Helen had never left Chrysopolis before. She had been born there, probably, and the work of a bureaucratic sve had never given her any reason to leave the boundary of its walls. That didn’t mean she knew nothing of travel, but it was all abstract. She knew the expected number of days it would take to travel from Chrysopolis to any number of major cities throughout the Empire, of the expected amount by which that number would vary from the standard. Though she knew, at least to the nearest thousand, how many tons of what sorts of commodities passed down the various major routes into and out of the city, she knew absolutely nothing about what that travel actually felt like until the day she set forth from Chrysopolis as the future bride of the Exarch of Eunon.

  As she approached Eunon, Helen had time to reflect on what she had learned. The first was to thank Nerathon, lord of the seas, for the boat was perhaps the greatest invention which had ever been granted humankind. The barge moving up the river Cocytus which had taken her and Abderus the majority of the way to Eunon had been as swift as it had been gentle. The same could not be said for the cart that took them the st leg of the trip.

  It was trying for noble splendor: the wood was eborately carved, the wheels were rimmed with bronze, and the entire thing was bedecked in painted decorations and soft cloth. But no amount of bnkets and pillows could change the fact that Helen could feel each pebble and bit of dust on the road reverberating through the entire body of the vehicle to nd home on the weakest and most sensitive part of her spine. Worse yet, every time she grunted in compint, Abderus gave her a patronizing look, as though he were pnning to swaddle her if she expressed any more discomfort.

  At least when the cart entered the city, Helen had a chance to look out the window at something interesting. Eunon looked remarkably different from Chrysopolis, but not in the way that she might have expected. The same stone and concrete made up Eunon’s architecture, but everything was arranged so differently that it scarcely parsed to her mind as being a city as opposed to some great art piece. Instead of Chrysopolis’s sharp edges and high archways, the buildings of Eunon looked almost like eborate wood-carvings, the windows small and scattered, the pilrs huge and blocky. Every exposed surface was dense with abstract, curving designs.

  “Holy markings,” Abderus expined when she asked him about it. “Before we turned to the worship of the Golden Lord, our gods were said to live beneath the earth. To appease them, all quarried stone must be kept beautiful. You’ll see it even in the poorer districts, itinerant stoneworkers carving their marks into the sides of houses for a handful of nummi.”

  And then, at st, the pace of Eunon. Or rather, the keep; for unlike the grand pace of Chrysopolis, which was built for the comfort of the Emperors, Eunon had begun life as a pce of battle and warfare. Even now, Helen could see in the outline of the Keep of the Exarch a pce of struggle.

  Helen nearly colpsed as she was led out of the back door of the carriage. As soon as her legs were forced to support her body’s weight once again, every single ache and pain that they had accumuted over the course of the trip re-emerged at once. Once again, Abderus was there to save the say, his broad shoulder giving Helen a pce to grab onto with her spare hand. She hated that, especially. Still, the process of regaining her ability to walk after a full day of being shaken about like seed husks inside of a rattle was faster than she might have feared. By the time she and her husband-to-be were walking up the front steps of the keep, Helen was fully poised and ready for whatever came next.

  What came next was a great deal of pageantry. The news of hers and Abderus’s engagement had not managed to outrace their arrival, which meant that as soon as the word spread through the Keep of the Exarch, its entire contents were emptied out into the entrance hall, creating a babbling mass of bureaucrats, priests, important aristocrats, servants, as well as the entirety of Abderus’s extended family. Helen ended up having to tell and re-tell her false backstory about being a princess of Iathines somewhere in the realm of a thousand times.

  Reactions were, of course, mixed. Nobody dared to actively question Abderus’s decision within his own household, but Helen wasn’t so blind to social implication that she could fail to notice the choice wording and questioning tone that many used when discussing the engagement. Abderus, to his credit, did quite a good job of fending off criticism with stories of Helen’s political acuity and vague gestures in the direction of her excellent health and exceptional beauty.

  “If the Golden Lord descended from upon high and handed you the most brilliant jewel you had ever seen and told you to keep it well, would you question it merely because you hadn’t spent a month in pnning?”

  He used that particur line four times that Helen could hear.

  It was all very exhausting. Never in her life had Helen been forced through so much pageantry so quickly, and even Shirrin’s lessons in etiquette soon ran out. It was a constant battle merely to keep above the rising tide of political ties, social niceties, of question and answers that the other party already knew. But she wasn’t going to give up so easily, and she fought through to the end. Once again, Abderus saved her. He must have been able to see her fgging, and so he announced to all present that he and Helen were going to retire to their chambers after such a long journey.

  Abderus’s personal chambers were a thing of utter beauty, all decked out in the Macarian style of silk and brocade, cases full of scrolls on the walls and huge tables of exotic pale wood taking up the center. There was even a side chamber, made expressly for the use of the wife of the Exarch when she did not wish to share a bed with her husband. Helen assured Abderus that she did not intend to make use of it much.

  Nevertheless, it was to that shadowed chamber that Helen retired, ciming to Abderus that all the fuss had left her in desperate need of silence and a nap. Silence, yes, but sleep was the furthest thing from Helen’s mind. Thoughts swirled in her mind about how, exactly, she was going to hold her position for long enough to enact her part of the pn. It was possible that she would do it through interpersonal charm alone, that Abderus’s love for her would continue to bloom, but she couldn’t rely on that sort of thing. And the day had proven that she was not going to become particurly beloved by the rest of the city, at least not in the way Athan was in Chrysopolis. She cked the constitution for a consistent public presence.

  But she had to have something to give to the people. Perhaps where charisma could not suffice, an exotic persona would? A beautiful princess from a faraway nd, wounded by the trauma that had brought her all the way to Philgeonia, a stranger to this nd, unfamiliar with its customs and unused to her role. And yet, her beauty and innate goodness had caught the eye of Abderus, and soon his heart. Never mind that it had been his loins which had sealed the deal, so long as she acted as demurely as possible, the people would fall in love with her anyway.

  She had become terrified, without realizing it, that the same fate would befall her as had befallen the Pale Prince. Abderus could no more protect her from the whims of the people than the Prince’s parents had been able to protect her from Peleus. Whether or not it was something worth being afraid of, the fear had been pnted in Helen’s mind, and she was going to do her best to prevent that fear from coming to be.

  Thus, when the time came, it would not merely be as a woman that she attempted to sway Abderus’s mind, but as the beloved of his entire realm. No man could deny such forces of emotion arrayed against him.

  Helen re-emerged from her chamber with far greater confidence within and far weaker confidence without. And not a moment too te, for scarcely had she and Abderus had a few minutes to speak to each other when a group of attendants came in to remind the Exarch that it was almost time for his return feast. Cosmetics and jewelry and different styles of dress were all pressed into Helen’s hands as the dies staff of the house were finally given a chance to stretch their decorative muscles. This would be her first chance to show herself off properly, after all.

  Helen picked out whatever she thought was going to look good, disregarding the fashion of both Macaria and Philgeonia and bming all of her choices on her homend. It was not an unpretty assortment of goods in which she was clothed when all was said and done, but it was a very exotic one. Red and copper were the words of the day, and her dresses were pinned up with metallic swans.

  The feast that ensued was her first chance to try out the new persona, and to do so with gusto entirely opposed to the actual substance of the act. She clung close to Abderus’s side, and several times throughout the evening she turned to him to ask how so and such a thing was done in the Macarian style. Once or twice she even made the mistake of doing so for things that he had already seen her do, though he didn’t dare bring it up. She would speak only occasionally, and then only to say something very sweet unless prompted otherwise. In particur, the story of the supposed conquest of Iathines, and Helen’s terrifying flight from that pce, had become almost a reflex. Each time it was told, a touch more detail was added, until it was something worthy of an epic, no doubt the subject of every tavern tale and street-corner song by the end of the week.

  It was, all in all, not an unsuccessful feast, though it remained a very stressful one. People seemed to like Helen, princess of Iathines; but “seemed” was the operative word. It could have very well been the same way that people tended to “like” orphans and widows, and it would be quite a long time before Helen had her finger so close to the pulse of Eunon that she could tell the difference.

  Then at st the feast came to an end, and it was time to retreat once more to the Exarchial chambers, for the part of the entire charade that Helen was finding herself enjoying most of all. That such indulgences served a distinct purpose hardly even crossed her mind. It was with a clean conscience and a deep love for the soft mattress construction of Eunon’s richest bedrooms that Helen fell asleep at the end of her first day as a true princess.

  The second day turned out to be much more typical than the first, in a wide variety of ways. Abderus, though hungover and sore, was nonetheless forced to wake just after dawn by a gaggle of courtiers, for there was much business to be done. Helen, not being yet even properly married to Abderus, had little to do with any of this, but the noise could not help to awaken her as well. Once the Exarch was dressed, his beard groomed and his calendar read out to him, he vanished from the room, leaving Helen to be, for the first time in many days, entirely unsure of what to do next.

  Much of the morning ended up being spent chatting idly with the sve girls tasked primarily with helping her to dress herself. Often in her past life, it had been those menial staff with whom Helen had had her closest retionships, the other bureaucratic sves being far too concerned with jockeying for position to stop and have a talk; but this was no longer possible. They could talk for hours without saying anything at all. Helen could not admit to anybody that she had grown up as a sve instead of a princess, and the sves did not dare say anything to the wife of the man who owned them. When at st Helen realized the futility of the gesture and had them dismissed, she was left with nothing but a sense of profound loneliness.

  She ended up wandering the fortress of Eunon, that she might at least know its every passage and hall by rote. Sves and soldiers watched her as she drifted from room to room, looking for all the world like a pretty phantom. At around midday, Helen realized she had hardly eaten, and slipped down to the fortress’s kitchen, pnted just outside the wall so that the smoke wouldn’t build up too much, and bothered them for a meal.

  It was while she was there, ruining her appetite with hot bread and cold fruit, that she was approached by someone whose face she remembered. He was a skinny, bald fellow, dark-skinned, possibly of Kemtryai or Kyreniai descent, and his eyes constantly darted about attentively. It took him several seconds to gather the necessary courage to cross the room, and several seconds after that to actually make use of his vocal cords.

  “My dy Helen, might I have your attention for… That is, might I speak to you about an important… Well, not an important matter but an essential one, for but a few moments?”

  Helen had made the mistake of trying to eat an entire fig in one bite, and as she was unwilling to viote her demure image by spitting it out, it was quite a long while before she was able to respond.

  “Of course. What is it?”

  “There is a very slight issue with the fortress kitchens that I would like for your husband to see to. I have not been able to grab his attention since he returned from Chrysopolis, so I had wondered if perhaps you might be able to bring this to his attention?”

  Helen frowned. “An issue? What sort of issue?”

  The man swallowed his phlegm visibly, twice. “It is nothing that requires your attention. Just a small discrepancy in the accounts.”

  “Then give me the…” Helen stopped. She knew accounts, but she did not want to make it too obvious. “Perhaps I could take a look? Iathines was such a small nation that I often found the burden of running it fell onto me.”

  After some more nervous hesitation, the man handed a pair of scrolls over to Helen, who set to work examining them. The discrepancy was not nearly so severe as to properly merit the word. The fortress’s demand for food had gone up very slightly, as had the price of several ingredients which Abderus preferred. However, the purse of the Exarchate was kept strictly monitored, so the budget had not been increased in such a way as to account for what was actually going to the kitchens. It was the sort of minor error in bureaucracy that Helen had spent her entire life learning to smooth over. Better still, it was something to do.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Helen said. “What sort of princess would I be if I couldn’t keep the household running, after all. Tell me, what is your name?”

  “Hagar,” the man said. “Second Quartermaster Hagar.”

  After thanking Hagar for his prudence, Helen rushed off to the records chamber and set to work. It was almost rexing, poring through documents and building up a summary of the fortress’s financials; it reminded her of normalcy. By the afternoon meal, she had decided on an appropriate compromise, decreasing the amount of food purchased and increasing the budget given until the two sides met peacefully. Then, borrowing a quill, she copied out the official form that Abderus would need to sign to have the change carried out, and brought both of them to dinner.

  Abderus was quite surprised when she shoved a pen and a scrap of parchment into his hand midway through the meal. “What is this? Did you write it? It doesn’t look like poetry.”

  Helen giggled. “Quite the opposite. It’s just a bit of official paperwork, a budget adjustment for the kitchens. I had to do much of the bureaucracy for Iathines, as its princess.”

  Abderus raised an eyebrow. “I see…”

  “I hope it is not too presumptuous of me. You rule Philgeonia, not I, but I had to find some way to occupy myself and…”

  “No, no, all is well.” Abderus quickly signed the parchment, then handed back both quill and scrap. “I see your mind truly is as excellent as your face.”

  Helen giggled girlishly. “Oh, cease your fttery, you’ve already earned my hand in marriage.”

  Helen took that first exchange as, essentially, permission to do as she pleased with bureaucratic matters, so long as Abderus’s seal ended up on the final order. And there was quite a bit that could be changed. Philgeonia had never been a particurly rich province: much of its terrain was rocky and the constant threat of the Sarraniai forced huge investments into defense while the apparatus of economy went neglected. Even on that first day, Helen had noticed a dozen inefficiencies in need of correction or further investigation.

  It was not long at all before two sets of stories began to spread about the Exarch’s foreigner wife-to-be. The first was that she was strange, unfamiliar with proper etiquette, and that she despised public appearances. The second was that if you had any problem in need of government attention, from budgetary matters to court cases, and the Exarch could not be reached, one could approach Helen instead and she would get it fixed almost too quickly to be believed. And as Abderus was a man who found army inspections, public acts of piety before the gods, and raucous partying to be far more interesting than matters of the court or bank, there were quite a few who found themselves seeking an audience with his mistress.

  For all that things change, so too do they stay the same. Helen had changed sex, traveled across the country, become engaged to one of the half-dozen most powerful men in the whole of the Macarian Empire, and still she found a way to occupy her days with scrolls and ink and wax tablets. On some days she felt as though the only real difference was that the new her was having quite a bit more sex.

  SaffronDragon