The Night of the Red Thorn

  The world she arrived in had the quality of a place that remembers what it was and is waiting to be reminded. The sky was the colour of prolonged drought, a whitish grey that was not clouds but the absence of them. The ground under her feet had the texture of earth that has not been wet in a very long time and has stopped expecting to be.

  She stood in it for a moment and let Astralinium be real. Not the memory of it, not the version she had carried in the lion chain for the past hour, but the actual present ground and sky and silence of it. Then she reached into her jacket and took out the locket.

  Inside was a photograph. The size of it was small and the image was larger than the size. Six people around a table in a cafeteria. Alice's hand in the middle of a gesture that was about to land. Jasmine watching it with patient amusement. Lyra's expression of reluctant warmth. Morokana's half-smile, the one he used when he found something genuinely good but didn't want to make a production of it. Jack, looking not at the camera but at something slightly to the left of it. Herself, in the middle of all of them, laughing at something that had already ended by the time the shutter clicked.

  "I am only standing here," she said, to the empty air and the parched earth and the sky that had forgotten rain, "because of them."

  She knelt on the ground. The sword settled beside her. She looked up at the sky, at the specific grey of it, at the weight of years of absence in every direction, and she asked. Not demanded. Asked, in the way of someone who understands that asking is the correct posture for a thing this large.

  "Creator of all nature. Restore what belongs to this land. Shower it with mercy."

  The clouds gathered the way clouds gather when there is moisture to find, which there is always, because there is always moisture somewhere, waiting for the temperature and pressure to make it possible. The first drop hit the dry earth and the earth received it with a sound like relief. Then more, and more, and the sound of it building, and the green that was underneath the drought responding to what it had always known was possible.

  The villagers came out of their houses and their shelters and stood in it with their faces up and their arms open and made the sounds that people make when something that has been absent for a very long time returns.

  Alicia knelt in the rain and thought about Morokana and let herself feel that loss cleanly, in the rain of a world he had never seen, because he deserved to be properly mourned somewhere.

  Far across the horizon, at the edge of the territory that the Rebel Army had held while the kingdom was absent, the Queen stood at the entrance of her command tent and watched the rain begin. She did not say it with fear. She said it with the specific preparation of someone for whom this event had always been a matter of when rather than if.

  "The Princess has come home." She turned to her generals. "Prepare the soldiers. We move at dawn."

  The night was quiet and full of stars. Alicia sat outside the elder's house and spoke quietly to people who were not there.

  "I'm okay," she told her parents. "I'm here. Don't worry."

  She wiped her face before her grandmother found her, appearing from behind the doorframe with the specific presence of an elder who has learned that appearing suddenly is more effective than announcing yourself. Her grandmother's hand moved through Alicia's hair in the way of hands that have done this since a person was very small.

  The village bell rang. Then the wrong bell.

  The first fire was on the eastern edge of the village. Alicia's sword was in her hand before she had completed the decision to reach for it, and she was moving toward the fire before the elder could form a sentence.

  The cavalry was more than two hundred. Archers at the back, swordsmen at the front, and the organisation of an army that knows the geography. Alicia placed herself between them and the village and made peace with the number.

  She raised the sword. The slash she released from the left was not quiet. The lion was not quiet. The cavalry heard it before they felt it, and the ones who survived the first pass looked at the girl standing in the rain-wet field and recognised, in the way that fighters recognise things, what they were looking at.

  She sent the villagers who came to help her back to find the others, because protecting residents was the army's function, not the other way around.

  From the chaos, the assassin came. His arms had been built rather than grown, scorpion claws integrated with the particular permanence of modifications that have had time to become how a person moves. He told her the Queen sent her regards. The poison his right claw found in her left hand was specific, the kind that slows what it touches rather than stopping it all at once, and the burning of it moved up her arm and into her chest and made everything slightly harder.

  She worked through it. She found the gap in his pattern the way she found all gaps, by watching long enough for the pattern to repeat, and she brought the sword across his face and her foot into his chest and he went down. She put the blade at his throat.

  "Don't come back," she said.

  He stood. He left into the dark. The desert took him.

  She turned back to the village. The fires were being managed. She moved through the aftermath and the still-falling rain and understood that the work of coming home was not an arrival but a beginning.

  The Birth of an Army

  In the morning she stood before the survivors. Not on a platform. The ground was sufficient.

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  "I am your princess. I know what was taken from this land and what it has cost you while I was gone. I am not here to ask forgiveness for the absence. I am here to ask for your hands, because there is work to do." She looked across all of them. "It does not matter what you were before this morning. If you can hold something and point it toward a threat, come forward. Not for me. For the people standing next to you."

  Four hundred and fifty people came forward. She made them swear in the way of oaths that are spoken to each other rather than to a symbol, person to person, which is the kind that holds.

  Over the three months that followed, Alicia worked beside them rather than above them, because the memory of Morokana building his machines with his own hands was still in her chest, and the lesson it carried was that people trust what you are willing to do alongside them. She organised the blacksmiths and the barracks and the rice planting and the defensive towers and the market roads that would begin connecting tribe to tribe. She built the infrastructure of a country that had been waiting for someone to believe it could exist again.

  When the scouts returned with news that the old city of Astralinium was standing, she led a thousand soldiers across the plains.

  The Return to the Throne

  The city was a ghost of its former scale, but it was there. The residents who had stayed through everything came out at the sound of horses and wept when they saw her.

  "The Princess has returned."

  She walked through the hollow halls of the palace alone, through rooms that had been emptied by years and by violence and by the ordinary entropy of things that are not tended. In the throne room her father's seat was there, half-destroyed, one side collapsed, but present. She stepped on something on the floor. A painting on wood, lacquered and preserved well enough to still be itself. Her father with his sword, wearing the specific expression he had when he had made a decision and was at peace with it.

  "Don't worry," she said. "I'm working on it."

  The restoration was a different kind of work than the building had been. It required reading the ruins as documents of what had been there and rebuilding from that knowledge rather than from preference. Her soldiers became masons. Alicia walked the streets and used the healing spells her mother had taught her on the sick, which was slower work than fighting and mattered more.

  In three days the city had stopped being ruins and started being a city in recovery. She sent her messengers to every surviving tribe.

  She did not send one to every village, because one tribe sent themselves.

  The floor of the newly restored throne room cracked when Marrie arrived, which was the kind of entrance that communicates intent before a word is spoken. The centipede fangs were part of her in the way of things that have been with a person long enough to change how they move. She looked at Alicia across the crater she had made.

  "Finally," she said. "You're back."

  Alicia looked at her and felt the complicated thing that the lion chain's memories had given her, which was the full context of what had happened between their families and what it meant and how it must have felt to be on Marrie's side of it. She had been nine when it happened. Marrie had been nine. Neither of them had chosen it. But only one of them had been exiled.

  "Marrie," she said. "Come make peace with us."

  Marrie's answer was her hands and her momentum, which was the only kind of answer she had prepared.

  They fought with the honesty of two people who have known each other since childhood and have unfinished business between them, and Alicia fought with the fairness she brought to everything. Marrie experienced that fairness as condescension. She said so.

  "You're not fighting me completely. You're doing it again. Making me less."

  "I'm fighting you as much as this requires," Alicia said.

  "Then fight harder! I deserve that!"

  And Alicia heard it, underneath the anger and the poison fangs and the years of accumulated grievance, the thing that was actually being asked. Not for defeat. For acknowledgement. For the experience of being taken seriously by the one person whose opinion had structured her entire exile.

  She pressed harder. Marrie fought harder. It became the fight it needed to be, real and full, and when Marrie committed everything to the final lunge and Alicia's sword found her stomach in the space before it arrived, they both became still.

  Marrie went to her knees. She found the worst words available and aimed them at Alicia's future and at the futures of everyone Alicia would love, and she said them with the specific bitterness of someone spending their last resource and wanting it to count.

  Alicia knelt beside her. She placed her hands against the wound and worked the healing through them, slow and careful, doing it completely rather than sufficiently. She helped Marrie's soldiers carry her. She watched them go until the desert took them.

  She stood alone on the field among soldiers who had given everything they had for a princess they had known for three months, and she stood with that for a long time before she walked back to the city that was waiting for her.

  The Queen of Universes

  The city welcomed her with the noise of people who are relieved and do not know what else to do with relief except make it heard. She told them about the soldiers plainly, because they deserved the truth in the same full measure the soldiers had given their lives, and the mourning that followed became, over the hours, grief and celebration held in the same breath, which is the only form that certain kinds of gratitude can take.

  A year passed in the building and the planting and the trading, in the currency named for her father and the schools and the military and the ordinary accumulating texture of a civilization that has remembered how to be itself. Different tribes settled in different streets and had disputes and resolved them and built the specific tissue of a place where more than one kind of person has decided to stay.

  One night Alicia dreamed of the two friends who had followed her through the portal from the rice field. She dreamed of a man whose face she could not see but whose presence felt like something she was moving toward, which was how she had always dreamed of him.

  She woke to news from the royal astronomers. A universe under attack. A name she recognised. Chakka.

  There was a king in the Lacrimosa Universe who had imprisoned the creature and was searching for the weapon that could end it permanently, because only Chakka's own weapons could destroy Chakka. Alicia had her father's knowledge now, recovered through the chain and through the year of rebuilding, and she knew things about where those weapons had been that the king searching for them did not.

  She went to find her armor.

  The maids assembled it with the practiced ceremony of people who understand that preparation is not separate from the thing prepared for. The gold of it was functional rather than decorative, anti-poison and anti-destruction, charged with spells spoken by people who understood what it would walk into. She stood in it and looked at her reflection in the polished floor of the throne room.

  She picked up her sword. She walked to the portal.

  She thought of a locket photograph and a cafeteria table and a man who had shouted across a closing gateway with everything he had, and she thought of her father walking toward Chakka with his sword and his decision, and she thought of her mother's hands and the words Saya cintakan awak, suamiku, and she thought of four hundred and fifty people who had stepped forward on a morning when they had every reason not to.

  "Mom," she said, to the air of the palace and to a small house by the sea on a different world. "Dad. I hope you know I'm okay."

  She faced the portal.

  "I am not a princess anymore." The sword was steady. The lion was steady. "I am Queen Alicia of Astralinium."

  She stepped through the light, ready to face the apocalypse that had been waiting for her since before she could hold a sword, and reclaim the destiny that her father had paid for with everything he had.