DGO Clipped Wings Chapter 4

Alvenica actually has responsibilities.
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Bleary-eyed, foggy-memoried, and possessed of a sore and aching skeleton, Alvenica bravely confronted the day. For her, this meant entering the expansive estate kitchen in a thin dressing gown, poorly belted against her waist and one shoulder making an escape down her arm, to be accosted by a team of bright eyed and bushy tailed cooks. They were armed with weapons of a kind, spatulas and knives and succulent fruits, a fiendish energy and an almost offensive pep to their step.

Her favorite was the sweet girl in the apron with pink-dyed hair who delivered her to a seat by the window, mug of coffee in one hand and mostly full brewing carafe in the other. Anyone who came bearing caffeine, especially the light roast she so loved, was a welcome person in her eyes. "Good morning your Majesty. Rough night?"

"Mmph," Alvenica mumbled, happily taking the mug. "I slept well enough, thank you Victoria."

The collected crew groaned in sympathy. 'Well enough' was familiar code to them. It was what the Princess said whenever she had not, in fact, done well enough. She knew it, and she knew they knew it. And yet still, it was the expected response. A princess could not be seen complaining in such plain language.

"I can't imagine having to go and meet with those men!" cried out Scarlet, knife flashing as she threw her hands up from her station. "It must be terrible, having only one other woman in the room with you."

"But what men they are," Scarlet's patisserie and sous-chef — Larissa, she recalled — whispered, and Alvenica could practically taste the sparkles coming from her words. "I've heard tell of the beautiful Medici, eyes like the deepest oceans of the Ring!"

"I think I prefer Zhou," Scarlet spoke salaciously, "Last I heard she was quite curious about Midgard culture, if you catch my drift."

"They spend too much time reading, your Majesty, ignore them." Victoria set the carafe down on the warming pad set in the middle of the table.

Alvenica sipped her coffee and wordlessly nodded. Did the servants for the various houses have some kind of longstanding understanding? Perhaps a secret society of letter-sending, to gossip about their lords and ladies and thus discharge the stresses of their work? Whatever it was, she felt a strange pang. What she wouldn't give to have access to such stores; the information they must contain. Perhaps it would help her keep the next Convention in line...

It was an idyllic morning, the excited chatter of her servants broken only by the lark-song from her gardens. It would be best if she enjoyed it, enjoyed the smell and taste of the lovely dish that had just been sat before her.

Of course, such an arrangement couldn't last. She was not so lucky.

Impeccably dressed Scyple interrupted her with four envelopes, placed neatly spaced before her plate of lightly sauced egg pasta. She regarded them with the gravitas one might reserve for a snake, or other poisonous creature. Each bore a single name, in a fine looping script. "What are these?"

"Official requests for audience, your Majesty."

"Of course they are," she sighed. Her mother had preferred to attend to such matters in the morning, hadn't she? A scheduling she had never once contraindicated, despite her own struggles with the early hours.

"Please, tell them I'll attend to them shortly. I need to make myself presentable."

Pity. She'd only had a few bites, and the sauce had been so delightfully citrusy...

*

She took the first audience in her gardens, where the carefully maintained flowerbeds, delightful water features, and well-mannered peafowl would offer a warmer, more personal touch. She met her claimant in more casual wear than she had worn during the Convention: her translucent tunic was unbound down to her navel, where it met dark trousers that tucked into soft-soled walking boots. Her hair was loosely braided back, enough to keep the bulk of it off her ears and down her back, and the Third Eye was draped about her neck and nestled between her breast, rather than atop her brow.

They had met before an abstract sculpture, undulating shapes that curved and twisted through each other to create an eyewatering waterfall effect. Fiore de Medici was dressed nearly-scandalously, in a dress that seemed to be little more than black velour strips, and it was his hair done up in a high bun this time.

"My dear, it is so lovely to see you in a more personal setting," he said as they walked among the hedges. "I trust you are not so down about the Convention last night?"

Perhaps it was the air, or the familiar environs, or even the warm smile Fiore offered her, but she found herself speaking freely. "The Convention was a mess. Are they often so full of arguments and fights?"

Fiore laughed, a thin but sonorous thing. "Darling, these things are really just... a release. A wound-slit for poisonous thoughts and feelings, do you suspect Herschel and I would ever be able to work together if we were not occasionally able to snipe at each other in person?"

"I was worried the two of you would come to blows, or worse." Damn Gawain's words, and damn her servant girl’s, Gawain’s gossip; there was a horrible invasive image stuck in her mind of the two men grappling against each other in a struggle far more personal and erotic than what she had witnessed. "And of course Tachyon seemed to make out like a pirate."

It was a hasty deflection, one Fiore noticed judging by the congenial smugness dripping from his shoulders. Still, his dislike for the man was enough to change the course of the conversation. "President Tachyon is a tree-viper in a man suit. He'll do anything he can to find a higher branch, to stay safe from the hungry things on the forest floor."

She nodded slowly; she knew very little about the holdings of Tachyon beyond the fact that he answered to a board of shareholders and other profit-driven men. Still, there was something about how Medici spoke. A real, frigid hate frosting over the hidden truth of the matter.

"You didn't come to me to complain about Tachyon, did you?"

He smiled, but for a moment they were distracted by two peacocks strutting around a particularly stunning arrangement of carefully cultivated creeping roses - a Midgardian invention characterized by its fractal bloom - plumage fanned. They danced about a central remarkably disinterested peahen.

Alvenica had never felt so much like an animal before.

"I can't ask an audience just to see my favorite Mandate?" Medici smiled and clapped along for the performance.

She tapped her fingers together where they were clasped behind her back. What a social minefield he'd lain for her. They were not mere friends, and she could not speak as openly with her as she could with Gawain, or even her servants. A wrong move here could affect the path of both their domains for years to come. What response would a man like Fiore find most pleasing...

"I think you the kind of man to accomplish two moves with one stroke," she said after a breath.

Something strange happened with him, then. He shifted on both feet, and his regard for her seemed at once warm and cold, like a physical trick Gawain had shown her in her youth; grasp a cold object and a hot object in the same hand and your brain will invent a new sensation, and new must mean pain.

"It's the mark of a good ruler, efficiency." The peacocks, dejected at the failure of their courtship, ruffled their feathers and made off deeper into the gardens. The hen, for her part, approached Alvenica. "It comes with experience, I fear. Give it a few years darling."

"Yes, hello darling Calliope," Alvenica whispered to the bird as it pressed its head into her palm. "How brave of you, dealing with those terrible boys. My mother said much the same." This last part she directed at Fiore, even if it was also applicable to the plight of the peahen.

The bird nuzzled into her, but with no snacks available, found better things to do, and left the princess alone with her guest.

The man laughed a sad kind of laugh. "What a woman. The galaxy is lesser for her absence. In her memory, I suppose I should take a more direct tact here."

"Please do. I'm curious why you stayed."

"What do you suppose the Emperor has planned for you?" Medici asked this as if he'd asked after the peculiarities of the weather that day. "I've only seen him face to face once."

She froze, then. Of course this is what Medici had wanted, she thought. She kicked herself mentally for ever thinking otherwise. He was a dear friend, but he was also a Mandate, and as such he must be held at a distance, regarded like the weapon he was. "I couldn't begin to say," she said, because who could begin to fathom the mind of the Emperor.

Take the bait, she begged him mentally, pushing on that image of him in her head.

"Hmm." He cocked his head at her, like a dog regarding something it doesn't quite understand. There was a pity coming from him, of the kind that made her want to shrink in on herself. "When was the first time you went to him?"

"I was sixteen. My mother had just died." She said this because it was true, and because in her mind it gave away very little.

"Indeed."

Their audience ended shortly after this, Fiore begging off due to his ship back to his home city being ready for him. If he left with a curious weight about his shoulders, and if something strange passed between them in their parting glance, Alvenica did not see fit to bring it up.

*

She took her second audience at the stables, because this guest loved nothing more than riding. That it required no real change of dress from her, save the retrieval of a pair of riding boots from ever-reliable Maryam, was a small bonus. The large field of green was bracketed on one end by the stables themselves, and on the other by a series of targets both static and moving.

"Hah! Bullseye, once more!"

Engaging them with the enthusiasm of youth incongruous with his age, and a beautiful short bow of horn and composite, was the Prince-Widower Agnes Adalwin Alt. Some may describe him as resplendent, with his lithe and well-honed form exposed by a linen shirt that exposed his left chest and arm, skin tight riding pants, and a kind of brightly colored red boot popular in the north Ring that terminated at the ankle and was tied about the calf to just under the knee by long lengths of silk. This, here, was the Midgardian Man. Men throughout space sought to emulate him, and was his movement that set whole trends in motion among them.

"I'm impressed Father. Even Gawain can only manage one or two shots such as those."

She rode behind him at a far more sedate pace, her chestnut stallion seemingly unimpressed by the energy on offer from his sibling spurred on by the Widower.

"You flatter me love! I would hate to meet the Dame at the point of the sword, as much as she might hate to find me downrange of her," the Prince said gamely, pulling his steed around to ride beside her. "Where is she, anyways? Word is that you are scarcely seen apart from her."

"She had other business to attend to today. My knight is as busy a woman as I am sometimes." She regarded him for a moment. She drew most of her appearance from him, she knew: they had the same shoulders, the same spun-gold hair - worn rakishly short and messy by the Widower - and she had even been told that they had the same face. Some, when they assumed her out of earshot, would gossip that the late queen had imparted only her sex to the Princess.

It upset her, in some regard. She could not even remember her mother by her own appearance.

"Besides, Father," she managed past a sudden lump in her throat. "You of all people don't need to request an audience just to see me. I would spend time with you if you only asked."

"Would you?" He asked, and there was no heat in his voice. Just a jovial kind of jabbing. "You yourself just said you were a busy woman."

"I—" He was right, of course. She'd received multiple messages from him over the past few weeks, and she'd ignored all of them. Excuses had been made, reminders set that also went ignored. So of course there was guilt there, and an instinct to redirect, to blame anything else.

Before she could, her father laughed. "It's okay 'Nica! Your mother was the same way; you know I met her while she was in the Spacy, right?"

"You've told me, yes."

He smiled fondly and nocked another arrow. This one he loosed with nary a glance, bending back in his saddle in a formidable display of lithe grace. The arrow flew true, sinking home in a high target, one Alvenica would hesitate to fire on herself.

"Suffice to say she only grew busier when she took the throne." He returned the bow to a hooked clasp at the fore of the saddle and brought his steed about to ride side by side with his daughter.

"I remember. She put her blood into the Ring."

"And her sweat, and her tears. She loved this place. I am glad that she was able to return to it, at the very least."

This was no euphemism; on even a habitat as truly massive as the Ring, resources were a blessing. Those that make up the human form were no different. So she had watched her mother's body, carefully prepared and wrapped in a sheet of biomaterial, lowered into a specially prepared plot of land: the soil had been specially tilled, microorganisms introduced, and a young cherry tree planted at the head. It was here that her body would be processed and returned from whence it came.

This too was a cold comfort to her. "You asked for an audience to reminisce, did you?"

"Do you blame me? I miss my daughter, and with the period of mourning coming to a close..."

Alvenica hummed softly and leaned forward, rubbing the cheek of her steed in thought. "I don't know how she did it. Some days I can barely get out of bed. Others I can't even think. Others..."

Others she stole vital pieces of military hardware and took them on joyrides. But the few who knew this, she trusted with her life. Gawain, Gawain's circle, and Alvenica's own servants. Her father, that noble man, did not need to know. The Prince-Widower was as much a role that needed playing as her own was. It was best to let him attend to that without worrying for her over-much. And yet still she reached out to him, and kicked herself for it.

"Oh, my love. You're more like her than you know. Even your mother struggled with her position," there was a wistful mood about him as he spoke. "The few nights we could share uninterrupted were filled with her complaints. And other things of course, but mostly—"

"Father!"

*

She took her third audience in her study after a quick lunch. Her pants were replaced with loose linen lounge-slacks, her shirt was buttoned up a touch more, and the Third Eye had been returned safely to its lock-box. She sat at a great burnt-cherry desk, made from the wreckage of the first tree grown on the Ring.

Felled by a lightning strike some four hundred years ago, it was considered an omen of great import, and much of it had found its way into her estate; the shelving behind her had been made from the very same tree. Lichtenberg marks ran through all of them. Once these shelves had held her mother's maps and spacy histories, before then they had held her grandmothers research journals and awards of merit. One queen had festooned them with every example of human-scale weaponry she could find.

Alvenica decorated them with her models. It was maybe a little gauche, maybe a little childish, but she had been building them since she was a girl and the thought of putting them away to gather dust out of sight galled her. So she sat at the fore of of a miniature flight detachment, and spoke to the man who had designed half of them.

Ms. Harlane Rutherford, once-head designer at Rutherford Rocket Technologies, now CEO after her elder brother stepped down due to health concerns, sat across the desk from her. She wore ill fitted tweed and shifted about as if uncomfortable being confined to a human shell. She touched her glasses, the arms of her chair, and the desk in quick succession, always finding something else to do or look at.

Still, she felt little ill will from her; in fact she had the sense she was admiring her handiwork. "Ms. Rutherford."

"Harlane, please. Your Honor, Grace. Honorable Grace."

"Harlane. What brings a company woman to my desk?" She had found with women like Harlane — twitchy, nervous, and of a flighty kind of attention — it was best to adopt a kind of probing tone. Leading them by the word as it were. "I trust there's no issues with the current batch of contracts?"

"No, no, there's no issues. I'm here for a good reason. Or, well, two reasons." She sniffed a little and leaned forward. Something had caught her interest, and focused her energies just so. "Your models are impressive. Do you build them all yourself?"

It seemed to put her at ease, so Alvenica leaned into it gladly.

"I do. I don't have quite the time for them anymore, but I am quite proud." She adjusted the pride of her collection, a 1/100 scale model of the venerable RRT-FR Statesman, where it sat at the edge of her desk. It was a simple thing, all straight lines and a no-nonsense visor set in a helmeted visage, but she did quite love it. "It's almost meditative."

"That leads nicely into the first reason I'm here. A gift," she leans down to draw a small box - vetted by guards and servants, else Harlane would not even be sitting here with it - and presented it. "To a continued healthy partnership."

Alvenica took it and could not avoid the sudden spark of joy in her chest. It was a model kit, brand new and unannounced. XM Falconer - Special Forces Use it read, just below the action art of the bird-headed machine in flight. "This is... this is incredible. Have you even announced this kit yet?"

"Tomorrow. I thought the Princess deserved the first print."

"I thank you. Sincerely, Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Yes, actually. I'd like to give you a tour of our facility, do a little unveiling," and here Alvenica began to sense some of the power and passion that had allowed her to take the seat she did. A love of machinery must have taken her a great way, she thought. "Another model is being unveiled to the Admiralty, and I believe the head of state should be there too."

Alvenica sat back. This was remarkably straightforward to her; no fraught emotional dilemmas to be found, just an offer that she would leap at if it weren't for the fundamental force called propriety. "I admit, I'm quite curious. Was this invitation your idea?"

"Of course," Harlane said, honesty dripping from her.

"Then I'll happily attend. Please forward the details to my head of house."

Smiles and farewells were shared, and Alvenica was left alone in her study. She turned to regard her walls of plastic, representing years of effort and love. Despite the joy burning in her chest, anxiety creeped in like a black stain on white paper. As was so common for her, she was left with one question despite the overwhelming positivity of the interaction.

How did she know?

*

Her last audience met her in the throne room proper. It was a place of ceremony, the air was thick with bygone history. As such, Alvenica appeared as she had at the Convention: mantle pinned to her doublet, hair bound up in a braided bun, and the Third Eye hung between her eyebrows.

The throne stood atop a small platform at the back of the long hall, and there was a great tapestry hung behind it, silver-on-red depictions of the great acts of Midgard: the forging of the Ring, the first coronation, the Coreward Flight, the Reunification... It was beginning to run out of space. If she ruled for long enough, she may very well need to oversee the placement of a second tapestry.

She did not sit on the throne, of course. It was a symbol of necessity, a reminder of the covenant between Midgard and her Queens. There would not come a point that she sat in it; every Queen before her had taken audience standing before the throne, and so would she.

Unlike her previous meetings, Gawain joined her. It was unseemly to be found alone in the throne room, but perhaps more than that Alvenica found that she feared this meeting the most. The stress of social engagement paled in comparison to what this meeting offered. Despite the knight’s stolid silence in the face of silent questioning, she would take solace in her presence.

"Your Majesty, " Norward Valiant spoke as he came up from a technically proficient bow. "Thank you for your time.