(no subject)
Okay, so I found this about nine months ago when transferring files to the next computer. I didn't post it then, because, well, I've been out of fandom for kind of a while, and also, it's unfinished. But, what the heck, I needed a more recent example of my writing for school, so I put this up. (If you're here reading for that class on aging, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND that you NOT go looking at the rest of my fic.)
This little thing was originally written for the Brains in a Jar challenge. I have since read the book which inspired that challenge, and I think this story holds up well. I seem to recall that I never finished it because I lost it, and it's really hard to get into something you're completely writing all over again. I will note that this IS FANFIC. The original story is called "Witch World", and it's fantastic, and I love it. It was written by the fabulous Andre Norton, may she rest in peace.
Justis scowled and looked out the window of his rented room at the approaching storm. As a professional Glide instructor, he of course had no fears for his own safety if he piloted in this weather, but Loyse would have serious trouble getting through if she took much longer.
Of course, given how poor a pilot she was, Loyse would have serious difficulty anyway.
Justis snorted. It was infuriating to stand here and watch several hundred dollars in winnings blow away in the wind. Not that he should have made the bet in the first place. He was handsome, glib, and in a romantic job, and as a result he could have pretty much any girl he wanted; but a bet that he could have even Governor Fulk’s daughter had quickly taught him that just because he could didn’t mean he should, or that it would be fun.
The girl was a fish, he thought in disgust. A cold, white fish, with colorless hair, lashes, brows, and skin, no curves, and no passion. She was intelligent enough not to be boring, but not, from those conversations they’d shared when he instructed her on the Glides, intelligent enough to be interesting, either.
And definitely not enough to be the sort of pilot that should be on the routes at all, much less in this weather.
Despite her incompetence, though, Loyse had passed her Glide certification, and in celebration and gratitude for his help-not to mention being as in love with him as a fish could be-she had wanted to meet him here tonight. A good thing, too, since the time limit on his damn bet was almost out.
Justic growled, and tossed his satchel over his shoulder. Loyse had said she might be detained without warning should someone (for once) take an interest in her. This storm would last long past the next morning, and if he wanted to get home, he would have to leave now.
She was probably just stuck at home, anyway.
For all his boasting, Justis was a dexterous pilot, and he was safely back at his home when a bike rented in Loyse’s name was uncovered on the Cliff route which led to the hotel in which he had been staying. It made the news broadcasts immediately, and much of the country prayed for the relatively-unknown-but-generally-liked young lady, who had been so close to her Majority examinations, the successful passage of which would ennoble her and legalize her upcoming marriage to the duke.
But although Governor Fulk had emergency crews and recovery operations at the site immediately, regardless of the storm, and although the cliff was only about a hundred feet tall-short compared to most others in the area-his daughter’s body was never found.
There was ice on either side of her. The Lady looked out the window of the Glide cart with a deepening line between her brows. The problem was not the enormous volume of snow which made visibility practically non-existent. As a talented pilot, the youth next to her could adjust for that. No, the problem was the howling gales which ripped around the surrounding mountains. Those there would be no defeating, not in a vehicle which hovered. Perhaps the rustic donkey-carts in the area could manage it, but those were too slow and too exposed, and in any rate, in this weather they would kill the donkey.
Or so she had been told. The Lady turned her gaze on the slim figure in the pilot’s seat beside her. In the hours they had been grounded by the storm, she had heard the girl’s story, and if she were one who smiled easily, it would bring an expression of approbation to her face every time she thought of it. The girl possessed a deliberate mind, and the sort of cold cunning which would fit in well amongst those of the Lady’s home.
The girl Loyse had faked an assignation to provide a reason to leave, and arranged it on a day which she knew would turn to blizzard. She had cultivated an appearance of hopeless incompetence on the Glides, whilst practicing in secret to become extremely accomplished at every sort of piloting. Then she had sent the bike over a cliff while rolling to safety herself, and walked a scant half-mile back to a hotel room rented under a false name and pre-stocked with all the equipment she needed to achieve a credible disguise.
Clever plan; thorough planning. Yes, it was the precisely sort of thing that would be welcome in the Lady’s home.
And it was amazing how thoroughly the disguise worked. The Lady had seen through it, but she had perceptions not available to most in the area. Not to mention, she reflected ruefully, a certain unfamiliarity with local dress customs.
Over-large clothes hid what few curves the girl had; hair dyed black so obviously that it must be affection discouraged thoughts of disguise, while still serving perfectly in that capacity; heavy make-up, a disdainful expression, and the new name of “Briant” completed the image of an Antifashionist young man, bored and spoiled and certainly not the governor’s reclusive dead daughter.
“The storm is getting worse,” Briant spoke from beside her.
The Lady’s expression did not change. “I know,” she said.
“If we don’t turn off the cart, the power will expire,” Briant continued, tone sharpened with worry, “and we’ll have to abandon it. If we do turn it off, its heat will disperse and we will expire.”
The only sign of the Lady’s own anxiety was the lower pitch of her voice. “I know,” she said again.
“If this storm doesn’t end, we will die!” Briant thumped back in her seat and looked back out the window.
The Lady raised a hand and placed it on the window to her right. The snowflakes seemed to swirl between her fingers as they blew sideways across the route. “The storm will end,” she said.
When one is traveling with witches, Briant reflected, one should not be surprised to see magic. Within half an hour of the witch’s promise, though the storm had been worsening when she made it, the wind had died enough for them to take off, although the snow still fell and obscured visibility.
As Briant started the Glide cart and began to travel towards Kars City, the witch lay back and went to sleep.
It had been a good piece of luck, finding the witch. A better piece of luck to find out her ride was an agent of the Duke-whom, Loyse reminded herself, she would now never be marrying. Tying the agent up and leaving him beside the route had been surprisingly pleasurable. Some day she would have to determine whether that was because as a girl, she disliked being forced into a marriage with his employer, or because the agent had attempted to sodomize her when he thought she was a boy.
And now, she reflected happily, she had the pleasure of watching his struggling form receding into the distance, as well as the gratitude of a citizen of the Witch colony and a Glide cart which would get her to Kars City ten days ahead of her projected schedule.
There was something to be said for serendipity.
It was several hours later when the witch finally awoke. Briant glanced over, and then returned her eyes to their circuit of the instrument panels and the surrounding countryside. “We’re maybe half an hour from the old walls of Kars,” she said. “Have you any idea of where you want to go once we get there?” And, she added silently, did you want any company?
“The Port,” the witch replied. “I had some friends waiting there for me. I’m late, but they won’t have left.”
Briant looked over, and then quickly looked again. Was the witch actually… smiling? A moment later, she was sure it must have been a trick of the light, yet the witch did seem more relaxed.
“As you say,” Briant said, disconcerted.
“I’m sure another set of hands would be welcome, and Koris will have plenty of room for you. Especially as you’ve proved yourself in a fight.”
If Loyse hadn’t been a governor’s daughter trained in reading people, she probably wouldn’t have sensed the cheer in the witch’s voice. Either Briant wasn’t the only one who had enjoyed watching the agent disappear, or there was someone a witch could actually like.
Within an hour, the cart was stashed in an alley, and Briant and the witch-or the Lady, as Briant had better get used to thinking of her if she didn’t want to be accused of rudeness-were making their way through the heavy crowds of midmorning into the open docking area of the Port, warmed in the wintry chill by hot breakfast rolls and hotter mugs of tea.
The Port was organized in a simple way: on the South side, there were numerous tracks designed to aid in takeoff and landing of all the various Ships and Oversize Glides. The East and West held tracks for arriving at and departing from those Southern tracks. On the North, there was a large, open hanger with all the Ships and Glides docked.
When one arrived at the Port, one looked around until he saw his ride, and then scrambled over to it. Once the Ship or Glide was full, it lumbered, very, very slowly, over to the Eastern track, where it proceeded to South quadrant. Because there was no more organized system to boarding and unloading, passengers in the Port were responsible for keeping out of the way of oncoming vehicles. This in turn led to a lot of shouting, either warnings to alert people to danger, or curses when someone moved too slowly.
“I’ve heard they tried to institute a more organized method for all of this,” Briant shouted over the din. “They had almost no injuries, but they got so few ships off the ground and fell so far behind schedule that they went back to the old way within three days.”
The Lady raised one side of her mouth just far enough to show her opinion of this.
“I think it’s better this way,” Briant laughed. “I like the chaos.”
The Lady drank her tea, deftly managing not to spill it when a man fell on her in his effort to escape an Oversize rumbling in.
“What’s the name of the ship we’re looking for, anyway?”
The Lady swallowed again. “The Gormian Princess.”
Within a second Briant had turned and pulled the witch’s head down to less than an inch from her own. “The Ghost Ship?” she demanded furiously.
The Lady raised a brow. “A ghost,” she informed Briant, plucking her small, pale hand from her collar, though she kept her head down where she could be heard, “is the bodiless spirit of a dead person or animal. Koris became tied to the ship when his body was partially destroyed by an assassination attempt, and he was tied to the ship in what was for them a relatively normal procedure, until a new body could be created for him.”
“And then Gorm blew up first?” Loyse put all the scorn she could into her voice.
“Precisely,” the Lady said equably. “And although we have the ability to restore his current body, unfortunately we have no notion how to separate him from the ship. Thus his body lies in suspended animation until that information can be found. He is neither,” she finished tartly, “bodiless nor dead. He is no ghost!”
“In my country such a thing would be considered a black art.”
The Lady hesitated. “I cannot promise you that no black art was used on Gorm to put him in this state, as I do not know how it was done. But… In your country, they put lights at the bottom of high mountains, and when ships crash on the rocks, they claim it was an accident. In your country, they would have forced you to be in charge of such piracy. Perhaps what is done in your country is not the best standard to be using?” Her voice was gentle, and her hand covered Loyse’s like a mother’s.
The girl shivered in the cold morning air, not meeting the witch’s eyes. Finally, she nodded, and took a healthy swallow of her tea. Briant said, “Let’s go meet these friends of yours.”
For once, the Lady full-out smiled.
Briant would later be disappointed to discover that her first memories of meeting Simon Tregarth and Koris of Gorm were vague and blurry. Nevertheless, warm air, a full stomach, and several hours of exhausting, expert-level piloting all pounced on her like cats on a young mouse, and she fell asleep almost as soon as she was shown her bunk.
When she woke in the morning, the first thing she felt was the thrum of giant, space-class engines, and immediate after that came the thrill of, for the first time, being on a spaceship in space.
Even without the bright, piercing light of a sun unfiltered by an atmosphere, Briant would have been unable to go back to sleep.
She rolled out of her bunk and pulled the scrim across the window to block the blinding glare, and walked over to examine the cupboards which came with her room. The first held basic toilet supplies: a sink, an unmentionable, and a locked rack to hold facial soaps and tooth cleansers. The second was a trash receptacle, the third a clothes closet. The fourth was empty locked shelves, presumably to hold personal items.
Briant frowned, and looked again at the top shelf. She would never put anything up there which she actually wanted, she knew; at barely five feet, it was far enough up she’d have trouble reaching the back. But right at the edge, restrained by the locks, was what turned out upon investigation to be a small carved figure. She turned it in her hands for some time before she realized that it was in the shape of a top-heavy child sleeping peacefully in an old fashioned water ship. The people of the far north archipelagos, Loyse remembered vaguely, used something of the same sort to get from one island to the next.
Briant shrugged and placed it back on the top shelf and proceeded to put away her few possessions: toiletries and clothes in their intended receptacles, and in the fourth cupboard she put her reasons for leaving: a silver locket of her mother’s, whom Loyse had never met; a pretty dress Loyse had worn at her coming out party, stained with the memory of humiliation; and a copy of the constitution of Verlaine, which her father had so thoroughly raped. On the top shelf, Loyse threw a thick, white braid, which she had been unable to part with for more reasons than just that it would point people to her trail.
Briant locked the door and went to go find breakfast.
Say what one would about a people who warred so much that their planet literally exploded, the Gormians could make good ships. Cruisers of Gorm were universally considered to be the best available, and as the Prince’s flagship, the Gormian Princess was the best of the best.
“My father didn’t know quite what to do with a son like me,” Koris had said bitterly one evening. “So he ignored me until his guilt became too much to ignore, at which point he gave me lavish gifts.”
“Very lavish,” Briant had enthused. “The Princess is considered unholy in… my home city, and still they speak of her workmanship and beauty. The power in her engines-!”
Koris’ hologram had frozen in place, a sign which Briant had learned meant he was thinking about something. “When I was piloting her, I thought she was the most wondrous thing I would ever know,” he’d shared softly. “Now that I’m part of her… I no longer have any words for it.”
Koris himself-once the prince of Gorm, now the spirit which ran the Princess-was approachable enough; at the time of his merging with the ship, he had been roughly the same age Briant was now, and he still acted his youth sometimes. He was quick to laugh, and easy-going: when a panel had fallen off of his sides during take-off, he had simply gone back to the ground, saying, “All things which fly must molt.”
He was capable of appearing as a hologram nearly anywhere in the ship, as it was run through with speakers and projectors, but he inevitably appeared only in a position where he could lean on arms in turn propped against a table or a railing or some such. His “face” was reasonably handsome, if one liked the genial, blond, blue-eyed type; his shoulders and arms were oddly broad and well-muscled, the mark of one who swung an axe almost as soon as he could walk. There was one lock of hair constantly falling into his eyes.
Simon Tregarth, his companion and, those few times when it was required, pilot, was from some world so far away that even the Gormian called him “outlander.” He was tall and lanky, with dark hair, pale eyes, and a sardonic mouth. He was reserved, speaking rarely, and then, almost never to Briant, except to correct her behavior-although, to be fair, he usually did so as one offering a suggestion, not as one criticizing.
Simon had the air of one who was used to commanding, and better used to being obeyed. Nevertheless, he deferred to Koris, to whom it was clear he owed some allegiance, and was even polite on those rare occasions he noticed Briant.
Neither Simon nor, as far as Briant could tell, Koris, was aware of her true gender, and as it could only cause complications, she didn’t care to inform them. For reasons Loyse couldn’t discern, neither did the witch.
Both men seemed to pay an uncommon lot of deference to the Lady, especially considering her origin; on this planet, at least, witches were considered a disgraceful minority, relegated to a colony on the Moon which most of them seemed more than happy to consider a fortress: impregnable and solitary. Accompanying such a one would mean, at best, exile for Briant if she were perceived to be a girl, for only women were witches, and thus only men could associate freely with them. More likely than exile, especially in any rural location, would be death at the hands of those who feared the Moon residents.
Nevertheless, it was the Lady who dictated their course:
This little thing was originally written for the Brains in a Jar challenge. I have since read the book which inspired that challenge, and I think this story holds up well. I seem to recall that I never finished it because I lost it, and it's really hard to get into something you're completely writing all over again. I will note that this IS FANFIC. The original story is called "Witch World", and it's fantastic, and I love it. It was written by the fabulous Andre Norton, may she rest in peace.
Justis scowled and looked out the window of his rented room at the approaching storm. As a professional Glide instructor, he of course had no fears for his own safety if he piloted in this weather, but Loyse would have serious trouble getting through if she took much longer.
Of course, given how poor a pilot she was, Loyse would have serious difficulty anyway.
Justis snorted. It was infuriating to stand here and watch several hundred dollars in winnings blow away in the wind. Not that he should have made the bet in the first place. He was handsome, glib, and in a romantic job, and as a result he could have pretty much any girl he wanted; but a bet that he could have even Governor Fulk’s daughter had quickly taught him that just because he could didn’t mean he should, or that it would be fun.
The girl was a fish, he thought in disgust. A cold, white fish, with colorless hair, lashes, brows, and skin, no curves, and no passion. She was intelligent enough not to be boring, but not, from those conversations they’d shared when he instructed her on the Glides, intelligent enough to be interesting, either.
And definitely not enough to be the sort of pilot that should be on the routes at all, much less in this weather.
Despite her incompetence, though, Loyse had passed her Glide certification, and in celebration and gratitude for his help-not to mention being as in love with him as a fish could be-she had wanted to meet him here tonight. A good thing, too, since the time limit on his damn bet was almost out.
Justic growled, and tossed his satchel over his shoulder. Loyse had said she might be detained without warning should someone (for once) take an interest in her. This storm would last long past the next morning, and if he wanted to get home, he would have to leave now.
She was probably just stuck at home, anyway.
For all his boasting, Justis was a dexterous pilot, and he was safely back at his home when a bike rented in Loyse’s name was uncovered on the Cliff route which led to the hotel in which he had been staying. It made the news broadcasts immediately, and much of the country prayed for the relatively-unknown-but-generally-liked young lady, who had been so close to her Majority examinations, the successful passage of which would ennoble her and legalize her upcoming marriage to the duke.
But although Governor Fulk had emergency crews and recovery operations at the site immediately, regardless of the storm, and although the cliff was only about a hundred feet tall-short compared to most others in the area-his daughter’s body was never found.
There was ice on either side of her. The Lady looked out the window of the Glide cart with a deepening line between her brows. The problem was not the enormous volume of snow which made visibility practically non-existent. As a talented pilot, the youth next to her could adjust for that. No, the problem was the howling gales which ripped around the surrounding mountains. Those there would be no defeating, not in a vehicle which hovered. Perhaps the rustic donkey-carts in the area could manage it, but those were too slow and too exposed, and in any rate, in this weather they would kill the donkey.
Or so she had been told. The Lady turned her gaze on the slim figure in the pilot’s seat beside her. In the hours they had been grounded by the storm, she had heard the girl’s story, and if she were one who smiled easily, it would bring an expression of approbation to her face every time she thought of it. The girl possessed a deliberate mind, and the sort of cold cunning which would fit in well amongst those of the Lady’s home.
The girl Loyse had faked an assignation to provide a reason to leave, and arranged it on a day which she knew would turn to blizzard. She had cultivated an appearance of hopeless incompetence on the Glides, whilst practicing in secret to become extremely accomplished at every sort of piloting. Then she had sent the bike over a cliff while rolling to safety herself, and walked a scant half-mile back to a hotel room rented under a false name and pre-stocked with all the equipment she needed to achieve a credible disguise.
Clever plan; thorough planning. Yes, it was the precisely sort of thing that would be welcome in the Lady’s home.
And it was amazing how thoroughly the disguise worked. The Lady had seen through it, but she had perceptions not available to most in the area. Not to mention, she reflected ruefully, a certain unfamiliarity with local dress customs.
Over-large clothes hid what few curves the girl had; hair dyed black so obviously that it must be affection discouraged thoughts of disguise, while still serving perfectly in that capacity; heavy make-up, a disdainful expression, and the new name of “Briant” completed the image of an Antifashionist young man, bored and spoiled and certainly not the governor’s reclusive dead daughter.
“The storm is getting worse,” Briant spoke from beside her.
The Lady’s expression did not change. “I know,” she said.
“If we don’t turn off the cart, the power will expire,” Briant continued, tone sharpened with worry, “and we’ll have to abandon it. If we do turn it off, its heat will disperse and we will expire.”
The only sign of the Lady’s own anxiety was the lower pitch of her voice. “I know,” she said again.
“If this storm doesn’t end, we will die!” Briant thumped back in her seat and looked back out the window.
The Lady raised a hand and placed it on the window to her right. The snowflakes seemed to swirl between her fingers as they blew sideways across the route. “The storm will end,” she said.
When one is traveling with witches, Briant reflected, one should not be surprised to see magic. Within half an hour of the witch’s promise, though the storm had been worsening when she made it, the wind had died enough for them to take off, although the snow still fell and obscured visibility.
As Briant started the Glide cart and began to travel towards Kars City, the witch lay back and went to sleep.
It had been a good piece of luck, finding the witch. A better piece of luck to find out her ride was an agent of the Duke-whom, Loyse reminded herself, she would now never be marrying. Tying the agent up and leaving him beside the route had been surprisingly pleasurable. Some day she would have to determine whether that was because as a girl, she disliked being forced into a marriage with his employer, or because the agent had attempted to sodomize her when he thought she was a boy.
And now, she reflected happily, she had the pleasure of watching his struggling form receding into the distance, as well as the gratitude of a citizen of the Witch colony and a Glide cart which would get her to Kars City ten days ahead of her projected schedule.
There was something to be said for serendipity.
It was several hours later when the witch finally awoke. Briant glanced over, and then returned her eyes to their circuit of the instrument panels and the surrounding countryside. “We’re maybe half an hour from the old walls of Kars,” she said. “Have you any idea of where you want to go once we get there?” And, she added silently, did you want any company?
“The Port,” the witch replied. “I had some friends waiting there for me. I’m late, but they won’t have left.”
Briant looked over, and then quickly looked again. Was the witch actually… smiling? A moment later, she was sure it must have been a trick of the light, yet the witch did seem more relaxed.
“As you say,” Briant said, disconcerted.
“I’m sure another set of hands would be welcome, and Koris will have plenty of room for you. Especially as you’ve proved yourself in a fight.”
If Loyse hadn’t been a governor’s daughter trained in reading people, she probably wouldn’t have sensed the cheer in the witch’s voice. Either Briant wasn’t the only one who had enjoyed watching the agent disappear, or there was someone a witch could actually like.
Within an hour, the cart was stashed in an alley, and Briant and the witch-or the Lady, as Briant had better get used to thinking of her if she didn’t want to be accused of rudeness-were making their way through the heavy crowds of midmorning into the open docking area of the Port, warmed in the wintry chill by hot breakfast rolls and hotter mugs of tea.
The Port was organized in a simple way: on the South side, there were numerous tracks designed to aid in takeoff and landing of all the various Ships and Oversize Glides. The East and West held tracks for arriving at and departing from those Southern tracks. On the North, there was a large, open hanger with all the Ships and Glides docked.
When one arrived at the Port, one looked around until he saw his ride, and then scrambled over to it. Once the Ship or Glide was full, it lumbered, very, very slowly, over to the Eastern track, where it proceeded to South quadrant. Because there was no more organized system to boarding and unloading, passengers in the Port were responsible for keeping out of the way of oncoming vehicles. This in turn led to a lot of shouting, either warnings to alert people to danger, or curses when someone moved too slowly.
“I’ve heard they tried to institute a more organized method for all of this,” Briant shouted over the din. “They had almost no injuries, but they got so few ships off the ground and fell so far behind schedule that they went back to the old way within three days.”
The Lady raised one side of her mouth just far enough to show her opinion of this.
“I think it’s better this way,” Briant laughed. “I like the chaos.”
The Lady drank her tea, deftly managing not to spill it when a man fell on her in his effort to escape an Oversize rumbling in.
“What’s the name of the ship we’re looking for, anyway?”
The Lady swallowed again. “The Gormian Princess.”
Within a second Briant had turned and pulled the witch’s head down to less than an inch from her own. “The Ghost Ship?” she demanded furiously.
The Lady raised a brow. “A ghost,” she informed Briant, plucking her small, pale hand from her collar, though she kept her head down where she could be heard, “is the bodiless spirit of a dead person or animal. Koris became tied to the ship when his body was partially destroyed by an assassination attempt, and he was tied to the ship in what was for them a relatively normal procedure, until a new body could be created for him.”
“And then Gorm blew up first?” Loyse put all the scorn she could into her voice.
“Precisely,” the Lady said equably. “And although we have the ability to restore his current body, unfortunately we have no notion how to separate him from the ship. Thus his body lies in suspended animation until that information can be found. He is neither,” she finished tartly, “bodiless nor dead. He is no ghost!”
“In my country such a thing would be considered a black art.”
The Lady hesitated. “I cannot promise you that no black art was used on Gorm to put him in this state, as I do not know how it was done. But… In your country, they put lights at the bottom of high mountains, and when ships crash on the rocks, they claim it was an accident. In your country, they would have forced you to be in charge of such piracy. Perhaps what is done in your country is not the best standard to be using?” Her voice was gentle, and her hand covered Loyse’s like a mother’s.
The girl shivered in the cold morning air, not meeting the witch’s eyes. Finally, she nodded, and took a healthy swallow of her tea. Briant said, “Let’s go meet these friends of yours.”
For once, the Lady full-out smiled.
Briant would later be disappointed to discover that her first memories of meeting Simon Tregarth and Koris of Gorm were vague and blurry. Nevertheless, warm air, a full stomach, and several hours of exhausting, expert-level piloting all pounced on her like cats on a young mouse, and she fell asleep almost as soon as she was shown her bunk.
When she woke in the morning, the first thing she felt was the thrum of giant, space-class engines, and immediate after that came the thrill of, for the first time, being on a spaceship in space.
Even without the bright, piercing light of a sun unfiltered by an atmosphere, Briant would have been unable to go back to sleep.
She rolled out of her bunk and pulled the scrim across the window to block the blinding glare, and walked over to examine the cupboards which came with her room. The first held basic toilet supplies: a sink, an unmentionable, and a locked rack to hold facial soaps and tooth cleansers. The second was a trash receptacle, the third a clothes closet. The fourth was empty locked shelves, presumably to hold personal items.
Briant frowned, and looked again at the top shelf. She would never put anything up there which she actually wanted, she knew; at barely five feet, it was far enough up she’d have trouble reaching the back. But right at the edge, restrained by the locks, was what turned out upon investigation to be a small carved figure. She turned it in her hands for some time before she realized that it was in the shape of a top-heavy child sleeping peacefully in an old fashioned water ship. The people of the far north archipelagos, Loyse remembered vaguely, used something of the same sort to get from one island to the next.
Briant shrugged and placed it back on the top shelf and proceeded to put away her few possessions: toiletries and clothes in their intended receptacles, and in the fourth cupboard she put her reasons for leaving: a silver locket of her mother’s, whom Loyse had never met; a pretty dress Loyse had worn at her coming out party, stained with the memory of humiliation; and a copy of the constitution of Verlaine, which her father had so thoroughly raped. On the top shelf, Loyse threw a thick, white braid, which she had been unable to part with for more reasons than just that it would point people to her trail.
Briant locked the door and went to go find breakfast.
Say what one would about a people who warred so much that their planet literally exploded, the Gormians could make good ships. Cruisers of Gorm were universally considered to be the best available, and as the Prince’s flagship, the Gormian Princess was the best of the best.
“My father didn’t know quite what to do with a son like me,” Koris had said bitterly one evening. “So he ignored me until his guilt became too much to ignore, at which point he gave me lavish gifts.”
“Very lavish,” Briant had enthused. “The Princess is considered unholy in… my home city, and still they speak of her workmanship and beauty. The power in her engines-!”
Koris’ hologram had frozen in place, a sign which Briant had learned meant he was thinking about something. “When I was piloting her, I thought she was the most wondrous thing I would ever know,” he’d shared softly. “Now that I’m part of her… I no longer have any words for it.”
Koris himself-once the prince of Gorm, now the spirit which ran the Princess-was approachable enough; at the time of his merging with the ship, he had been roughly the same age Briant was now, and he still acted his youth sometimes. He was quick to laugh, and easy-going: when a panel had fallen off of his sides during take-off, he had simply gone back to the ground, saying, “All things which fly must molt.”
He was capable of appearing as a hologram nearly anywhere in the ship, as it was run through with speakers and projectors, but he inevitably appeared only in a position where he could lean on arms in turn propped against a table or a railing or some such. His “face” was reasonably handsome, if one liked the genial, blond, blue-eyed type; his shoulders and arms were oddly broad and well-muscled, the mark of one who swung an axe almost as soon as he could walk. There was one lock of hair constantly falling into his eyes.
Simon Tregarth, his companion and, those few times when it was required, pilot, was from some world so far away that even the Gormian called him “outlander.” He was tall and lanky, with dark hair, pale eyes, and a sardonic mouth. He was reserved, speaking rarely, and then, almost never to Briant, except to correct her behavior-although, to be fair, he usually did so as one offering a suggestion, not as one criticizing.
Simon had the air of one who was used to commanding, and better used to being obeyed. Nevertheless, he deferred to Koris, to whom it was clear he owed some allegiance, and was even polite on those rare occasions he noticed Briant.
Neither Simon nor, as far as Briant could tell, Koris, was aware of her true gender, and as it could only cause complications, she didn’t care to inform them. For reasons Loyse couldn’t discern, neither did the witch.
Both men seemed to pay an uncommon lot of deference to the Lady, especially considering her origin; on this planet, at least, witches were considered a disgraceful minority, relegated to a colony on the Moon which most of them seemed more than happy to consider a fortress: impregnable and solitary. Accompanying such a one would mean, at best, exile for Briant if she were perceived to be a girl, for only women were witches, and thus only men could associate freely with them. More likely than exile, especially in any rural location, would be death at the hands of those who feared the Moon residents.
Nevertheless, it was the Lady who dictated their course: