Chapter Two

THE PRINCESS

Princess Iona leaned forward and kissed her father’s corpse on the forehead. As she straightened herself up, an artillery shell exploded directly overhead, shaking the crypt and deluging its occupants with debris. Iona wearily lamented this dark, dingy, and degrading locale while she watched the undertaker hobble over to brush the dust off her father’s remains. An Allerian king deserved better, she thought. Indeed, there was barely enough room in the crypt to hold the few family members, royal officials, longtime servants, and diplomats hastily summoned for the long-expected occasion. It was, however, the only safe place for the ceremony. The royal sanctuary, like almost everything else above ground, was mostly rubble, its famous stained glass windows now shards amidst the wreckage of what had once been the most beautiful city on the continent.

Iona had adored her father. She always felt that his regnal name, Bartholomew III, was too formal and solemn for his genial personality. She scarcely remembered her mother, who died of pneumonia when she was six years old, but her father had been the one positive and constant in her life. He nicknamed her “Bank” because, he said, she was so valuable to him. When she was younger, they played cards, took long walks in the palace gardens, and created ditties about the officials who competed for his time and attention. He gave her as normal an upbringing as her position allowed and kept her out of the public eye. He even permitted her to attend the royal academy with her brother. “An ignorant princess,” he once told her with a twinkle in his eye, “is about as valuable as a learned whore.” The thing she appreciated the most, though, was that he always respected her for who she was rather than what others expected her to be. And if his sometimes brutal honesty did little to curb her natural imperiousness and snarkiness, it at least made her conscious of some of her less admirable characteristics.

Of course, she thought as she stared at her father’s corpse, everything that occurred before the war seemed halcyon compared with the current horrors. Iona had to dig deep in her memory to recall a time without the heartbreaking casualty lists, fearful rumors, unending grief, and interminable shortages that marked the past decade. Her father had not wanted the war, and had in fact done everything possible to avoid it. He was sufficiently well-versed in history to know that violence was the most unpredictable form of statecraft. As a result, he had insisted on continuing negotiations over the Ethosia principality’s fate long after both his advisers and the Rowowan empire ceased to take them seriously. When Rowowan troops finally invaded Ethosia, her father did not share in the relief and enthusiasm that swept across his kingdom that summer. Indeed, he received the news of the national assembly’s declaration of war on Rowowa without comment. His subdued response put a somewhat downbeat coda on an occasion otherwise characterized by national urgency, patriotism, and determination. Later that day, when she and her father sipped tea in his study, he observed that wars develop a momentum of their own that take societies places that their leaders never wanted or intended them to go.

At first her father’s concerns seemed overdrawn. Allerian soldiers defeated the invading Rowowan army at the Battle of Momoweb and drove it out of Ethosia. Although the Rowowan empire’s population and geographic size exceeded Alleria’s by a factor of four, its ossified and sclerotic government was initially incapable of effectively waging the war it had so deliberately provoked. In the months following Momoweb, Allerian forces stormed across the border and occupied the southwesternmost Rowowan provinces. Victory appeared just around the corner, and everyone expected Alleria’s soldiers to return home soon covered in glory and proud of their triumphs.

Unfortunately for Alleria, the Rowowans sorted out their internal difficulties, mobilized their superior forces, and embarked on a war of attrition designed to kill as many Allerians as possible. The conflict degenerated into a sustained, brutal, and bloody stalemate that gradually and irretrievably drained Alleria of men, materiel, and hope. Moreover, as each side invested more and more of its resources into the war, a negotiated peace became impossible. What had begun as a dispute over a poverty-ridden and backward principality became a war of annihilation in which Alleria was at a distinct disadvantage. The Allerian army lost its foothold in Rowowa and then, after a prolonged and desperate struggle, Ethosia too. The Ethosian capital of Highrealm became a cauldron that consumed tens of thousands of Rowowan and Allerian soldiers and switched hands twice before it finally fell to Rowowa once and for all. Rowowan troops pushed into Alleria itself, overrunning the eastern plains before besieging the capital, Aurora. While one Rowowan army methodically reduced Aurora, others conquered the southern wastelands and western seaboard. In that last desperate summer of the war, law and order collapsed throughout those parts of Alleria still free of Rowowan control. Thousands starved, and hundreds of thousands more left their homes in search of safety and succor. By then there was scarcely a family in the kingdom that had not lost at least one person to a conflict that was finally coming to a close after ten long years of unimaginable sacrifice and horror.

Iona liked to think of her father as the war’s first and last casualty. As the conflict slowly turned against Alleria, he devoted more and more energy to supervising it through meetings, speeches, rallies, and inspections. To find the time for these activities, he sacrificed first his hobbies – especially theater and chess – then his friends, and lastly his family. To be sure, he always cleared his calendar to see Iona, but their conversations grew stilted and one-sided as he withdrew into himself. Finally, and paradoxically, he lost interest in the war itself, spending his days gazing out his office window at the gardens below. His health declined and his heart failed. His death came more as a relief than a surprise not only to Iona, but to the Allerian people as well. By the time the Rowowan army besieged Aurora, it was obvious to everyone that Alleria was in its death throes. The Allerians, though, battled on anyway not out of any hope for victory, but rather to spare their beloved king the humiliation of defeat and all that would come with it – imprisonment, trial, ignominy, and perhaps even execution. Throughout that summer, thousands of Allerian soldiers fought on, waiting to hear the news of the king’s death so that they could finally lay down their arms and end the bloodletting.

Iona’s twin brother, Rael, interrupted her thoughts with a nudge and a smirk. “Who picked this crippled undertaker?”

“Be quiet!” she hissed, shifting her eyes from her father’s remains to the officiating priest. Rael had recently returned to Aurora from the front after a two-year absence to be with their father in his final days. Time in the army had done little to smooth out his rough social edges. He tended to say the right thing at the wrong time and the wrong thing at the right time. Iona thought that age and experience should have taught him some tact and discretion, but remembered that his undeniable good looks and royal status provided him with an immunity from the usual social graces.

Ten years of war had of course changed everyone involved one way or another. Mostly, Iona felt, for the worse. She ruefully included herself on this list. The conflict had transformed her from an important royal personage into an afterthought. Although there were plenty of opportunities for women to contribute to the war effort, Iona struggled to find an appropriate role for herself. Some officials wanted to use her for diplomatic or propaganda purposes, but her father quashed that idea by stating that his daughter was not a chess piece. Left to her own devices to find her own niche, Iona tried a little bit of everything: teaching, nursing, clerking, translating, and even riveting. In each instance, the day-to-day grind of the job, her impatience with rigmarole, and her inability to live up to everyone’s expectations repeatedly disillusioned her. After several weeks or months of effort, she invariably quit whichever task she had taken up and retreated to the security of the palace until boredom and guilt drove her to try something else.

Iona’s personal life was equally unsatisfactory, characterized as it was by one failed relationship after another. Despite their shared womb, she and her brother had never been close. He was the heir, the future king, whereas Iona was the zygotic residue. She coped with her jealousy by withdrawing from Rael and his friends, and he made little effort to bridge the gap between them because he was oblivious of it. When the war began, she was attracted to anxious boys looking for comfort before they headed off to the front. Although a part of her felt that embracing them was her patriotic duty, she was also drawn to their fear-induced lack of pretense. They had, she believed, an endearing authenticity that promoted an honesty often absent from the palace intrigue that swirled around her. As the war progressed and the casualty lists hardened her heart, she gravitated toward self-assured and cynical officers who made the most of the opportunities the conflict offered. Not surprisingly, these liaisons were perfunctory, unfulfilling, and mercenary. Whatever their nature, they ended when the soldier returned to the front and was killed, wounded, or otherwise distracted. To make matters worse, she gradually lost touch with her female friends as they married, moved, or entered the workforce. Her hair remained flaxen blonde and her eyes dark blue, but by the time her father succumbed to his final illness, even she noticed a harshness in her face that she could not entirely attribute to aging.

As the priest concluded the ceremony, Iona suddenly realized that her world had become as small and concentrated as the crypt in which she stood. Her hopes and dreams for the future, never well-formed to begin with, had narrowed to the immediate and mundane. Because the Rowowans had cut off Aurora’s supply lines, she now valued things she had once taken for granted, such as a warm bath and tomorrow’s meal. Indeed, the daily grind for survival in the siege had displaced issues that would have once generated attention and comment: the Valgoran ambassador’s affair with his chambermaid, the unsolved murder of a servant girl on palace grounds, an embezzlement scandal in the interior ministry, and so on. Iona knew that a long and important phase in her life was ending, but she had only the vaguest idea of what would come next. However, she took comfort in the knowledge that her fate lay not in the hands of the pitiless and barbaric Rowowans on the capital’s outskirts, but in those of the tall, bald, and aesthetic man standing next to her twin brother, not three feet away.