The Scorpion Rules (4 page)

But I was born to a crown. I was born to a fate defined by my bloodline and by the forces of history. I was born to a duty that I did not choose, and cannot set aside.

I was born to be a hostage.

I was very young when the king my grandfather died and the queen my mother ascended to the throne. Like many other royals, my mother had made a dynastic marriage young—just out of the Precepture. She had been sure to have a child—me—while young. She had known she would not be eligible to hold a throne until she had a hostage child to turn over to Talis.

So she had me. She took our throne. And she turned me over.

On the day of my mother's coronation, I was made Her Royal Highness Greta Gustafsen Stuart, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy. The next day, I became one of Talis's hostages. I was five years old.

Of my time before the Precepture I mostly have bits and pieces. But I remember the day of my mother's coronation—the sea of little flags in the fists of the crowd, the sway of the formal carriage, the diamond pins in my mother's hair—and I remember the day after. I remember how the ship came, and how the two Swan Riders stepped out of it.

They were two huge men with huge wings. My mother's sharpened, painted fingertips bit into my shoulders. She held me fiercely and then—

Then she let me go. She let me go, and she gave me a little push between the shoulder blades. She pushed me away. I staggered for a second. Then I walked to the Swan Riders because my mother wanted me to, and because if I had clung to her, I would have been torn from her arms.

Even then, I knew that.

The boy with bound hands: Who was he, that he did not know what I had known at five? Who was he that he did not know that resisting Talis and his Swan Riders is futile? (That was in fact exactly how Talis put it, in the Utterances.
Resistance is futile.
)

My mother had not had a choice. Like me, she'd never had one. Like me, she'd been born to a crown. Like me, she had her duty. She too had been a hostage. And her father before her. And before that, and before that—for four hundred years.

In the Dark Ages of Europe, kings had exchanged their own children as hostages to secure treaties. Each king knew that if they broke the peace, their own sons would be the first to die.

The royal hostages of those ancient days were raised in enemy courts. In the Age of Talis, we are raised in a handful of Preceptures, scattered around the globe. We are raised together equitably, and we are educated impeccably, and we are treated as well as can be managed. And if war comes, we are still the first to die.

And therefore, war does not come.

Or not so often. Talis made many changes to the world, many things that pushed war toward ritual. The Children of Peace are only part of it, but we are the keystone. Between us and the orbital weapons, the great AI keeps things pretty well in line. What wars occur—perhaps two or three a year—are symbolic, short, and small-scale. Global military casualties per annum are normally in the low thousands, civilian casualties almost nil. This is the treasure and crown of our age: the world is as peaceful as it has ever been.

The world is at peace
, said the Utterances.
And really, if the odd princess has a hard day, is that too much to ask?

There followed, then, a series of hard days.

The boy with bound hands was, we were told, from a new state called the Cumberland Alliance. We knew better than to ask anything more, even when the boy did not immediately appear. We did not discuss the boy, or what might be keeping him. But of course there was nothing out of line in discussing geopolitics, so we talked Cumberland to death.

Sidney's nation had won the war that killed him, which I suppose would have pleased him. The Cumberland Alliance emerged from a regional shakeup among the losing parties. Like many nations it was defined by water: in this case, the drainage of the Ohio River basin. It stretched south to Nashville and north to Cleveland, with a capital at Indianapolis and a military-industrial center at Pittsburgh.

The details do not really matter. What mattered to me was the border. The northern border of Cumberland was defined by a trickling ditch and a wattle fence, down the edge of the mined and marshy bed of old Lake Erie. On the other side of that fence were the watchtowers of the Pan Polar Confederacy: my nation. Unlucky for the Cumberlanders, to border a superpower.

Unlucky for me, if they were thirsty enough.

I needed only another sixteen months, and I would be of age. I would be released from the Precepture, my mother's throne falling to regency (taken most likely by some pampered cousin with a conveniently hostage-aged child) until I could produce an heir and hostage of my own—a thing I did not care to dwell on.

If there was no war in the next sixteen months, then I would live. Sixteen months is not long.

And yet . . . the Cumberland hostage had been dragged to the Precepture in chains. He'd had a strong face and desperate eyes. He'd looked like a Christian being dragged to the lions, like someone who'd been told he was going to die.

And maybe he had been. Maybe the war was that close.

Maybe they'd sent him here intending to throw him away.

A boy, I told my classmates. The new hostage was a boy. About our age. I skipped the part about him being dragged in in chains. Thandi looked at my flushed face and waggled her eyebrows suggestively. But she was wrong. There was nothing of romance in the way I thought about this boy, though I thought about him all the time.

“Are you thinking about him?” said Xie from nowhere.

I jumped. “Sorry, what?”

“Careful,” she said. “Don't break the curds.”

We were working together in the dairy. I was straining whey. Xie was heating pitchers of water and lowering them into the big tray of raw milk, to warm it gently and thereby nourish the friendly bacteria that would turn the milk to cheese.

The day was hot, and the dairy was positively steaming, and sweat was dripping down Da-Xia's nose. From the solar injector to the milk tray, she carried pitcher after steaming pitcher. I stopped for a moment to watch the blue enamelware moving like a bead on an invisible thread—that smooth, despite its weight. Xie's rolled-up sleeves bunched above her elbows. Muscles ran like tapestry cords through her forearms and wrists.

She flicked a look over her shoulder. “Greta?” Her hair was done in the tiny, glossy braids traditional to the royalty of the Himalayan slopes. One of the braids had fallen forward and slashed across her face like a wound. “Now you're staring into space,” she said.

And Thandi drawled from the doorway, “Who are you, and what have you done with Greta?” The screendoor whapped shut behind her as she came in with a pail of milk.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'll focus.”

“Oh, don't, please.” Xie smiled. “It's a rare treat to see you dreamy. We can spare a batch of cheese.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Thandi. But Xie just smiled at her and pushed the slashing hair back behind one ear.

Dreamy. I was not dreaming. I was thinking about the new hostage screaming—about me shocked and falling to my knees. I would not say this to Thandi. I had wanted to say it to Xie, but constantly monitored as we were, it was hard to find a good place in which to hide such a large conversation.

Outside I could hear Grego and Han laughing together. They were meant to be straining cream, but it sounded livelier than that. Grego was funny, but he told jokes in precise deadpan, as if they were engineering instructions. It was rare to hear him laugh—but somehow Han, who was as far from deadpan as one could imagine, could always make him. I envied them their ability to laugh together. Somehow Xie and I could rarely manage it.

“You know,” said Xie, “it would be all right, if you were thinking about him.”

“Who?” I said, because I did not know what else to say. Under the dairy roof we were not in the line of sight of the Panopticon, but some kind of eavesdrop bug could be assumed. We all took greater liberties under roofs, but they could not be infinite.

“Who?” Xie echoed. Her mood, maybe infected by the laughter outside, seemed playful. “Sidney, obviously.”

“Oh. Sidney.”

“Yes, Sidney,” said Thandi. “I know you two weren't off playing coyotes, but . . .”

“Playing coyotes” was school euphemism for meeting outside, after dark—one presumed it was for sex.

“Certainly not,” said Xie. “But still. He liked you. And you didn't mind. All things are relative, and from you, Princess of the Icy Places, not minding is nearly a declaration of undying love.”

I turned my back on them both, and looked to my own, slightly riper, cheese tray. The smell of it—sour as baby spit-up—suddenly turned my stomach. “My marriage will be dynastic.”

“So will mine,” said Xie to my back. “But in the meantime, I have eyes.”

“Yes,” said Thandi, whapping her way back out the door. “We noticed.”

I blushed. Eyes were the least of what Xie had. Playing coyotes? She was the queen of the pack, whereas I had my sexuality filed under “further research is needed.”

Sidney. We'd been hostaged together for eleven years. I knew every curve of his accent, every lilt of his laugh. I knew he hated zucchini, as do we all. But the shameful truth was I was not thinking about Sidney at all. He was, after all, already dead.

I looked at Xie. We were alone. A roof was over us.

“So,” she said, softly. “Sidney?”

“Sidney,” I said, but it was a lie. “No. I'm thinking more of this new boy.”

Da-Xia's eyebrows folded up, and then she gave a faint, faint nod, letting me know she'd followed my switch to speaking in code.

“I wonder—I just wonder how long he'll be with us.”

“So fickle!” Xie said, as if teasing, as if we were still talking about boys. She meant wars were fickle too. I'd been ready to die with Sidney, and I hadn't. And maybe I wouldn't, even now.

“Just remember,” she said. “There's time yet between you and that dynastic marriage.”

“I hope so.” Sixteen months was not so long.

Da-Xia put her hand—well known, work hardened, hot from the pitchers—on the back of my neck. I leaned into her.

“Me too,” she said.

And in the five days after I first saw the Cumberland hostage, I didn't sleep well.

I have never been a good sleeper. If I could choose a blessing it would perhaps be the ability to put my head on the pillow and drift off, quietly, reliably, without fuss. Instead my brain takes exhaustion as its cue to review every stupid mistake I've ever made, and then (like the crowned princes in Shakespeare) I have bad dreams.

Xie sleeps. I don't.

By the fifth day I had had quite enough of it.

I was alone that night. Da-Xia had gone out to play coyotes. The room was too quiet without her breathing in it. Above me the glass ceiling was a dark gleam—glass, to let the Panopticon watch over us. I lay there and looked up at it. Xie had a habit of folding cranes from whatever paper she could scavenge, and hanging them from the glass. Their small angles shifted slowly, dully, though the room seemed airless. Through their dapple I could see the spill of the Milky Way, and the insect twist of the Panopticon mast rising against the sky.