Chapter Twelve: Habits of a Proper Princess

I think Vittoro meant it as a barb when he invited me to discuss rescue operations with himself and the queen. Certainly, Laeanna had indicated no interest in military matters in the past, and I'd just come around to thinking myself a military man before I'd been whisked away to limbo. But if I was to be a princess, a ruler, and a uniter of kingdoms, I'd damn well get involved. Dilettante officers who practiced at watercolors and pigeon-breeding when they should have been concentrating on strategy and common sense were the bastards who got good men killed. So I made a point to arrange a meeting as soon as possible - but, despite my repeated protests, it was going to have to wait until the following morning. I couldn't bear the thought of Becounia or anybody else spending a minute more than they had to in that horrible place.

Of course, having to wait until morning did mean I had time to mend things with Meliswe. She'd wandered off to find an outfit she thought I'd like and some wine. I intended on relieving her of her outfit tout suite, but I'd enjoy the relieving and I'd enjoy the wine. While I waited, I showed Dill around my suite - five rooms on the eastern side of the palace, including the atrium with its soaring roof and intricate stained glass - it had once been the palace chapel, and I wondered whether what Meliswe and I did in there was sacrilegious or the exact opposite. Dill was in a continual state at being stunned - the closest thing to a palace she'd ever been in was the Temple of the True Tree back in Blue Fern, and the atrium of my domain in the castle could fit several of those with room to spare. I suggested that she should write a letter to her folks back in Blue Fern to let them know she was alive.

"I… I only know how to write the script of the woodsong, princess, and not well. And they cannot read."

I wondered whether that was even possible - how did one send a letter to a village fifty miles beyond any fae road? "We'll have to correct that if you're to be my new handmaiden," I said.

"I… I am not fae, my lady. You know this."

I had an iffy relationship with letting people wait on me at all - if it was important to do, I could do it myself. That was my motto on the farm, and I didn't see any reason to change it now. But, Meliswe insisted, royals had to have servants - it was part of the office. If you lived in a cave and didn't have people in fancy gowns pouring your drinks and opening doors for you, you weren't much of a noble at all. At the very least, everybody would think you were an eccentric or a pushover, and I didn't want to be seen as either. But there was one eccentricity that I'd allow myself: I was going to invite people who I liked and respected into my service, and I was going to treat them well. Most people assigned to royal service were the bastard sons and daughters of nobles… that was, in fact, how Meliswe had initially got her post as a palace servant, a lady's attendant. She'd become the princess's handmaiden by inadvertently endearing herself to Laeanna when she scolded a noble for being unkind to his horse. Almost all of the higher servile posts were occupied by people who were half-fae or more, but there was no rule that said I couldn't pick whomever I wanted.

"There's no rule that says I can't pick whoever I like," I stated. "So if I like you, you can have the job, even if you're a mountain troll."

"My lady… a mountain troll would not be a good choice…"

I shrugged. "I'd still give her a fair shake. Look… if you don't want the job that's fine. I'll give you enough mithrins to travel home or wherever else you want to go and I'll be happy to see you visit whenever you like. No hard feelings. But I can promise you this: if anybody gives you a rough time for being half-human or half-sylvast, they'll have Princess Laeanna to deal with. What do you say?"

Dill looked up to the vaulted ceiling of the atrium, closing her eyes and smiling happily as the colored lights of the stained glass glittered across her. "I… I would get to live in the palace?"

"You'd have your own room next to mine, a salary to do with as you please, and one day off a week, plus other days on request. I won't lie - it's a demanding job because you'll have to be around the likes of me ten or eleven hours every day. But, on the bright side, you get to be around the likes of me ten or eleven hours every day." I'm not sure whether it's typical of a handmaiden or not, but Meliswe typically spent half that time either doing whatever I was doing (e.g. sitting next to me at meals) or doing whatever she liked while I was otherwise engaged (e.g. studying in the library). But I didn't want to give Dill the impression that it was mostly idle time.

"Then I accept your deal!" she stuck out her hand to shake on it. Though, when I shook her hand, she gave me an odd look and showed me how the sylvast do it: you stick out your opposite hand and the two of you join fingers together to symbolize the twining of roots. I told her, honestly, that I liked her way and that the two of us would shake that way from there on out.

"You haven't even drawn the bath yet!" Meliswe sighed.

"Our resident zephrylite made a mess of the place while we were gone, so I had to give him enough orders to last all night," I said.

"You just don't know how to work the bath." She was absolutely right, but I wasn't about to admit it.

Meliswe traipsed into the room hiding her change of clothes under a protective cover - she and I were going to bathe first… which, frankly, kind of defeated the purpose of her trying on anything to get me in the mood. But it was what she was set on doing, so I was helpless to do anything but indulge her. She showed Dill how to run the bath while I watched on, pretending that I already knew how to work the mess of levers and pumps that controlled the water valves. I'd have gotten it right on my own eventually, but it might have taken a while.

Dill waited around after the bath was full, humming happily and glancing around the place, still tickled pink at the notion of being in a palace. Meliswe suggested that she should return to her room for the night, to which Dill replied that she wasn't sure where that was. So my former handmaiden had to pad back out and show her where the recently-vacated (as of two hours ago) handmaiden's quarters were. I waited for Meliswe to return, arraying soaps, oils, and scented candles along the rim of my bathing tub. Old-Laeanna had been serious about her baths, and I was starting to understand the appeal.

"This is mine?" Dill exclaimed happily from out in the hallway. She was easy to please, our Dill.

Then Meliswe slipped back in, locking the door behind her. She locked eyes on me and let her dress flutter to the ground. She'd eventually show Dill where to take the laundry, I'm sure, but not with that dress - after our literal time in the wilderness, it had seen better days and would live out its remaining existence cut into washrags. Then, clad in only her undies, she sauntered over to the tub.

As a quick sidebar: in Alfheim, women's undergarments are a thing of genius. Unlike the undergarments of Earth (at least in the West), where women basically wear flimsy little dresses under their regular dresses or wear little cotton drawers, women in Alfheim usually wear 'panties' (or 'underpants'), which are essentially elastic, body-hugging briefs that manage to be both very comfortable and very alluring (when a woman wants it to be). Meliswe's panties were black and lacy and about as small as you could get away with while maintaining coverage of the backside and nethers. They somehow managed to be more alluring than complete nudity - the idea of nudity exuding from her sinuous movements, but never quite visible.

She sauntered around me, her finger tracing along my shoulder, pulling my hair out of the way to unbutton my own dress. She planted kisses on my neck as she pulled the dress from me - another heap for the dishrag pile. To my surprise, I felt her directing me toward the little stool that she usually occupied when seeing to the princess's bathing needs.

"Put your wings out - you need salve or it'll get infected."

I did so, feeling the dull soreness of the hole in my wing membrane and the deep exhaustion my flight muscles still felt. The salve stung a bit as she applied it, but then it tingled and numbed. Once Meliswe blew it dry, she helped me fold my wings back and gave me a little swat on the backside.

"All done, princess. Shall we bathe?"

We did, sinking down until we were neck-deep in the tepid water, our eye contact never leaving one another as we did. And we tried to wash one another… and, normally, our failure to do so would be on account of getting up to hanky-panky instead of cleaning. But we were both so scraped up and bruised that there was a lot more wincing and yelping than there was moaning or sighing. Afterward, we salved one another on all the scraped up bits and Meliswe showed me her dress.

I'd been expecting something scandalously alluring, and this wasn't quite it. I buttoned it up for her - not the first time I'd buttoned up a dress, but the first time Laeanna had, and I turned her back to face me. Her eyes were uncertain, waiting for my response, and I wanted more than anything to kiss her, but my breath was caught in my chest. Yes, Meliswe looked beautiful in it, as she looked beautiful in almost anything, but the gown was semi-modest by palace standards. A very nice, clearly very expensive gown that would never get you accused of being either a prude or a tart. It was cream pink, just a bit less orange than the rose gold of her hair, glittering with small gems and flowing to the floor. The hips and the bust were taut, and Meliswe had a way of making anything vaguely form-fitting really pop. There was a little lacy collar, and the coils of her hair dangled down, resting perfectly at either side. It wasn't scandalous, but I was still in awe of her beauty, awed that anybody who prettied up that well could be such a humble and good person, too.

"Do you like it?" she asked, and suddenly she sounded very unsure of herself.

"It's beautiful… it's yours?" By that, I meant that it wasn't exactly handmaiden clothing. While handmaidens usually accompanied their ladies to galas and balls, they generally wore something nice but insufficient to upstage the real guests - handmaidens were in the 'upper servantry', far from scullery maids, but they also weren't nobility. In that gown, though, Meliswe would upstage any fae lady I could think of.

Meliswe ran her hands down the fabric. "It's mine. My mother - she's a quarter human - she gave it to me when my father first got me an appointment at the palace. I was a common attendant, and I told her it was absurd to think I'd ever get the chance to wear something like this. A few years later, when Laeanna took me into her service, she told me: 'see, Meliswe? Things will happen for you if you're a good person and loyal to the queen!', and I still thought she was being foolish. My mother was proud of me… why shouldn't she be? But handmaidens aren't ladies of the court. I was happy enough with my simple gowns and their glass jewelry. Laeanna didn't look down on me… she didn't look down on anybody. And neither do you. You've got a lot in common, actually, and more and more often hours go by before I remember that you're not the same person. But you were the one who said I'm not a servant, Lariborn, and who decided my life was worth as much as a princess's. That's why I feel like I belong in this gown tonight."

"It is and you do," I said. I kissed her lips, smelled the spicy sweetness of her perfume. "When I thought I'd lost you, I couldn't think of anything else. You're not just a servant." I shook my head. "Nobody's just a servant, but you're more special than that, Meliswe Juniper. You make me want to be a better person, and that better person isn't Larry Born. I'm Laeanna of the Vernal." I raised an eyebrow. "But I am ordering you to my bed."

"After a dance."

"After a dance," I agreed.

We didn't have any music with us, but we danced. Me in my nightgown and Meliswe in her pink ball gown, we circled about the room, looking into on another's eyes. She asked me to sing her a song, so I sung 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee', planting a kiss on her lips between each stanza. Laeanna had a good singing voice and now so did I - more muscle memory, I suppose, able to hit the notes like a silver bell. By the end of the song, I had Meliswe humming along to it - the tune's not especially complicated.

"That's beautiful," she whispered. "What does it mean?"

I laughed - without realizing it, I'd just sung the whole song in English. That was literally the first English I'd spoken since coming to Alfheim. I don't know if I could utter an English sentence if I tried, but if I tried to sing it out - no problem! We retreated to the boudoir and Meliswe asked me to sing more songs in my 'strange mumble language' as she stripped for me, and I tried to think of something upbeat that I could sing. But, looking at Meliswe dancing half-nude in my bedchamber, I could only think of the most beautiful song I knew of - my maw's favorite, as she picked it out whenever it was her turn to run the church hymnal. I'm sure it's sacrilegious, but I sang The Good 'Ol Way right there at my bedside as I prepared to knock boots with Meliswe, my loins on fire, my heart beating in my chest, and my words echoing sweet in my ears:

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good ol' way

And who shall wear the starry crown

Good Lord, show me the way

"What does it mean?" Meliswe asked.

"It means I love you."

+++++

My wounds were salved up, but my nethers sure weren't, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable night. For both of us, unless Meliswe is a far better actress than I give her credit for. It was a thorough and late night and I had to wake up at the crack of dawn to meet with my mother… that's Queen Alathea and not my maw back in Nebraska… to discuss a rescue operation. But I dared not miss it because I worried that there wouldn't be a rescue operation if I didn't speak up for Becounia and the other women.

I rolled out of bed, which was hard because Meliswe kept groaning and trying to pull me back in. But I made it out, combed my hair, washed my face, and prettied it enough to be presentable. Then I trudged down to the handmaiden's quarters and pounded on the door until Dill opened the door and, bleary-eyed, helped to button me up. Gaia knows why they didn't just make dresses of the same soft, elastic stuff that they made panties out of. I decided on the spot to have some of them made - princesses can do that. I made my own way to the queen's drawing room, a fifteen-minute walk from my own suite, my groggy mind struggling to recall the hallways, turns, and stairs to take.

I spotted Captain Vittoro in the hallway and made a point of entering with him. I didn't want to be the last one in the room, the NCO shuffling in after the officers have already started talking strategy. He offered me a wary nod and we strode side-by-side into the drawing room, where the queen's handmaiden was drawing up tea. They haven't yet discovered coffee in Alfheim and I'm eager to find it some day to introduce these poor, deprived people in the ways of waking up properly.

"Laeanna," the queen said. "I returned from Estival as soon as I could. I was overjoyed to learn you were unharmed."

She made a show of hugging me - I guess the captain didn't know I wasn't much more than a place-holder princess in the queen's eyes. Her eyes were calculating, checking my body for harm and tutting over my half-healed bruises. "Mostly unharmed. It was a mistake to send you out with only twenty men," she stated. "You're not to leave the palace until the wedding."

"I was captured outside the kingdom, mother… I'm not sure what good cloistering me inside the palace will do…"

"The palace is a large place," the queen said. "If need be, we can whittle it down to somewhere safer yet…"

Vittoro took a seat across from the queen. "My queen, our primary concern within Vernal is assassins. If the princess acquires an escort before travel, I see no reason to restrict her activities." He looked to me pointedly. "Even those activities that don't usually capture her attention."

"But perhaps they should," I said. "I think you'll both agree that I have reasons aplenty to take an interest in security. Two assassination attempts and a kidnapping. And no sooner am I rescued… thank you, captain… but I am told that I have no authority to command the queen's troops, not even if I've got new information that requires a tactical change. I want to know why we aren't sending out men right this moment to rescue Becounia and neutralize the raiders."

The queen tapped her fingernails on the table, growing tired of our little game. "Because you are not a military expert and were not in a position to gauge the strength of their defenses. Vittoro, wouldn't you say there are too many unknowns to mount an operation?"

"There are many unknowns, my queen. I'm inclined to err on the side of caution. But, if the princess and her friend…"

"Becounia," I said.

Alathea huffed - she huffed in exactly the same way I sometimes did. "Who is this Becounia you keep mentioning?"

"She's your cartographer, mother. She's the woman who helped me escape from the raider harem, free six of the twelve other women there, and rescue Meliswe. And if she's lucky, she's being held as a sex slave by those raiders, and nobody deserves that. Certainly not a friend and a loyal subject. We must send an expedition to rescue her, rescue the others, and wipe that goddamn fort off the map!"

The queen slammed her fist on the table, jostling tea everywhere and startling Vittoro. "You do not dictate military policy in my realm, you do not tell me what to do, and you do not give me ultimatums. You know damn well why you are not given leave to command my troops."

I turned to the captain and mustered as much icy indifference as I could muster. "Captain, please give my mother and me two minutes in private." The queen nodded her approval and Vittoro left the room, leaving his cloak on the back of his chair.

"Now you listen here…" the queen hissed.

"No, you listen. You need me, Alathea. I may not be the daughter you knew, but I'm the daughter you have now, and I'm damn sure the last one you're ever going to get. And your daughter is telling you this: we owe it to those women to rescue them, and if you deny me, I swear to Gaia I'll fly right out of this palace and you'll never see me again. I'll rescue Becounia myself if I have to, because she was following my orders when she got captured and she trusted me. She trusted me more than she ever trusted anybody in this whole crazy world and now she's in a fucking dungeon getting raped every night. You're the queen. Swallow your pride, do what's best for your subjects, and order the operation."

A minute later, Vittoro returned to the room, bowing to the queen and then nodding to me before taking his seat again. "Shall I tell you how I plan to take the fort, my queen?" Captain Vittoro was an old hand at reading his fellow officers.

"Please do," Alathea said. "And, if my daughter gives you orders in the future, you may assume they come from me."

+++++

Officers react one of two ways when you call them out for having their heads up their behinds: either they double down on their boneheaded thinking and decide to make an example of you or they admit they're wrong and respect you more afterward. They're sometimes grumpy for a while before the respect bit, though. From everything I'd heard, Alathea was a pretty decent woman, at least as far as queens go. So I'd taken a gamble that she wouldn't have me seized on the spot and committed to a dungeon, and she hadn't. Instead, she did the next worst thing instead of making a horrible example of me: she gave me more responsibility. She did this the next day, after she'd decided she wasn't so cross at me any more that she might lose her cool. She summoned me to the garden, strolling with me over to a particularly verdant spot.

"My first Laeanna was my daughter for eighty-two years. Gaia willing, you'll be my daughter for much longer. If you insist that you're ready to command people and make decisions, I'll give you plenty of opportunities to further hone that skill."

In other words: if I was going to be a pain in her behind, she was going to give me just enough responsibility that I'd be too busy to bug her. The first order of business, she said, was being in charge of my own personnel since I'd already made a few changes without telling her.

"I know you and that girl Meliswe have been busy in your chambers most nights, that you've got some human-sylvast girl acting as your handmaiden. She's been meditating in the gardens and making all the vines go crazy." She pointed to the spot - vines had crept half-way up the palace wall and a group of three gardeners on tall ladders were busy cutting them down. "I could have used that handmaiden position for political capital, which is why I've always given Laeanna the illusion of personnel choices after selecting a few appropriate candidates."

"She chose Meliswe."

Alathea waved dismissively. "Yes, but she just shifted from one favor position to another. If you insist on being eccentric and selecting non-fae to whatever positions you like, frankly I don't care. The right woman for the right job, I say. But I want it to be clear to all that you, my eccentric daughter, are the one with the kind heart who can't say 'no' to a good sob story."

"That's not what I did."

"That's what the perception will be. I'm giving you a budget, and you'll file any additions or changes to your staff through my clerk. If ever I decide to second-guess you, it will be for a very good reason, and you will obey me. Are we understood?"

I smiled sweetly. "Yes, mother." I'd taken to calling her that. I figured that the more I did it, especially when it was just the two of us, the more it would settle into her mind, and it appeared to be working. "So… how much have I got to work with?"

She stated a figure so astronomically high that I thought it was a joke - until she pointed out that this included the princess's personal guard. Twenty guards who, between salary, training, armament, and horses took up the lion's share of my considerable budget. I could afford a few people beyond that - Dill as my handmaiden, Meliswe as my 'personal/personnel executive', and one or two more spots I could fill as needs required.

The captain of my personal guard was Lieutenant Anrovagorius, a big brash faun who everybody called Anro or Lieutenant Ro. He, two sergeants, a quartermaster, and sixteen guards were in my service - whenever there were guards right outside my room or escorting me to any official event, that was some of them. Six of those twenty were new on account of their predecessors having died when I'd been kidnapped - my personal guard had made up about a third of my escort, and they'd all been slaughtered when I'd been kidnapped. I hadn't known any of this because nobody saw fit to inform me. Laeanna hadn't taken her guard for granted, not exactly, but she'd had no interest in it whatsoever. If I was to face more assassination attempts, that seemed like a good policy to change.

I met with them during training a few days later, which they did with a contingent of the queen's guard under Vittoro himself. There were enough new faces in my guard that the captain wanted to see that their training was up to snuff before leaving the to their own devices - a pretty reasonable idea. Vittoro was an officer, the second-highest ranking one after the VIP in charge of the whole army, but he thought like a Master Sergeant most of the time, which made him somebody who could get things done and a good guy to be in the good graces of. His eyebrows went up when he saw me enter with my guards.

"Ho! Princess in the court!" He shouted. At that, everybody lowered their practice weapons or stopped whatever they were doing and stood at attention. "To what do we have the honor?"

I'd just come to see what training entailed, but that was before I'd realized that Vittoro was back from the wilds. That meant he'd ridden out to the old fort with about a hundred men and done whatever there was to be done. The fact that he was unscathed and his men were already up and training suggested that it hadn't been a protracted or even particularly difficult battle.

"I take it you didn't have trouble with the raiders, captain?"

He winced and took a second to respond. "No, princess, we didn't. On your advice, I took them at night with a pair of fae taking out the idiots at the portcullis. We got everybody in and in a defensive line before the others even knew the gate was open and wiped the courtyard with 'em. Four injured on our side to thirty or so dead or injured on theirs. We chased the rest out into the forest, burned the palisade, and busted every door with a lock wide open, so it'll be a while before anybody comes back there to roost again. We gave the noncombatants the option of coming back to the pass fortress…"

"And Becounia? Did you find her?"

Vittoro nodded. "We did, my lady."

My face lit up. "Where is she? I'm sure she came back with you?"

He nodded again. "She did, in a manner of speaking. We found her dead, along with two other women. Three others we found and rescued from the 'harem' you described. I'm very sorry."

I almost cried in front of all those men, but my pride wouldn't let me. I drew my lips flat and nodded. "I understand, and I thank you and your men for doing what you could. Did she, at least, have a quick death?"

"I… I think the less I say the better, princess. I hope she doesn't remember much…"

"Remember much? What kind of sense does that make?"

"Becounia was mostly fey and a magical adept. She'll certainly have gone to Elysheim, though those with particularly traumatic ends sometimes opt not to return to the lands of the living. Still, if she was as brave and true as you say she was, perhaps she'll find the mettle to return."

"She will," I said - and, frankly, that took a lot of the salt out of that wound. "Becounia's problem wasn't a lack of bravery, but that she'd never been taught to fight. She froze up the instant combat started and I had to do everything. If she'd been half-trained, I might not have been captured to begin with."

"So far as I know, princess, you've never shown a whit of interest in fighting or strategy, and yet it's practically all I've heard from you lately. A handful of fancy magic spells do not make you a fighter."

"I can fight," I insisted.

"Oh?" Vittoro loosed the straps of his leather training armor and tossed it aside. He strode up to me, the rest of the men shuffling to get a better view and a better listen. He grabbed one of the little sticks the guards used as training weapons and handed it to me. "You say you can fight, princess. I'm not one to question your highness, but I'd like to see it first-hand."

"You want me to attack you?"

"I'm sure my men will pull you away before you hurt me too badly."

Instead of hemming and hawing over it, I took his stick and paced out into the training yard. Vittoro didn't take a weapon - he was trying to make an example out of me. And, though he didn't realize it, I still had a little spark of soldierly pride burning hot in me, and it would humiliate me to be easily beaten by an unarmed man, even if he weighed twice what I did and could probably hospitalize me with a single punch. Vittoro squared off against me, legs planted, gesturing for me to come at him, so I did.

I leapt forward quickly enough that, even though he was half-expecting it, I had the element of surprise. I slammed the stick right into the captain's gut and, when he doubled over, I clocked him right in the mouth with my little fist. I didn't hold back at all. Then, before he could retaliate, I skipped away - the princess didn't have any fight training, but she had good dance reflexes. I thought myself out of the captain's range, but I'd forgotten about my training stick. He grabbed it in a meaty paw and yanked me forward. I turned the forward momentum into a leap - I imagine most folks would have stumbled off-balance, but I didn't. But I wasn't home free. The captain grabbed my arm and flipped me to the ground as gently as he could, pinning me there as I struggled helplessly to get up. When I didn't give up, he wrenched my arm until I tapped uncle.

Vittoro helped me back to my feet and I dusted myself off. Lucky for me, I wasn't wearing a good dress. I looked around, a bit embarrassed at how easily I'd been bested even after getting a surprise attack… and every last man was looking at the two of us in abject terror. Captain Vittoro had just challenged Princess Laeanna to a fight and had thrown her highness, Laeanna, Princess of the Vernal, onto the dusty ground in the training courtyard. I stuck my hand out and, with a bemused expression, the captain shook it, his meaty paw dwarfing mine.

"I take it back," he said. "I don't know who in the realm taught you, but you can fight. If I was your size, my goose would've been cooked."

"But you're not."

"I'm not. No offense, princess, but you can't fight me like you're fighting somebody your same size, which I suppose is how you must have learned. Any hardy man can swing an axe and throw a haymaker, and that's half-way to being a decent brawler. If you're going to be fighting people who are bigger and stronger than you, you need techniques with a lot more subtlety and they take a lot more training. There are small men who can occasionally best me in a fight, but they're awfully rare."

"Well I want you to find one… and he's going to teach me."