interesting was that when we
ran the codes it had broadcasted, they didn’t match the ship at all.”

“Wait a minute.”
The tapping stopped.  Xyling raised one eyebrow.  “The ship jumped to
hyperspace without being near a node? That’s suicide.” 

“Yes, sir.  No
trace of them have been found.  But the codes, sir. After a deep retrace, we
found that they were originally assigned to a freighter from Montares. That
ship was actually decommissioned over a year and a half ago.  The dark matter
engine signature and bio-signature on the actual ship were not Konkastian or
from the monastic planet directly.”  The young soldier struggled to maintain
his composure.  “They were Lathlian.”

The silence in
the office was thick, as Xyling absorbed this information.  “My wife is still
on Montares, yes?”  He referred to her as such, even though their marriage had
never been officially marked by either planet in the aftermath of the invasion,
let alone consummated.  Vazeria d’Tar was his father’s claim to legitimate rule
of almost a third of the empire and for him, it was merely a matter of catching
her eventually and bending her to his will.

“She has not
left.”

“And all of our
Lathlians are accounted for, yes?”  In the two years since the invasion, many
Lathlians had been conscripted into the Konkastian army as low level laborers,
with one or two extraordinary exceptions.

“The important
ones we track, anyway, sir.” 

“Then I have a
pretty good guess as to who it is.  Check the bio-signatures in the station
logs for a Lathlian Pharinae.  And put Captain Kordan’s fleet on this
assignment from here on out.  I have a feeling he’ll have a personal score to
settle with Eneria d’Munt now.”

“Yes, sir.”  The
lieutenant left the office, relieved to have been spared the invisible, cold
wrath of his commanding officer.

Xyling turned
his chair around and stared at the large interactive screen in front of him. 
“Well, well, well.  One of the rats has shown herself. Vaz, you should have
done a better job of convincing her to join you in your fortress.  Now, she’s
either dead, or she’s mine to kill.”

He looked at the
glowing red sphere of the Local Cluster.  There were still hundreds of planets
to take over and from there, the Konkastians could launch an exploration of the
galaxy unmatched since the Pharinae left the Seven Sisters millions of years
ago.

Eventually, they
would find what they were looking for.

Aijo made the
mistake of falling asleep next to the candle that burned through the night. 
Pharinae required sleep as much as any carbon based human being, but for
different reasons.  Within her mind were not neurons, but superstrings,
although they served much the same function.  Her quantum metabolism needed to
recover badly from expending so much energy to alter the neuron paths in her
master’s brain.  Teaching someone a language was almost as bad as rearranging
their DNA.

She hadn’t
expected the child to escape from her governess first thing in the morning and
she hadn’t expected to sleep for so long.  The last words she heard before
being trapped in the muffling, horrible lead glass of the vase was, “Gotcha!”

It was as if the
world was suddenly filled with cotton.  The lead content in the glass was not very
thick, but it enclosed her and cut off her oxygen and the spectrums of
electromagnetic energy she desperately needed to function.

She fluttered
around wildly, seeking any escape, but realized quickly that it was futile.

Her only hope
was that Eneria was well enough to function. 

Aijo let out a
telepathic cry with almost all of her remaining energy, hoping it would pierce
the thick leaded crystal and reach her master’s mind.

“Wake up!”

Marilyn heard it
too, although it was in Lathlian and she couldn’t begin to comprehend what it
meant.  The girl looked around the room wildly, wondering who had called out
the funny word.

Eneria had been
dreaming.  They were vague, disjointed dreams with a stream of unfamiliar
sounds and words interrupting what had been an otherwise silent film in her
mind.  Then, a very familiar phrase hit her hard, accompanied with a sense of
terrible urgency.

“Aijo!” Eneria
said, shooting bolt upright as if she had never been unconscious.  She looked
frantically at her unfamiliar surroundings, blinking in the light.  Good
gods,
her head hurt.

“Here!" the
fairy shouted in her mind, and Eneria found her head tilting that direction,
only to see Aijo pawing frantically at the glass jar that imprisoned her. 
"Thank the gods that you’re awake.  This jar is lead crystal, I can’t get
out.”

A little
humanoid girl stood before her, holding the jar with the Pharinae inside it,
her eyes wide open.  They stared at each other for one moment, both surprised
to see each other.   Then they girl called out in a loud voice, “Uncle James,
the lady is awake!”

Eneria was
surprised that she could understand the girl, but then she identified the
source of the headache that was pounding in her temple. Aijo must have picked
up on some of the language.

“Hello, young...
it,” Eneria said to the girl, her mouth twitching over the unfamiliar words. 
That wasn’t grammatically correct by a long shot, but the meaning would get
across, hopefully.   “What name?”

“Marilyn,” she
replied warily.  Eneria’s accent was strange, and it was obvious she didn’t
speak the language well at all.

Eneria held her
hand up to her chest.  Gestures tended to be more similar among humanoids than
words. “My name Eneria, but I called Enny.  Is that fairy in jar?”  Eneria was
struggling to find the words she needed.  She wondered where Aijo had picked up
a word for Pharinae if there were none of her people on this world.