Chapter Nineteen: Tales From Afar

The morning after the masquerade, I was awoken a few hours earlier than I'd have liked. We hadn't settled down until late and my sleep quality hadn't been very good. I had every intention of skipping court in the morning and wandering in around half-past noon to be updated on the day's proceedings. Alathea wouldn't give me too hard of a time if I didn't make it a habit. The nobles were going to be discussing farming and mining rights in the northern fiefdoms, which sounded godawful boring.

Mind you: farming is interesting, and I had plenty of ideas for how to 'modernize' the realm's medieval system. But I had no interest whatsoever in who got to develop fields where or what percentage tax they were allowed to levy. I had every intention of sleeping in, and yet somebody was tap-tap-tapping away at my door at seven in the morning. Tapping away politely, mind you, but a tap is a tap, and it echoed right through the antechamber and into our bedroom.

"Make it stop," Meliswe said. She nudged me with her foot until I was half-way out from under the covers, and she nearly pushed me right off onto the cold marble floor.

With a sigh, I swung out of bed and padded out to my chamber entrance, opening the double-doors with what I hoped was an air of ominous grump. Don't bug the princess, I hope I conveyed. Outside shuffled three servants trundling big metal carts topped with heating trays. The head servant (and resident tap-tap-tapper) fumbled for a card and cleared her throat to read it.

"The Prince Velda would like to apologize for last night's unfortunate turn of events and offer you a gourmet Wisten breakfast."

"Breakfast?" Meliswe asked. I hadn't even heard her approaching but, when she was hungry, food would summon my former handmaiden like spirits to a grimkey.

"I guess that's a yes," I sighed. "Come on in."

"I'm sorry, princess, I didn't hear them tapping!" Dill rushed in, still dressed in her night gown. Like Meliswe and myself, she'd had a pretty late night solving murder most foul.

"Um… I guess we're having breakfast," I said.

"Did she say yes?" Velda called from down the hallway.

"Yes!" I called back. "I guess we're having victuals in here."

I went to my drawing room with Dill to fetch chairs while Meliswe nattered with the prince over how to set up the table and where to put everything. The servants set up the trays in front of the washbasin and carted out the table from my study. I had five rooms in my suite: the big antechamber, which had once been a chapel; the bedroom; a drawing room, a study; and the gallery, which still mostly sported needlepoint and paintings by old Laeanna, though I'd added a few of my own charcoal sketches and subpar (by her standards) needlepoint creations. There was also a fae-style lavatory abutting the drawing room, but it wasn't much bigger than my shoe closet (which, I must admit, is plenty big - princesses have lots of shoes).

Velda strolled into the place, whistling as he took in the antechamber. Six centuries ago, it had been constructed as a royal chapel for King Valenglas, my fae grandfather, who'd apparently been a pious man. Since Alathea was barely observant at all, the chapel was just another room now, and I guess Laeanna had liked the aesthetics enough to stake it out as her own domain within the palace. I couldn't fault her choice - it was a beautiful room, and it had enough open floorspace to do pretty much anything, such as hosting an impromptu Wisten breakfast. The queen wandered in just as we were about to start, looking bright and beautiful despite the early hour. It was the first time she'd ever sought me-Laeanna out in person, and I'm pretty much certain she just wanted more delicacies from the south to munch on - they'd been a hit last night.

"Are you still in your nightie?" she said.

Yes, Dill, Meliswe, and I were all in our night wear. We'd been up until the wee hours of the morning dealing with a murder and its aftermath. There'd been lots of crying and lots of bonding, and I'm pretty sure I had a new dear friend due back from Elysheim in four to eight years.

"Shouldn't you be in court?" I asked.

The queen motioned for a plate, gesturing at one of the minced aarduck pastries like the one that Dill was about to bite into. "The northern lords are discussing farming rights. It's godsawful boring. I don't care who develops fields where so long as they don't stab one another over it and agree to keep taxes reasonable." She crunched her way through a pastry in about five seconds flat. Somehow, however improbably, she managed to be polite and elegant about it. "On that topic, Meliswe, dear, I was sorry to hear about your sister's little death. It sounds like things took a turn for the worse after I left."

"I almost got assassinated, mother," I said.

"Yes, well at least we finally caught the bastards this time. Well done, girl." She gestured for tea - after years of careful observation and snappy feedback, the palace's kitchen staff were experts in reading the queen's body language and could usually tell what she wanted from a glance or a flick of her hand. "Prince Velda, I take it you want to discuss more than last night's masquerade?"

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"Yes, Queen Alathea. I am deeply sorry for the oversight that led to last night's debacle - the two assassins were canny but should never have gotten in to begin with. And I'm sorry for whatever friction and misunderstanding transpired between myself, your daughter, and her…" he glanced toward Meliswe.

"Let's not put a name on it," I said.

Ladies of the fae weren't expected to be chaste. After all, no reasonably libidinous woman could expect to go a few centuries without taking on a lover or twenty. Women more often than men so there wouldn't be any issue to worry about. But, since she would be expected to marry to forge familial alliances, her affairs couldn't be serious. And here I was, a formerly-happily-married-man, and I think the only person I ever loved as much as Meliswe was Aurdrey, my daughter, my first-born. Maybe that makes me a bad person or a sucker for unusually buxom fae beauties, but I couldn't call her anything close to how I felt. Not without raising a lot of eyebrows, not to mention the ire of Queen Alathea.

"Between myself, your daughter, and her dear friend," Velda said eventually. "But, yes… after last night's events, I suspect we have more interests in common beyond the trade routes flowing out of Wyrmsreach…"

+++++

When I'd first come to Alfheim, hurtling out of limbo instead of the original Princess Laeanna, Meliswe had been convinced that the nefarious agents of Wisthelm were responsible. After all, they stood to lose the most from the union between the fae realms. And yet, at least some of the Wisten kings saw opportunity rather than threat, and Velda doubted that any of the kings had called for an assassination. As much as they disliked the idea of a larger, more unified fae realm, they were already terrified of the power of the fae realms. The queens and kings and great lords of the fae were mostly content to play their court games and delve into the abstruse realms of fae magic but, angered and unleashed, they could wipe any other nation off the face of the map. There were rumors, for instance, of how a lady of the fae had recently been captured by an entire army raiders and had single-handedly reduced their fortress to rubble and escaped.

"Those rumors may be overstated," I said. "I only destroyed the one tower and don't think I killed more than five or six of the bastards by myself."

"Interesting," Velda said - he hadn't known that was me. "Regardless, after the spectacle I witnessed last night, I am convinced that the people of Vernal will be great allies or terrible foes, and Wyrmsreach has need for the former. Our maritime trade is in danger, and I fear I'll have no kingdom to inherit if the support from our high king wavers."

Wyrmsreach lay to the south of the fae realms, eight days' ride from Vernal, a small but prosperous nation the size of Sicily on the coast of the Shimmering Sea. For centuries, their ships sailed mostly uncontested, passing up and down the coast and occasionally venturing across the sea to the Outer Realms, where a few coastal trading towns sold odd things not available anywhere else in the world. Rare animals, strange artifacts, and minerals found nowhere else. A great empire had once ruled the Outer Realms, but it had collapsed centuries ago amid some calamity, and all attempts to civilize the land had failed. Horrible and strange beasts infested the inland areas, and all who managed to survive and return were inevitably driven insane.

"This is to impress upon you that no civilized nation has taken root in that land for centuries," Velda said.

"Longer than that," the queen added. "During the first conjunction of the four realms two thousand years ago, the historians of the day noted that the 'Nation of Makers' had collapsed a century before and a diaspora of its survivors followed over the next decades."

The prince nodded. "Thank you. The memory of your people is deep. I can only speak of the history of our young nation."

Piracy was an occasional problem across the Shimmering Sea, but not a major one. Aside from brief flare-ups of war and subsequent privateering, the maritime nations didn't harass one another - it was bad for trade. And the pirate fiefdoms that sometimes arose in the Outer Realms were small and disorganized and rarely outlasted their founders. Recently, though, the pirates had become more organized, setting out from the Outer Realms in small flotillas and taking ships on the high seas. The more daring among them conducted raids, sailing into coastal villages and looting and pillaging as they liked. The few captured sailors spoke of a new pirate king - a fae - who'd united the settlements of the central coast and, against all odds, established a great capital inland. Not only did this king control greater forces, his navies wielded strange magics that rivaled those of the fae.

"What sorts of magic?" I asked him.

"Not like fae magic, nor the poor likeness of it that our sorcerers practice. This is some strange human magic - men with alchemical sticks that fire metal shot much farther and more accurately than any arrow, great bombards that blast through stone and roar like thunder, and ships of steel that belch smoke and are unscathed by even alchemical fire and catapult stones. One of these metal ships besieged our fortress city at Rook Harbor, blasting half of the fortress to rubble with its bombards and destroying thirty warships, completely unscathed until the Sorcerer Pentagrin agreed to defeat the beast for a hundred pounds of gold. He stood atop the cliffside and struck the ship with three great fireballs, chunks of rock and magma that rained down from the heavens. The first hit barely scathed the ship, though it lit some of its crew on fire. The second fireball cracked a chasm in its steel hull and slowed the thing, and the third hit some alchemical engine and created a blast so great that it deafened the poor sorcerer and could be heard in Mount Calyx fifty miles away. There were no survivors, but from the bodies and body parts washed ashore… mostly just parts… it appears that the entire crew were human."

"A marriage of the contraptions of humans and some strange alchemy," Meliswe said.

"Perhaps…" Velda allowed.

"Not 'perhaps'," she stated, shuffling off to my study where, among the two dozen books I had out, were some recent sketches. Some were from my life in Alfheim, some were nudes of Meliswe, some were ideas for alchemical contraptions, and some were things I remembered from Earth… including a Mark IV tank and some character sketches of doughboys with their rifles. "The princess has truth dreams of the things, terrible war machines from a distant realm called Urth. But what does it mean that they've made their way to Alfheim?"

"It means the divide between Alfheim and this Urth has weakened," the queen said, glancing in my direction. "And somebody has deduced how to cross the chasm."