The Year of the Dead Rose

by Rachel Parsons

Chapter 14
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
appear in this issue.

Chapter 15

“Naturally, we will back you. You are not just my sovereign’s closest friend, your nation is our greatest trading partner.”

Rhiannon took this with a serious look on her face. They were in the waiting room that she was converting to her chambers. She hated meeting people in the throne room, as the stone throne was hard on her bare butt. Here she had placed a leather sofa, two leather chairs, all by a hearth which heated everything to a roast.

At Rosalyn’s suggestion, she was going to put in wood paneling, flooring and make two levels. One would have a desk, in two parts, with a glass piece connecting them. By her left side would be a wood stove, which could warm her and her coffee, and a hollowed-out portable stone pantry, which could keep things cool in the summer. Behind her, a balcony.

This was in the future; now, the only livable part was the area around the hearth with an indoor garderobe to her left, facing the fire. There were smoldering pots around it, both to bring warming currents. The heat would be sucked by drafts on the southern wall and hide the stink from the garderobe.

She was on the sofa, with Rosalyn on her side, and Zusanna on her feet. Rosalyn was dressed in a breathtaking kirtle made of fine silk with a golden partlet over it, and a cape around her shoulders. She also had on red leather boots. When she first presented herself in this way, Rhiannon nearly tore the garment off and clawed her truest companion. She had been envious to the point of murder.

Branwen had noticed that and capitalized on it. “Well, our doll has decided to dress itself.” She made a production of walking around Rosalyn, tsk-tsk-ing. “Do you know what we do with dolls that develop minds of their own?”

“Give them a cricket for a conscience?” Rosalyn said with angry, mock perkiness.

Rhiannon nearly choked, she so wanted to laugh at that remark. At that moment, her emerald maelstrom was tamed; could not begrudge her friend anything when she could make her laugh.

And Branwen had been the quintessential bitch that afternoon. Something about her nudity brought out aggression in Branwen, Rhiannon supposed. At least, nothing had been good enough for her. Had she always been like this, only to burden Heveydd and Modron with her annoying perfectionism?

“The kettles, Rhiannon, they do not heat the coffee right. We send our best to you, dear sister, so the kettles should be the best, too. My servants, Rhiannon. They are slow in their responses to me. Why won’t you let me cudgel them? It is not right that if I have to leave my slaves at home I do not get to cudgel the servants you assign me.

“And the snow, Rhiannon. You believe in snow gods. Sprinkle incense on their canters, or whatever you do to placate your gods. I do not wish snow.” She made little fists and hit vainly at the air as she said these things.

Rhiannon thought that last remark to be especially unfair, as surely Branwen must realize that if anyone would wish to kiss the butts of the snow gods, it would be her.

By the time she was settled, and Rhiannon was free to get ready for a formal audience with James Connell, it had already been a day and a half. She wanted to apologize to James, he was a handsome one whose flower-bedecked codpiece indicated his presence could be very fulfilling, but he must know queens, and queens did not apologize. Not even barbarian ones.

Aye, she knew what he thought of her, which is why, when they did meet, she had been standing and would move her bare foot up his thigh and stick her toes in the crack in his toga. He gurgled in a satisfying way when she did that, and it provided her with a balancing and flexibility exercise at the same time.

He had shuddered as they all had taken their seats. Less tumescent now, he was spewing forth garbage. She was reminded of the time a billy had had too much malmsey before he had wanted to demonstrate his manliness to her. Instead of launching his bolt, had vomited forth another fluid on her than the one she had been expecting.

He made it sound like New Prydain was doing New Fairy a favor in trading with her. Never mind that the strange flows of this part of the five kingdoms made cotton easy to grow, wheat easy to preserve on barges, or fruits easy to pluck from trees. The salt mines helped preserve venison, not to mention a little preserving spell here and there.

The New Prydainians did not approve of preserving spells that kept grains lasting longer and made them resistant to devouring bugs, but what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. But that was another point that James thought appropriate to bore her with: many of the merchants wanted the foodstuffs labeled, ‘preserved by spells.’

“But they don’t believe in spells in New Prydain.”

“They nonetheless want to know, and I concur.”

He tended to concur a lot. She wondered whether ‘concurring’ was a sexual technique in New Prydain.

Didn’t he realize all this wrangling over the regulation of food would be moot if New Fairy lost the war? If New Fairy fell to the army of New Dyved, all of this would go some one hundred and eighty trillion miles away, where the offworlders would use it to substitute for the produce of their lost farmlands, which had been replaced by tenements for their poor, their huddled masses, yearning for the usufruct of this new world.

But if the world were devastated by the offworlders, that would ruin New Prydain’s economy. The soup into which this put James Connell’s kingdom was reflected in the soup of words he was spitting up.

Every now and again, Rosalyn would whisper something in Rhiannon’s ear, looking very serious. The princess would nod somberly. From the lines on his forehead, this clearly worried James Connell. But he needn’t have been concerned. Once, Rosalyn commented on the mole that Branwen’s kirtle revealed. She wore it low enough that it brought out the competitive nature in the former courtesan.

Another time, it was the nervous habit the western queen had of playing with her toes through her boots. She whispered a bet with her new mistress about whether Branwen had the normal panoply of digits on her feet, or whether she was freakish in this respect. Rhiannon responded, as if she were doing crunches with her abdominal muscles. Although his eyes narrowed at this, the prime minister kept on holding forth.

But then the golden sovereign must have figured out the sport, for right in the middle of Connell’s appeal to Rhiannon to repeal the Corn Laws, so that the ethnic Terrans of his land could be fed, Branwen started doing a hand puppet behind his head. He was oblivious to this, as he waxed about how that would tie New Prydain, New Fairy, and New Dyved together, thus obviating the need for war. “Queen Alcippe,” he explained, “will be on her knees when she realized this will feed her poor.”

Rhiannon smiled what she hoped was a sympathetic smile, as it took all her being, all her essence, all her self-control not to dissolve into giggles as Branwen’s left hand made the perfect image of an elephant doing something anatomically impossible to itself as she pointed at her prime minister with her right index finger.

Her abdomen was lurching inward and outward, drawing a puzzled look from James Connell, when Ioseff, Third Earl of Gwrydall, burst in unannounced.

“What means this, sirrah?’ yelled Rhiannon. Branwen hastily put her hands in her lap, and James Connell frowned a deep and ugly pursing. Zusanna began barking and growling.

“It is the Council of Barons. They wish to meet you on the Plain of the Immortals. They say you must accept their charge, as you are queen, and lead them to battle.”

“I am not yet queen; there has been no enthronement.” This was disingenuous on her part, as she knew it was but a formality, given Heveydd’s condition.

“They will enthrone you by acclamation and by acclamation make you regent over Heveydd. Then you will either lead them to battle or abdicate and leave the kingdom.”

Rhiannon grabbed and squeezed Rosalyn’s hand. During her captivity in New Dyved, she always announced, when Rosalyn would gripe, that she would know what to do if worse came to worst.

Well, worse had come to worst, and she didn’t know what to do.

Proceed to chapter 16...