An Imperfect Princess (21 page)

Eneria put her
head in her hands.  “So we’ve disabled maybe two out of two hundred soldiers so
far.  And they’re going to get themselves repaired the moment they go back to
the ship, I’m sure.”

“Perhaps it is
time that we put the second phase of the plan into operation, then,” James said
from behind her, and Eneria felt reassured simply by hearing his voice.  “I
have to report the shipwreck to the palace, as the rights of salvage off the
coast all belong to the Duke of Cornwall, and thus the crown.  Due to the size
of the ship, they will not inquire further–they’d only be interested if it was
a merchant vessel of considerable size.  Although if they knew of your cargo,
they would not hesitate to claim salvage!” 

Eneria absently
touched the pendent around her neck.  “If I had known the value of the cargo, I
would have been trading with primitive worlds all along.”

“I shall also
inform the crown there were no survivors.  And this business will become public
record in the newspapers.”

“We have no way
of telling if the Konkastians can even speak English yet, do we?”

“Oh, I’m sure
they can,” Aijo said miserably.  “They may not have brought any Pharinae, but
they have sophisticated computers that do the same thing, although not as fast
or as accurately as I can.”  She glanced at the lead lined walls.  “I’m glad
they don’t have any of my people with them.  I think they’d be able to detect
me even
through
the lead.  But it means that they probably have already
picked up both the local written and spoken dialects.” 

“And knowing
Xyling, he’s combing the countryside for information about me.” Eneria was
glum.  “Well, he has nothing to connect Elinor of Lestonia with Eneria of
Lathlor, except for Cornwall.”

“I will inform
the crown that no one survived the wreck,” James repeated, taking Eneria’s
hand.  Aijo held her tongue; their very survival depended on his good will, and
there was nothing she could say that would convince Eneria to end their
relationship right now.  “I’m also going to start carrying around my own
protection for us.  Your electrical-killing weapons are all good and well, but
I’d rather have a pistol at my side, just in case.”

Eneria was
essentially housebound, but Clarissa and James continued their normal
schedule.  For Clarissa, however, her heart was no longer in it.   One day
while visiting the trapped Eneria, she explained her feelings.

“Before you
arrived, my life was simple.”  She touched the windowsill, looking outside at
London below.  “I was going to debut, have a smashing season, and catch myself
a duke for a husband.”  The sky was overcast, a common occurrence in London,
Eneria had found.  “But now I suddenly have found that the world–no, the very
universe–is a larger place.  If everything is as you say, how can I be content
to settle for being a duke’s wife?”

Eneria suddenly
felt guilty.  “I was going to be content with that myself, if I had to.”

Clarissa
squeezed her eyes shut, her beautiful face wreathed with longing.  “Now I want
to see the world.  I want to travel.  I want to have adventures and find out
what life is like outside of the sheltered walls of the estate.”

“Adventure is
not all it is cracked up to be,” Eneria warned.  “It comes at the cost of
security.”

“I suppose so,”
Clarissa said. “All this time, I thought that ruination came merely from a
ruined reputation.  Now I understand, it is not merely gentle breeding and a
pure body that give someone innocence.  It is an un-stretched mind as well.” 
Clarissa shook her head, as if to clear it.  “I do not think I can only be
content with life as it has been given to me anymore.”

“So you’re no
longer going to try to catch a duke?”

Clarissa smiled
wryly. “Only if he promises to take me sailing across the oceans and exploring
with him in the heart of deepest Peru.”

Eneria and James
had spent a great deal of time together in her room, talking of science and
nature.  They kept Marilyn and Clarissa with them, leaving the door open.  The
servants had been told that Lady Eneria had taken ill, and Anna and Mitsy
fussed over her daily as if she were a baby.

 Eneria knew an
astonishing amount regarding not only physics, but chemistry and biology.  Since
she had no means of generating electricity to run her crucibles and arcs unless
he was willing to hope on the velocipede, James brought her scientific papers
to alleviate her boredom.

“Your friend Mr.
Faraday has an amazing grasp of electromagnetics, considering,” Aijo had said
upon reading some of his papers from the Royal Society.  “Normally, an
intelligent species would be symbiotic with my people–the Pharinae–and figure a
lot of this out earlier, with their help.”

“There must have
been Pharinae on Earth before,” Eneria said, shaking her head and leaning
against the back of her chair, her eyes closed in deep thought.  “Or else you
humans would not look as you do.  Without the Pharinae, an intelligent being
could end up looking like anything.”  She smiled at a memory.  “There are a few
intelligent life forms that develop even without the Pharinae, because their
world was not colonized, or the colony was abandoned.  But they look... well,
nothing like us.  The Mrmarians resemble jellyfish and communicate with
chemicals underwater.  The Vassk are like giant rabbits.” 

James was on the
other side of the room, content to simply watch her think.  Her hair was down,
and the henna dye from a few weeks ago had faded so that her hair was back to
its sable brown with the occasional odd shimmer of blue.  When she spoke of
subjects that would cause great controversies in his world, however, he was
glad that she was trapped indoors.  She was dangerous to their world.

She continued,
“Your religions all seem to base themselves upon the belief that man was made
in the image of God. Well, you’re made in the image of the Pharinae, and I
suppose to very primitive peoples they could see them as gods.” 

“What I think
may have happened,” Aijo said slowly, as if reluctant to come to a conclusion,
“was that something happened here, an irreconcilable split between the Pharinae
colony here and your world.  The colony must have come at least three million
years ago, based on my regressive analysis of human genetics. That is when we
found a suitable candidate species and began to warp the genome toward our own
means.”

He was still
fascinated to hear her description of why Eneria, a woman from a world so
completely different from Earth that her very organs functioned differently,
looked and acted quite a lot like a human.  The idea that living beings were
able to change over such vast scales of time–three million years!–was an idea
barely even touched upon by the Royal Society.  It was wrong, heretical, even.

But he was not a
terribly god fearing man himself, he thought ruefully.  He was as sinful as
they came. Else he would never have permitted the lapse in his library before.

It was a lapse
he would not be unwilling to repeat, but getting Eneria away from her guardian
fairy was impossible. The fairy only needed sleep if she was getting
insufficient light or had completed an exhausting task.  Unfortunately, she
tended to sleep in the afternoon when Eneria was working, and then stuffed Enny’s
brain with more of the local language and culture at night.  He was still
amazed that she had learned English perfectly in less than a month; all that
was left was a faint accent in her warm, gentle voice.

He returned to
the conversation when he heard Eneria start talking about their next plan.

“James, if I am
correct in my understanding, each member of the
ton
is expected to host
a dinner party or some gathering at some point in the season, size dependent
upon station.  Right?”

He stretched his
legs out, glad to be able to participate again, rather than merely absorb.

“More or less,”
he said, lacing his fingers together in front of him.  “There is no formal rule
regarding it, merely a general understanding.  Some hosts may actually throw a
lavish party above their means, if they have an eligible daughter they recently
presented, or to celebrate a significant event such as a wedding.  And some
hosts may intentionally scale down an event in order to create an atmosphere of
exclusivity.”

Eneria turned
around in her chair, gripping the back of it in concentrated thought.  “So it
would not be unusual for you to throw an especially grand ball, with Clarissa
coming out.”

“How large a
scale do you have in mind?”

Eneria grinned. 
“Large enough to invite an entire unit of the Konkastian army, to start.”

And so it was
decided that midway through the Season, Princess Elinor of Lestonia would throw
a ball for Clarissa Brookfield’s eighteenth birthday.  Although she had
originally come to London under the pretense of Clarissa’s chaperone, after the
discovery of the Konkastians, she had not been a very good one. 

The plan was to
lure as many Konkastians into the assembly as possible, and then disable their
weapons all at once, after Aijo did some more hacking.  Then, in conversation,
James would mention the dead woman he found on the salvaged ship in Cornwall,
as well as his upcoming scientific paper on unusual magnetic phenomena observed
recently for the Royal Society.   Hopefully, the Konkastians would take the
hint that Eneria was dead and buried and that this planet was anathema to their
electronics.

If the plan
failed, then they would have to go back to Aijo’s first plan–run away and hide
in a cave.

But Eneria knew
how the Konkastian military thought.  They attacked with a single minded
purpose, without much forethought, and relied on their overwhelming strength in
numbers to succeed.  The coup on Lathlor would never have worked if they hadn’t
brought along a thousand troops as Xyling’s “honor guard” and then worn
Lathlian uniforms to fool the world.

Xyling himself
would not send men skilled in electrical engineering, or even capable of
serious scientific thought, down to a primitive planet.  He’d sent Kordan, for
crying out loud, the mere head of a patrol squadron, probably to allow the man
some vengeance for being on the receiving end of a very rude gesture.  If the
Konkastians were guilty as a race of one great sin, it was pride.  But even
with only rudimentary knowledge of the technology they were using, the men were
still like gods compared to the non-cyborg natives.  There was no need to send
mechanics to a planet that was still harnessing the power of steam and water.

Clarissa was
delighted with the idea of a party for her, and her enthusiasm for her Season
returned.  She happily spent Eneria’s money, coordinating cooks and an
orchestra and even demanding that the ballroom of their townhouse be refinished
for the event.  She wanted to make her birthday party the talk of the season,
even if due to the logistics of holding it in her brother-in-law’s townhouse,
she couldn’t make it the largest one.

Since their house
was hosting it, even Marilyn would be permitted to attend, however briefly. 
This brightened the girl’s mood considerably as well.  She had calmed down much
since coming to London, perhaps because learning history and culture with Aijo
was much more fun than learning it with Mrs. Thomas.

The weeks flew
by and the night Clarissa’s birthday party came quickly. 

“Now Marilyn,”
Eneria said, fitting the girl’s tiny wrist with a newly made electromagnetic
pulse device in the form of a beautiful ruby bracelet. “As soon as you see men
in red and black uniforms, all with ice blond hair, just press this button a
few times.  If they all wince in unison, you’ll know they are Konkastians.”

“Yes, Princess
Enny,” Marilyn said, seriously.  She had been tasked with the dirty business
because Clarissa would be watched and would be conspicuous if she fiddled with
her bracelets too much.  If she were seen causing the pulse, the entire charade
would be over.

“You look very
pretty in that dress,” Eneria said, and meant it.  The girl’s curls had been
set into perfect ringlets, and Eneria felt the stab of jealousy that her hair
was completely incapable of such a thing.  Her dress was white lawn with red
and gold ribbons, and her new ruby necklace and bracelet set off her golden
eyes and brown hair perfectly.

Eneria too was
dressed up.  Once the pulse had disabled their sensors, she was to make a grand
appearance down the staircase.  Her hair had been freshly doused with henna to
hide the bluish overtones, and she wore one of the formal gowns she had
commissioned, a deep emerald green with blue trim.  She rounded it out with her
old platinum and diamond earrings and the heavy black opal pendant that had
started the whole misadventure.  The bug in it was killed, after all, and any
means they would have of detecting it would be disabled before she stepped out
of the safety of the lead lined room.  Since it was no longer a brooch, she
doubted that anyone would recognize it being from Yertarf.

Clarissa paced
around nervously, her own gown in a pale blue watered silk to set off her
silver and sapphire earring set.  She looked quite a bit like Vaz did on her
wedding day, although she was nervous instead of depressed.

“The first
guests should be arriving in a few minutes,” she said, forcing herself to take
a calming breath.  “I ought to go and greet them.”

A knock sounded
on the door, and James was there.  Eneria sucked in her own breath at the sight
of him.  Once again, he was poured into a suit of superfine wool, in a crisp
navy and tan color scheme, with those shiny black Hessian boots he saved for
special occasions.

He smiled at
them, that damnable charming smile that made her knees go weak.  “What a sight
to greet a mortal man!  I knew about fairies, but now I think I must also
believe in angels.”