How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse--Book One of the Thorne Chronicles Read online

  The King cleared his throat. “Welcome,” he said again, to the First Fairy. His eyes clutched at the Vizier. Then, carefully, mechanically, the King welcomed the rest of the fairies. One by one.

  By the fourth (aquamarine, angular, and very tall), the Vizier was sure they were xenos. By the ninth (cobalt, whose robes draped in a fashion that suggested rather too many limbs for a human), he was unsure again. By the twelfth (the smallest, pale, and round as the second moon), he simply didn’t care. They were beautiful. They were magical.

  One by one, they approached the cradle. One by one, they offered their gifts to the Princess, who woke up at some point and stared at her visitors with wide dark eyes.

  “. . . bestow the gift of harp-playing, that you may hold a room rapt and beguile men’s hearts and minds.” The green fairy leaned over the baby. Tapped her forehead with a small, green finger.

  Rory gurgled.

  Only one left. The Vizier realized he was holding his breath. Let it go, slowly. His stomach hurt. All this worry for nothing, like most of his efforts.

  And, then, from the doorway, came a voice: “Oh, I see. You started without me.”

  The thirteenth fairy had arrived.

  She sauntered across the basilica on silent boots, spike-heeled and made of a shiny, very-much-not-traditional material, with silver laces, like wire. She had a shock of pink hair cresting upright along the middle of her scalp. The sides of her skull were shaved bare, and marked with intricate, disturbing tattoos that seemed to move if one tried to look too closely. She wore a black jacket, too big, flapping open, so that the buckles jingled and clinked, and a too-short skirt over too-long legs wrapped in hose that looked like fishing net. The garment under the jacket was the same shade as her hair, and it looked as if it had been slashed by razors. Her skin was metallic, shifting pewter to bronze, flirting with the light. Instead of scales, rings and rivets studded her skin, all polished to a high gleam.

  The guests said nothing. Didn’t move, as if they worried she might notice them. The other fairies drew closer to the cradle and made a wall of glittering fabric, like martial butterflies. The first raised her vermillion hands and waved her fingers, go back, go away.

  The thirteenth fairy ignored her. She climbed the dais steps. Paused at the top, and stared at the rest. They wilted aside. Then the thirteenth fairy lasered her attention at the King and the Consort. Dragged her eyes the height and breadth of them.

  “Is it custom to begin important ceremonies without all the important guests?”

  The King and Consort looked at each other. The King flinched. He scuffed his gaze along the stones and said, as if through a mouthful of velvet, “Well, no. But you weren’t invited. So, ah, I’ll thank you to leave, now.”

  The thirteenth fairy’s brows rose. The twin rings above her left eye gleamed like tiny suns. “Excuse me? I was very much invited.”

  “Majesty.” The Vizier’s voice wisped across the dais. “It’s my doing. It seemed—imprudent to leave her out this time.”

  The King stared at him. Opened his mouth and left it hanging. His tongue wiggled, pink and furious.

  “You are welcome, then, Lady,” said the Consort. She plucked at her skirts, which was as close to a curtsy as she could manage while gathering herself to leap at the fairy, should she try something untoward toward the Princess.

  The thirteenth fairy smiled. The tiny silver ring at the corner of her mouth winked. The Vizier noted that she showed a lot of teeth. He also noted that they were unusually pointed. Sharp, even.

  “Thank you, Consort.” She glanced sidelong at the King. “You would have left me out again.”

  “I even didn’t think you were—”

  “Real?”

  “That. Yes. And the last time you came to a Naming, you tried to murder the baby.”

  “I did not.”

  “Well, you certainly didn’t—”

  “What? Bring a gift? Is that what you think this lot have passed on? Kindness, beauty, a pure heart. Some wits thrown in to differentiate the poor thing from a doll. And the ability to play the harp. So useful for a royal scion in this age of galactic empire. Do you play the harp, Majesty?”

  “I—no.”

  “Then why should your daughter need that skill?”

  The King seemed to recall who he was, and that people didn’t interrupt him more than, well, ever. He drew himself up straight and threw back his shoulders. For a moment, the thirteenth fairy saw the ghost of the man he might have been, and her smile faded.

  The King mistook that as encouragement.

  “I mean,” he said, and his tone could have sliced stone, “that my foremother would have died, if you’d had your way, on her sixteenth birthday. You cursed her, my lady. I think harp-playing is infinitely preferable.”

  The thirteenth fairy said nothing for a very long time. The silence squeezed into every crevice and crept into open eyes and nostrils and mouths and breathing tubes, filling mouths and lungs and air sacks and cranial vents.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “I suppose you would. Your worth does not hang on your ability to please others.”

  She turned a shoulder to the King and looked at the rest of the fairies. The pink crest on her scalp quivered. The tips caught the light and gleamed like glass. “And you. I expected better. Half a millennium passes, they crawl out of their gravity wells and travel all the way here, and all you can do is repeat the old words.”

  The first fairy spread her hands. “Here or there, then or now, they are much the same.”

  “What they value in a daughter has not changed,” said the fourth fairy, pale yellow, whose gift had been clear skin. “Nor,” she added under her breath, “have their inheritance laws.”

  “We understand,” added the third fairy, “what you were trying to do, back then.”

  “We just didn’t much like your methods,” said the eighth.

  “And we are not without mercy.” The cobalt fairy drifted a step out of line, like a shadow tracking the motion of an invisible sun. “You will note, sister, that this is the first girl born in almost two hundred years to this line.”

  The import of that statement took a moment to settle. Then a collective gasp ricocheted through the guests. The k’bal put their heads together, clicking and gusting to themself, while their hat-flames snapped and creaked. The mirri’s daughter-buds spun in eccentric, erratic orbits, while the President herself tipped onto her suit’s belly and rocked there. The humans covered their mouths, some of them; or put heads together to mutter about how could that be. More than one impossible bounced off the tile and tapestry before evaporating into uncertainty.

  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.

  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 la
tter 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.