“Prince?” I called, thinking that somehow he had discovered my indiscretions with his sister last night; and now, in retaliation, had murdered the innocent I’d picked up at the edge of the woods.
The figure with the flaming hair stopped behind the tree where my friend had fallen. I heard a low chuckle, and despite the heat I felt a chill. That was not the Prince’s laughter.
“Don’t move!” I cried, my finger less than steady on the trigger.
Out of the shadows she came, still laughing. The rifle strap cut between her breasts, her weapon holstered so that I knew she did not intend to fire on me. Even so, her eyes were a fury.
“Princess,” I said.
She mocked me with a shake of her head. “Dear Prince, whatever will I do with you? Was it only last night you filled my ears with promises of fidelity? This is a poor start.”
“You’ve gone too far,” I said. “That girl—”
The Princess took a step into the sunlight and her hair turned molten. “Was she important to you?”
“She was innocent,” I said, momentarily blinded by her hair but pretending otherwise, not trusting her for even a moment with the knowledge of my vulnerability.
“Should that have saved her?” she asked, her voice tiptoeing around me through spots of glare. I tried to follow her with my gun; she was toying with me.
“If you’ve a fight to pick with me—”
“Oh, come now. If my father insulted your mother, would she go out of her way to slap him in the face? Don’t be ridiculous. She’d pay her soldiers to fight, and plenty of innocents would die. This little ‘love’ of yours was in my way.”
“I didn’t love her,” I said. “You needn’t have bothered.”
As the glare receded, and her face went into shadow, I saw the Princess stoop to snatch a pear from our picnic and take a bite. I lowered my gun and began to dress, she stared at me with a curious smile while the juice ran down her chin, her throat. She was dressed like a huntress, in soft brown leather and tall boots. As I began lacing up my shirt, she stopped me with a touch. “Don’t,” she said.
“Are you mad?”
Her grip tightened on my wrist. She clenched her teeth behind her smile. “Will you tell on me? Why not carry as before? Only I will ever know that once you broke our promise.”
I tore my arm away from her. “What do you want? We’ve had our pleasure but it can never happen again. What if we had been discovered last night?”
She took a step closer, pressing against me, her smell aphrodisiac. “It would have simplified everything. We would be planning a spectacular wedding now. It’s what our parents want: the children of both countries formally wed.”
I kicked through the remains of the picnic and fled into the woods, knowing that she was on my heels. A few yards into the shadows I came upon the body of the girl whose sweat and musk still flavored my tongue. Fallen leaves clung to the wreck of her face. As I leaned against tree trunk, the Princess caught me from behind, her nails cutting into my ribs. She twisted me toward her, biting at my lips. I stumbled against the tree, fighting her off, but she grabbed my hair and we both went down into the loam. She was naked beneath her brief leather skirt.
“I don’t want this,” I said. My body hinted otherwise.
“We’re two of a kind, Prince, and you know it.”
I made myself relax. She believed my imitation of submission; her eyelids narrowed, pupils drifting to one side. She wasn’t seeing me, though her hands were all over my body. She trembled, already close, so close that I could feel myself being sucked along with her.
Then I looked through the grass and my body went cold. She was looking at the twisted limbs, the torn belly, the sun-browned breasts draped in a bloodied blouse. The tree trunk obscured my view, but I knew the Princess had a clear sight of my dead lover’s gory face.
“My God!” I rolled free of her. She lay panting in the grass, her body wracked by spasms. I tore myself away from the sight and ran toward my car and my guardians, toward the borders of home.
My private jet left the Princess’s airspace shortly after sunset; it was another hour before we circled and came to earth. That was time enough for her to destroy the old pattern of my life, as I soon discovered.
Instead of the black ultralight carriage that normally awaited my return, an ugly armored vehicle idled on the airstrip. Arqui’s car. In constant fear of assassination, he never traveled in anything less secure than a street tank. Inside, Prime Minister Arquinian sat breaking pencils and cleaning his fingertips.
“You’ve done it now,” he said as I took an uncomfortable seat beside him. “Mind telling us what happened over there?”
By “us” he meant himself and the Queen Mother, who watched from a two-way in the roof.
“How much do you know?” I asked, casually opening the wet bar which the P.M. never left behind.
“How much?” I could see he was in a rage. “They’ve declared war! It’s finished now, all the treaties. Five years of my life, you ruin in a pleasure jaunt that was meant to ease tensions.”
“It was fate,” I said with a shrug.
“Well, what happened?”
“I met the Princess.”
“The Princess,” Mother said, as if she understood perfectly. She had been a princess herself once. “You two had a fight? A lovers’ tiff?”
“Lovers!” Arquinian waxed apoplectic. “My God, and it came to this? The casualties are already past counting. Can’t you talk to the girl, reason with her, if she’s the cause?”
I shook my head, raised my hands. “There’s no reasoning with her, she’s in a passion. I’m all she wants.”
“Well!” said my mother, trying to hide her improper amusement from the P.M.
“Then it’s your fault,” said Arquinian.
“I haven’t killed a soul.”
“You haven’t patched things up, either. This is juvenile behavior.”
He shook a finger at me, as if I were still a child to be reprimanded—but I seized it and bent it backward, out of view of my mother, watching his face whiten while I whispered.
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Arq. She’s irrational. How can I reason with such a girl?”
“I’ve reasoned with far worse, young man, and so must you. She must be stopped. This war especially must stop.”
I relinquished his finger, now properly sprained, and he took it away without showing his distress. But the blood had drained from his ultimatum:
“If you don’t do something, Prince, we might turn you over to her.”
“Oh, leave him alone, Arqui,” said my mother. “We’ll do nothing of the sort.”
“Thanks, Mum.”
I peeked out the window, saw that we’d reached the city. “Look, there’s nothing I can do if her father sends armies on her word. The whole family must be insane. I’m surprised you’d risk me in negotiations. She killed my consort, that’s what started it.”
“You think I don’t know you better than that?” said Arquinian.
“I don’t care what you know.”
With that, I unlatched the door and leapt to the street. The Prime Minister and my mother, for once in accord, screamed after me, but Arqui didn’t dare leave his movable fortress. He ordered the drivers to give pursuit, but a military procession, brass horns blaring, marched in the way and several foot soldiers vanished beneath the tank treads before it could be halted. I ducked into an alley, leaving familial duties behind, and dodged through street after street, thankful to be home again.
All I needed now was a place to stay.
For three days I hid in a garret, writing sentimental battle odes and drinking cheap wine. I could find none of my old slumming companions to drink with me. For all their brave treasonous talk and rebellious posturing, they had conceded quietly enough to military induction and now were soldiers, mired in mud and gulping gas at the front, too stupid to command planes or even to push buttons in proper sequence from the safety of underground bunkers.