Chapter Thirteen: The Princess and the Master

Master Dhyr arrived the next week. They came from far to the southeast, from some strange desert sultanate distant from the fae lands. But even many miles from our realms, the fae held sway and our wealth and magic were the thing of whispered tales. To most of Alfheim, the fae realms are a lot like Atlantis, only if instead of being an island that sank, it was a whole forest planet that had befallen some kind of magical calamity long ago and its survivors had established the world's most powerful nation right where Switzerland ought to be. That is to say, Dhyr heard the news of the fae princess who wanted to learn combat and they rode all the way to the palace, dressed as a beggar and smelling of unwashed fur.

Dhyr was an oncaran, the first one that I'd ever seen close up. They were common enough in Estival, but I'd only seen them cheering and hopping with the street throngs. Up close, though, they looked a lot like you might expect a werewolf to look, assuming it was half-cat rather than half-wolf. Dhyr had golden brown fur with lighter fur on their belly and little dark spots on their back. I wasn't sure whether they were male or female because oncaran men and women looked pretty much the same, even when they were naked, even to one another. They didn't usually identify as one or the other, and the only time it really mattered were the three days a month they went in heat - which they didn't do at all when others of their kind weren't around. So Dhyr never told me and I never asked - strange but true.

They arrived at the palace looking like something the cat dragged in, and I imagine I'm pretty fortunate that Lieutenant Ro informed me about the master at all. He rapped on the little awning in the garden where Meliswe and I were learning about woodsong from Dill. She was a lot better at it than us, but it was only my third time trying the craft, making the flowering vines grow around my wrists in little bracelets and around my head in a little circlet of flowers. I'd completely forgot I was wearing them, so the first impression I had of Dhyr was that of a raggedy hobo cat and the first impression they had of me was a fae princess decked out in a spring green gown and adorned with flowers.

"Somebody's come from afar, my lady, some distant desert kingdom called Pispistria, with a crumpled copy of Captain Vittoro's announcement. They say they've come to teach the Princess of Fae to fight."

"The Princess of Fae?" Meliswe asked.

"Their words, not mine, miss."

"Let's see this somebody!" I hopped to my feet, excited - this was the first serious inquiry. All the rest had been small, scrappy men from Vernal City who thought themselves far better fighters than Lieutenant Ro had deemed them to be.

Dhyr was crouched out in the hallway near my suite, being looked over by four members of my guard. They stood up when they saw me, uncurling with feline grace to their full height, which was a smidge taller than Dill and maybe four inches shorter than me. Dhyr nodded in acknowledgement but said nothing, their tail slowly swishing behind them.

"It looks like you've had a long journey," I said. "I'm sure you'll want a bath. Please, come in."

"Shall we accompany you, milady?" the lieutenant asked.

I regarded Dhyr again. Their time outside the palace and then waiting near my chambers had been at least an hour - if they'd been carrying an accursed poison, it would have since lost its power. "Lady Meliswe will accompany me. Please station four men right outside." I'd been calling her 'Lady Meliswe' in front of everybody and, though it hadn't yet caught on, nobody had called me on it, either. As with any important person who wasn't nobility, most people called her 'madam' or 'miss'.

The oncaran followed in after us, looking disheveled and miserable - I figured it for a trick right off the bat. Well… maybe not quite a trick so much as a social disconnect between their culture and ours. Dhyr was presenting this way on purpose, and I wasn't quite sure why. Their tail swished back and forth a little faster - that was annoyance among the barnyard cats back home. For some reason, they were getting annoyed.

"Sorry about the dilly-dallying," I said, working the bath's controls. "It's a big palace and it can take a bit for messages to get from one end to the other. I can give you privacy as soon as the bath's drawn up. Then we'll get you some fresh clothes and… do your people have dietary preferences? Mostly meat, I’m guessing…"

Dhyr sighed. "I am trying to teach you your first lesson!" they said, exasperated.

"Oh…" I looked at Meliswe, who could only shrug. "Okay, shoot. What's the lesson?"

"That you don't judge an opponent by their appearance! Here I come to you, a princess in a grand palace, looking like a wretch, a pauper, a drifter, and you are to scoff at me, to see me as beneath notice… and that is when I reveal my pedigree to you!"

"Oh!" I looked back at Meliswe, who shrugged again. "Sorry about that… you see, in my experience, fighting men… folks… sometimes don't take very much care of their appearances. And normally I'd just have left it at that, but you looked so miserable out there… well, I figured you must've had a hard journey from… Pispistria, was it? And I know I like a nice bath after a hard day, so… voila! And now you know not to judge your opponent by their appearance!"

Dhyr looked at me, blinked slowly twice, and burst into uproarious laughter half-way between a human laugh and a jackal's cry. My guards peeked in to make sure all was well. "Bested by the student on the first lesson! Thank you, princess, for that lesson in humility. I like you - I will teach you… for twenty mithrins a lesson. And now I will take a much-needed bath and, as I do, will tell you why I am worth twenty mithrins a lesson." They peeled off all their clothes with no compunctions and slipped into the water. "I am Dhyr, Master of the Fang School, student to Lsyh of the Dry Valley, who was student to Whys, may they rest in power, who founded the Fang. In the battle at Jade Glen, I killed twenty of the enemy in the quiet of night. My master saw fit to mark my wrist after the battle of…"

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Dhyr could tell long stories, but they were also worthy of their title. Even bathed and dressed up, they weren't much to look at, small even by oncaran standards (who tended to be as slender as but a bit shorter than fae) and lacking the many piercings and battle tattoos that assassins and soldiers-for-hire of their race often sported. But Dhyr was amazingly fast, deceptively strong, and knew how to use that combination to great effect. They beat me handily whenever we squared off, no matter what advantage they gave me. For instance, on my second lesson the master had me bind their arms behind their back to demonstrate efficiency of movement and proceeded to beat me with a flying leg lock that I hadn't even known was possible. Then they bound my arms and had me do all sorts of exercises using only my legs and midsection. After that lesson, we brought Meliswe in, at Dhyr's suggestion.

"You can receive much wisdom from a master," Dhyr said, patting their fur-tufted chest. "But much learning also comes from fighting those worse than yourself. Bring Meliswe in and, if she surpasses you, we will find somebody even worse."

I harrumphed at the notion that Meliswe might be a better fighter than me. "And what about fighters just as good as you?" I asked.

Dhyr gave a cackling little laugh. "Impossible! Only you are exactly as good as you are, and even then not always. Trust me - I've been doing this longer than you've been alive."

"I'm eighty-two."

"Well you fight as old as you look, which is much younger."

I spent the next few weeks busying myself with studying four things: learning fighting, practicing magic, practicing my singing, and learning all about the noble houses of the fae. These last two exercises were in anticipation of the upcoming equinox, when the sceptre of the fae courts would pass from Hibernal to Vernal and the queen would open court for the season. Since this would entail all of the fae houses coming together in some sort of grand ceremony, it was important that the royal family have a skill to show off (Laeanna usually did some magical demonstration, but I wasn't quite to the point where most fae nobles weren't at least in the ballpark of my skill level). My magic was still coming along, but that practice included woodsong with Dill - a craft that required so precise a control over tone and pronunciation that regular singing was child's play in comparison. So I "volunteered" (at the queen's request) to perform a song with a bit of woodsong worked into it - the idea was to bring a shriveled rose to bloom by the end of the song. It wasn't amazing magical pyrotechnics, but it was pretty keen.

Singing I could get behind. The memorization of names, lineages, alliances and vendettas, house crests, and so on… that was pure agony. I'd have let Dhyr and Meliswe batter me with practice sticks all day long if it meant I didn't have to sit in the library with the Big Book of Fae Lineages getting grilled by whoever was willing to slog through the damn thing with me - Meliswe, Surburrus, or Dill (who wasn't much help, since she was still just learning to read fae). The book was five hundred sixty-three pages long and, while some of that was illustrations of house crests, there was an awful lot of cramped, tiny text. Since printing presses were barely a thing on Alfheim, that meant some poor scribe had probably slaved for years to copy the thing… and that was only the abridged version.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"You're not ready for the full version," Meliswe said.

"Did other-Laeanna know the full version?"

Meliswe nodded and fetched one of its four volumes, each nearly as thick as the abridged copy. She cracked it open over the reading table and ran a slim finger along a tract of annotations, which I could tell apart from the main text because they were written in ruddy brown rather than black. Laeanna had added hundreds of annotations in the margins of the book where she thought the information was incomplete or inaccurate. And her handwriting was exactly the same as the main writing in the book. For that matter, it was exactly the same as my own inexplicably neat fae script, with its strange loops and curlicue elaborations, each denoting subtleties of meaning, tense, or pronunciation.

"She wrote the book?"

Meliswe shook her head. "She scribed it. Three hours every day for two years. After scribing the abridged version when she was younger. She hand-painted all of the house crests."

I whistled. She'd done a hell of a job. I wasn't so bad at drawing, myself, but Laeanna had possessed a far subtler and more aesthetic hand than I'd been blessed with… though now, I supposed, I was blessed with her same talents if I cared to develop them. "So it would be weird if I didn't know this stuff."

"Right. We can only attribute so much to memory issues stemming from your trauma," she said.

That's the story we (and by we, I mean Queen Alathea) had decided to go with. It would explain my 'memory lapses' and changes in my personality, but if I made an idiot of myself, it would reflect badly on the whole realm. So I had to be poor Princess Laeanna overcoming her trauma and not, 'oh, that poor girl… isn't that just the most pathetic thing?' I'm a proud person… too proud at times… and I would not be seen with pity.

I like to think I succeeded. Not to toot my own horn, but I've always been a fast study. I could fix anything on the farm, had a sketchbook full of development ideas, some of which I'd even had a chance to do. And I could recite hundreds of significant dates or tell you little details from almost any book I'd read. For instance, in Sherlock Holmes's ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, Doyle fouls up and calls Watson 'James' instead of 'John'. Strange but true! And now all of that knowledge was completely, utterly useless! I had a lot to learn about my new world. Luckily, Laeanna was sharper than I ever was, and I got at least some of that sharpness on account of being the new inhabitant of her brain. That might also be why I have a bit of a crush on Captain Vittoro, which Meliswe absolutely cannot ever find out about. In any case, I got the gist of the realm's noble houses pretty well, even if it would take years for me to cultivate the expertise that the original Laeanna had, in fact, spent years cultivating.

I knew enough about the fae houses, right? Well, there was a lot more subtlety to it than that. And - surprise - I'd get to meet my father. My fae father, not the one who'd died in Puerto Rico of yellow fever.

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There was a little strip of wilderness between the Hibernal realm and Vernal, only about four miles wide, on account of the union between Queen Alathea and King Fostolas back when they were only princess and prince. Before that, the wilderness had spanned a thirty mile stretch, just like the stretch between Vernal and Estival currently was, but their marriage had squeezed the realms together through fae magic and expanded the acreage of both realms by something like ten percent. The strip of wild lands was now small, but the Hibernal king had to meet the Vernal queen there according to fae law and tradition. On the day of the equinox, at exactly midnight, a procession from the Hibernal realm met with our Vernal procession at the half-way point between our realms. I was forbidden to go to the ceremony since I wasn't allowed to go out into the wilds between realms, even if it was only a measly two miles, but I could see the whole thing happening from atop the gate tower. The wilds were still the wilds, no matter how small, and Alathea wasn't about to let me get kidnapped again. I watched the torchlight of the two processions approaching one another. They merged into a single formation and continued toward the gate. Meliswe sidled up next to me, planting a kiss on my cheek.

"Your father will be the one with the Robe of Frost…"

"And the Hibernal Crown and the Sword of Aul-Faethiar, with the Stone of Vigil upon its scabbard, green like the moon from whence we came. Yes, I read the damn book."

"I just wished to make sure… this is all part of being a princess, I'm afraid."

I was supposed to be cool with my father but polite. Apparently, this was a state of affairs that stretched back almost fifty years. I didn't anticipate finding it hard, since I didn't know the man at all - hell, sometimes I'm distant and aloof by accident. Meliswe couldn't tell me why Laeanna was distant from her father and if anybody else knew the reason, they hadn't volunteered the information. I was curious and willing to do a little sleuthing if it would solve the Princess Laeanna and the Case of the Distant Father.

The combined procession of Vernal and Hibernal approached the gate with my mother and father riding at the fore. I was supposed to go down and welcome them with my own little contingent of Dill (who was very new to riding a horse), Lieutenant Ro (who didn't care for riding, as they'd never gotten stirrups for reverse-articulated faun legs quite right), and four of my other guards. I buzzed down from the tower in lieu of the stairs and mounted my horse, which sent my people scrambling because they'd been waiting at the base of the gate tower and weren't yet mounted. We rode up to the Vernal side of the gate and waited for the group to arrive, their lanterns approaching in the night. They came to a stop right at the threshold to Vernal. I gave the king the closest thing to a bow I could manage from horseback.

"My lord of winter, welcome to the land of spring," I said.

The king nodded gravely, handed the Sceptre of Fae to my mother, and the group trotted on into Vernal. I took a spot just behind the king and the queen, next to the fae lord who must have been my adopted brother Prince Gaelin, the other child of Fostolas. He was attractive, as most fae are, though not handsome as my mother and I were beautiful (nor as handsome as Calivar, part of me chimed in). Instead, he was an intense young man with thin lips and electric blue hair.

"You're looking well," he said. "I was sorry to hear about your hardship in the wild… but, looking at you, I wouldn't have suspected anything was amiss but for that dagger you carry at your side."

"After two assassination attempts and a kidnapping, brother, I'd be a fool not to arm myself. Plus, if you can have a sword, I can certainly have a dagger."

"That's true, sister. Though, to be honest, I barely know how to use this thing. Why bother when you can ride out with a dozen guards who've been using their blades for years?"

I nodded as if that was wise, but in reality I knew the reason well enough: because sometimes those blades fell, and if you weren't ready to add your own blade (and your own life) to the fight, the fight might be lost and you'd still be dead or worse. In fact, Gaelin's birth parents, a pair of merchants, had both died violently at the hands of robbers when he was just a baby. The king, wanting for a son and being close to their family, had taken the boy under his wing. When Gaelin's parents returned from Elysheim around seven years later, Fostolas had asked to adopt the boy (who, by then, had spent most of his childhood with the king). They'd agreed… in exchange for a tidy trove of mithrins. Or so I'd read in the Big Book of Fae Lineages.

As we rode, I thought on that. Gaelin would be the next king - he was a prince and a pure-blooded fae - but Fostolas and Alathea also had a son, and his whereabouts were apparently the issue of contention between Laeanna and her father. I wondered what had happened there. We rode until the dawn, when we stopped at the estate of the Duke and Duchess of High Bloom to rest our horses and relax before the rest of the ride to Vernal City.

High Bloom was the third largest city in the realm, perhaps half the size of Vernal City, surrounded by miles of fragrant orchards and fertile farmlands. The countryside there reminded me of home, except the main road led to High Bloom instead of Sioux City. At the city's center was Castle Blossom - not half the palace that the queen had, but still plenty impressive, standing above the squat, brown-roofed buildings of High Bloom like Notre Dame must've stood over medieval Paris. They'd gone all out setting up their great hall for us, tapestries hung and tables arranged for a grand banquet. Fostolas and Alathea sat with the lord and lady of the castle, discussing things of political import, no doubt. I made my appearance before them, smiling and exchanging pleasantries (which I'd rehearsed beforehand with Meliswe) before making my way to the farthest table I could get away with absconding to. There, I sat with Meliswe, feeding her grapes and sipping wine from one another's glasses, while Gaelin strummed a tune on an instrument more like a Spanish guitar than a medieval lute. The tune reminded me of Greensleeves, and so I sang it for them… quietly, I thought, but the prince and princess playing a duet attracted attention from all of the nearby tables. Gaelin had the changes to tune and tempo figured out by the time I got to the chorus:

Greensleeves was my delight,

Greensleeves my heart of gold.

Greensleeves was my heart of joy,

and who but my lady Greensleeves?

By the end of the song, we had half of the hall listening, and there was polite applause (these were nobles after all) when the last note rang out. Gaelin bowed and I did a little curtsy.

"That's a beautiful tune," Gaelin said. "What language was that?"

"English," I said. "Uh… it's an ancient language, and little known in this age."

"I've heard of it," he said, to my surprise. "A man washed ashore two months ago, the only survivor of a horrible wreck, or so he indicated in pantomime. When he was first rescued, he spoke a strange language to the villagers there. I was on a pilgrimage to the holy springs not far off and offered the help of myself and my men to look for further survivors - and, indeed, we found two more clinging to the scraps of lifeboats, who also spoke an odd tongue that none of us had ever heard - between my guard and myself, we spoke fifteen languages with at least some fluency, and we recognized not a word from these three men. But, the next morning, all three men spoke perfect Faeric and seemed distressed to find that they could no longer utter their native tongues. When I asked them what they'd spoken the day before, the one man said 'English' and the other two said 'Deutsch'." Gaelin chuckled. "I'd like to hear an explanation for that!"

"And I'd like to offer one," I said, and not insincerely. Three survivors - two Germans and an Englishman - washing ashore in Hibernal, and without having to traverse limbo to get there (I presume)! "Alas, it's as much a mystery to me as it is to you. I dredged the language out of the deepest basement of Surburrus's library."

"Ah, so you are still a bookworm!" he laughed, and gestured back to my dagger. "I suppose some books need stabbing more than others."