“I—”
I could think of nothing to excuse myself. The Abbot. There was no one in the world whose regard I valued more. No one whom I would have less liked to see me in disgrace.
But the Abbot only smiled softly at me. “Think nothing of it, Greta. We are not so jaded, I hope, that an incoming spaceship does not qualify as a distraction.”
Distantly I could hear the boy shouting. Slavery, I thought again. Slavery is no part—
“You wish to quote something?”
I blinked.
“I can see it in your face,” said the Abbot. “Well. In your face, and in your neural activity, as reflected by the blood flow visible in infrared and trace electrical activity visible via EM sensors. How is it that Talis puts it?”
The Utterances, 2:25: Never lie to an AI.
Particularly one who has raised you as if he were a father, from the age of five.
Behind my back, the boy was all but screaming.
Slavery. The Abbot was quite right—it was part of a quotation. He raised the icon of one eyebrow at me, and I quoted: “Slavery is no part of natural law.”
“Ah.” The Abbot would have been within his rights to punish me for such a radical thought, but he seemed merely ruminative. “Roman, of course, coming from you. Let me see. ‘Slavery is no part of natural law, but an invention of man. And it is that other invention of man, war, which produces so many slaves.’ Gaius the Jurist.” He smoothed a stray curl behind my ear with his ivory fingers. “Don’t worry, dear one. This young fellow may be a challenge, but I’ll have him settled down soon.” He lifted the hand away from my hair, signaling. The shouting stopped.
I turned around to see the boy sagging in the steward’s pincered arms.
“He is no slave,” said the Abbot. “And neither are you, Greta. Never forget that. Neither are you.”
3
THE ODD PRINCESS HAS SOME HARD DAYS
Iam not a slave. The Abbot, in this one thing, was wrong: I have never thought myself a slave.
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.