An Imperfect Princess (10 page)

“Did you have a
debut?” Marilyn asked warily.

“No.”  Eneria
crouched down to where she was eye level with the child. “I did not have to be
presented to society.  I lived in the court all my life.  I also did not have
to worry about meeting a husband; potential suitors would flock to me when I
announced I was looking.”

“Where is the
fairy?”  The child changed the subject so abruptly that Eneria had to rearrange
her thoughts for a moment.

“She is asleep. 
She has had a very hard time these last few days.”

“Where?” 

“In the room
where I am staying.”  She straightened up and smoothed her skirts.  “But do not
wake her, for she will be cranky.”

“Can she talk?”

“Of course. 
When she is awake.”  She patted the child on the head.  “Now if you will excuse
me, I have some business with your uncle.”

Eneria fled down
the stairs.  She had never been very good with children.  Her brother had been
the one who adored children, who wanted to play with them and had always wanted
an enormous family with his perfect womanly dream bride.

She did not see
the girl trot away toward the bedroom, the cat at her heels, heedless of the
warnings not to wake up the sleeping fairy.

She found the
master of the house in his study and knocked politely on the door, as she had
learned was the custom here.

“You may enter,”
a deep, masculine voice said.

Eneria felt her
knees turn into pudding.  Why, oh why, did he have to be handsome?  If he was a
middle aged toad she could stare him down more easily.  If he was an old, jolly
man they could have a great time together.  But instead, his physical
attractiveness reverberated all the way down to her toes.

She slipped in
the room and stood there dumbly, her mouth too dry for words.

“Yes?” he
prompted, and he motioned for her to take a seat in front of him.  She sank
into the chair, grateful not to have to be upright any longer.  She
was
still recovering from a pretty nasty space wreck.

“My things,” she
choked out. She cleared her throat and tried again.  “I was wondering what had
been done with the clothing and things I arrived in.  I am not too concerned
about the coverall, it was only a disguise to make me appear as a boy.”  She
silently thanked Clarissa for that story, even as she winced internally at the
lie.   “But I had some other items as well, in the pockets.”

“No one would
have mistaken you for a male in that outfit,” he said softly, raising one
eyebrow.  “Unless he was nearly blind.”

“I didn’t say it
was a
good
disguise,” she defended, lamely.  So much for that idea. 
“But it was convenient.”

He opened a
drawer in the desk he sat behind and pulled out a few objects.  “I do not even
know what these are,” he said as he set them before her.

She pulled her
pocket spectrometer toward her.  “And I do not know the words in your
language.”  She turned on the small device and held it in her hand.  “This does
not work without a few other parts, but it examines the matter of something
else, like a gem, and tells me what that gem is made of.  The purity, the
clarity, that sort of thing.”

“So it’s a
jeweler’s loop?  It is unlike one I have ever seen.”

“It is a bit
more complex than that, but in essence, that is what it is.”  She reached for
another object that was long and pointy.  “This is just a ratchet.”  She turned
the handle, grinning at the mechanical clicks. 

“A finely made
one, it seems.”

“It was one of
the few things I had to buy new.”  She reached for the last object, her wallet,
which was locked with a fingerprint-pulse identification system.  She held her
thumb over the latch and it made a chirping sound and popped open, revealing a
neat arrangement of tiny pockets and folds.  “This is just a pocketbook.”

He looked on,
fascinated, as she pulled out coins, paper money, a few receipts, and some tiny
photos of Vaz and her mother, which she slid toward him, interested in his
reaction.

“These
miniatures are exquisite. But the artist painted their hair
blue
,” the
earl said, staring at the tiny color photographs.  “Was that some sort of
artistic license, or a tribute to your country, or what?”

“It is a family
trait.”  She twirled one strand of her own seal brown hair, admiring the ice
blue highlights that picked up.  The color was more of a trick of refraction,
like a bird’s feather, but it was still her best feature in many respects.

“I have never
heard of anyone with blue hair.”  He shook his head in disbelief.  “Although if
your story is true, you should have blue blood to match...”

Eneria paused in
her twirling, her stomach sinking. 
No one
on this world had blue hair? 
She was more unusual than she had wanted to be, apparently.

“These
are
remarkable miniature paintings.”  He held up one fragile piece of photographic
paper, squinting at it.  “I have never seen such minute detail.  You can’t even
see the brush strokes.”

Eneria froze. 
They were so primitive that they didn’t even have photography yet?  Oh dear,
she shouldn’t have shown him the pictures after all.

This was not
going so well.  She should take her things and flee this house before she did
any more damage.  But where on this planet could she possibly go?  Her ship was
in need of repairs, and she could not fly it more than a hundred feet in its
current state.

“There was one
more thing... a pendent.”  She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. 
“It was originally a brooch, but I changed the setting as the stone was too
large for anything else.”

“That would be
this.”  Instead of pulling it out from the drawer, he had been keeping it in
his own pocket.  It was warm to the touch when he handed it to her.  “That is a
magnificent stone.”

“Oh, it is.” 
Her fingers curled around it.  “It was a bonus for my last trade, one I should
have turned down.  It has caused me far more trouble than its value.”

“Was it stolen?”
he asked, almost gently.  She was taken aback by the question, but he seemed
quite serious about it.  He must have been having doubts.

“Not as far as I
know.  But it is of Konkastian origin and they were able to track me with it.”
She bit her lip, weighing the pendant.  “It is a gem fit for a queen–or a princess–but
if I had known, I would have refused it.”

“I see.”  The
man looked across his desk with those deep brown eyes of the sort she had never
seen before.  His hair was faintly curly, like his niece’s hair, but in a
midnight black instead.  It was neatly trimmed, but wild in its own way, as if
it refused any efforts at styling.  “If you are going to seek asylum in
England, perhaps I can have you contact my solicitor.  But first, I want to be
sure of something.”

“Oh?”  She
leaned forward.

He replied in a
completely, utterly different language.

She blinked.

“I’m sorry,” she
said, shaking her head.  “I didn’t understand any of that.”

He leaned
forward with a resigned sigh and settled his chin on his hand. “That was Greek,
Miss d’Munt.  As in, the country you claim to hail from.”

 Eneria’s heart
bottomed out, and she felt the blood drain from her face.

She’d been found
out
already
!

Marilyn stood on
her tiptoes to peer over the top of the dresser where the fairy had curled up
next to a candle on the metal candelabra.

She grinned,
revealing missing teeth where they had not quite finished coming in yet.  In
her hand she held a box with air holes, opting to avoid the lead crystal vase
that had nearly killed the fairy before.

“Uncle James is
going to have to believe me after he sees you,” she said. She started to reach
for the sleeping creature, then she stopped.  The stranger had said that the
fairy was asleep and shouldn’t be woken.

She was torn
between her admiration for the stranger and her desire to prove to her uncle
that she wasn’t imagining things.  Her small hand wavered, but in the end, good
behavior lost.  With a cheeky grin, she grabbed at the fairy. However, her hand
went right
through
the creature.  She hadn’t realized that the fairy
wasn’t solid; when she had caught her in the jar, she had also captured the air
around it.

Her actions did
have an effect.  The small golden creature blinked sleepily, brightened a bit,
and stared at the room around her, not seeing.  Eventually, her bleary gaze
settled on Marilyn, at which point she screamed.

Her scream was a
high, tinny sound, and Marilyn instinctively responded in kind.  The fairy
leaped out of the way as Marilyn made another lunge for her.  She fluttered
around the ceiling for a few moments before heading out into the hallway. 
Marilyn followed, ignoring her governess who had just rushed down the hallway
upon hearing her charge’s cry.

She chased the
fairy down the stairs and was pleased as the creature made a beeline for her
uncle’s study.  He would surely see her at this rate!

Aijo hated
waking up early under any circumstances, especially before she’d recharged her
miniature nuclear batteries.  Waking up to a child that apparently thought you
were a toy to play with was even worse. 

Eneria was not in
the bed, and Aijo remembered that she had been well enough to get out of bed
this afternoon.  She hoped that all the language and culture she had been
stuffing in her ward’s head for the last few days was coming in handy.

She honed in on
her mistress, not caring that she was towing an overexcited seven year-old
behind her.  She needed
help.
 

“Excuse me?”
Eneria said, not having to feign confusion.

He said
something else, in what sounded like a completely different language from the
first one she had used.  Some of the roots seemed familiar, and she realized
that these were probably parent languages to the one she was speaking,
someplace along the line.

“I see you do
not speak Greek or Latin,” he said, cocking one elegant eyebrow.  “Unusual, I’d
say, for a noble from the Continent.”

“I was very lax
in my studies,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender.

“You do not come
across as a simpleton,” he disagreed.  “Your astonishing command of English in
three short days has been the most remarkable learning I have ever witnessed.
Unless... you already knew English and you were deceiving us

She bristled
with indignation.  “Now wait just a minute
—
”

He cut her off
firmly. “I think, Princess Eneria, that you are a liar and a thief.”  He stared
at the beautiful pendent he held, watching the fire and play of color roll
around the black opal.  “It is amazingly convenient how your English has
improved so drastically in so short of a time, is it not?  Even your accent is
fading.  And I have a hard time believing that the rickety boat you arrived in
came any further than France, let alone the Baltic Sea.”

It had come from
quite a lot farther than either of those places. “I’ll admit to being a bit
deceptive about where I came from.”  She met him squarely in the eye.  “But
that is because you would never believe the truth.”

“Oh? Try me.”

She took a deep
breath.  “Lathlor is not a country, it is a world.  It is over one thousand
light years away–I do not know if you have another word for a light-year, but
it is the distance that it takes light one year to travel.  My ‘rickety boat’
is not a sea vessel, but a ship that flies through the sky, beyond the world,
among the stars.”  She smiled at the utter disbelief that he was emanating. 
“See? I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

He slid his hand
from his chin to his forehead, shaking his head in pity. “I take it back.  You’re
not a liar, you’re utterly daft.”

She stood up and
started pacing around his study, unable to hold herself still. “Everything I
told you was true.  My mother, the queen, now lives with my cousin Vaz on
Montares.  The Konkastian Empire is based around another–what is the word for a
collection of worlds that circles around a star?”

“Like our
planets circle around the sun?”

“Mmmm, perhaps
you do not have a word for it.”  She sighed; it was frustrating to not know the
terms she needed.

He was beginning
to look very, very confused himself.  “Miss d’Munt, you clearly belong back in
bed.  I am definitely of the opinion that your concussion was worse than I
realized.  Next you’ll tell me that you arrived with an angel and a fairy.”

“Actually...” 
She tapped her lip thoughtfully, as a sudden commotion came into the office in
the form of a golden trail of light and a determined seven year-old.

“Enny!” Aijo
called, zooming around the ceiling.  Her tinny voice sounded distressed as she
spoke in rapid Lathlian.  “Get the monster away from me!”

“Aijo!”  Acting
quickly, Eneria grabbed the child to prevent her from getting any closer.  She
dropped down to her knees and caught her in a tight hug from behind. “Lady
Marilyn, I asked you not to wake her,” she said into the girl’s ear.

“Marilyn Coretta
Holding!”  The earl jumped up from his seat, as if to assist Eneria in
restraining her, but then he simply looked at the girl in angry
disappointment.  He had not noticed the streak of gold she had been chasing, as
Aijo had been quite a bit above his eye level. “You know you are supposed to
knock before you enter this room!”  He wagged his finger and Eneria suddenly
had an insight as to why Marilyn might rebel so much.  He was almost cute to
watch when he was angry.

“But Uncle
James, the fairy is here!”  The girl struggled to escape Eneria’s capture. 
“Look, it’s up in the corner!”  She pointed to the corner, where the pinky
sized fairy was trying in vain to hide behind a decorate cornice.