Alone on the Battlefield
"Hhk— hhk, hhk, hhk, hhk."
Again. Another nightmare. I was sick to death of them.
The room had been drowned in air freshener, and still the reek of blood seemed to rise off it until nausea climbed my throat.
"Hah... hah."
I dragged in ragged breaths and slowly lowered my trembling feet toward the floor beneath the bed. Reason was certain no blade, no saw-tooth, was going to come leaping out from under there. Even so, I hesitated to set them down, again and again.
Silent and barefoot, I finally touched the floor and made my way to the window. All at once, I saw myself in the glass.
Evangeline's hair, faint in the windowpane, was no longer a brilliant gold. It had burned down to ash — platinum, gone white.
Damn it. Now the room smelled scorched, too.
"...Koff."
A small, dry cough escaped me as I reached out with the only hand I had left. Maybe I was still half-asleep. I grabbed at empty air several times before I managed to wrench the half-open window the rest of the way wide, the latch giving a dull clack, and then I turned toward the forest spread beyond the sill and hauled in the deepest breath I could.
"Hssaaaaah— khak, khak."
Hard enough to drive out every last trace of the blood-stink dyed into the depths of my lungs.
"Khak... khak."
I forced open eyes that would not quite close, dry and stiff, and looked up into the night sky.
Two months since the war had ended. I still had not made it out of that place.
An excited voice poured from the radio without a break. Hold a hand close to the set, and I felt I might actually feel the heat coming off the reporter in the middle of his harangue.
Any more of that and my head was going to split. I jabbed a finger out and hammered the stop button in a fit of irritation. A few times there came a sound like a thin scrap of metal striking a block of wood, and then the radio went quiet.
There. Better.
A thin hiss. Just when I thought the sound had died, white smoke began to seep from the radio's seams.
"...Damn it."
I turned a resentful glare on my own left arm. Not the soft line of skin — an artificial curve of hard metal plates, tangled and interlocked. The Combat Prosthetic Arm I had been fitted with after losing the left one two years ago. A work of magitech into which the engineering of the whole Failon Kingdom had been poured. No. Of the whole continent.
I had heard the Delmaria Republic in particular had thrown real weight behind it. Among the Four Powers, they were the furthest along in magitech, and it was not close. Without this, I never could have done that bastard Aslaksha the courtesy of a hole through the skull.
If there was a problem, it was the strength. Controlling it was a little difficult.
Very difficult.
This was too much, even so. I had mashed a radio button a handful of times. Did the thing have to go and break?
The official name did begin with combat, granted. Even then, it was excessive. As a weapon, a hundred and twenty out of a hundred. As a prosthetic, sixty — no. Call it fifty.
I was trying, at least, not to use the left hand in ordinary life. That, it turned out, was surprisingly hard.
"...And this was paid for with people's taxes, too."
Guilt crept in on me. I picked the radio up and turned it this way and that, wondering if there was any saving it.
Knock, knock.
"Oh— yes, come in."
A maid opened the door without a sound, slipped inside, and bowed deeply from the waist.
"Your Highness. Your father is calling for you."
"...Father?"
I tipped my head and asked it back.
Father — Karl Failond, fourth king of the Failon Kingdom — summoned me on occasions that fell into two kinds. When the palace staff brought me his word, they marked the difference in the name they used.
The first was His Majesty. His Majesty summons you. His Majesty is looking for you. Then we met as the king of a nation and his princess. Sometimes a minister or a palace servant sat in with us, and sometimes it became a three-sided audience with a spokesman sent up from the parliament. Mostly, we spoke of official business.
The second was, precisely, your father. Not king and princess, but a private word between a father and his daughter. The place changed with it. Not the formal audience chamber — a small, modest room set aside inside the palace. Far less ceremony. Even if a third person was there, they were family and nothing else. A servant almost never stayed.
"...All right. I'll be out in a moment."
"Understood. I shall wait beyond the door. Please tell me when you are ready."
I watched her close the door and go, and muttered to myself.
What does he want me for.
I turned it over while I changed, taking my time.
The war was over. The kingdom was slowly washing the afterpoison of it out of itself and trying to come back to ordinary days, and I had heard the parliament was deep in lively argument over postwar policy and what was to be done. Word was that the upper and lower houses were not so far apart, for once. Odd, from people whose entire occupation had been fighting each other day in and day out.
Ah. Don't tell me.
Maybe a marriage proposal had come down from the Empire.
In the original, Evangeline had already been betrothed to the Empire's third prince at eleven. What was his name. Oscar Valentine, was it? The memory was hazy. I had met him once in the two years I spent bracing for war, right after I possessed this body, and there had been nothing there. No spark at all. A man's mind in a woman's body might have had something to do with it.
In any case, I was never going to spread my legs in front of that man because I actually wanted to. Not if it killed me.
Even so, if Father had truly called me over a marriage talk this time, I would have no excuse to refuse. I would simply have to take it. To put it bluntly, these four years had shown me every sight a person ought to see and every sight they ought not to. Opening my legs now — how much could that even matter.
I finished changing and set my hand on the knob. It bent of its own accord, and the door swung open.
What. I had not even put any strength into it.
"...I was waiting. Had you called, I would have opened it for you."
She must have been standing by the whole time with her hand already on the knob. A maid's work really was an extreme profession.
On the way to the private room where Father was waiting, she spoke, low.
"...Your Highness. Have you, by any chance, brought in another new freshener?"
How did she know. I had gone out of my way to procure one that was not supposed to show at all.
"I would advise against fresheners with too strong a scent. They can ruin the nose."
She had opened in a weighty tone, and yet she gave only that brief caution and said nothing more. It left me oddly wrong-footed. I could not pretend I failed to understand.
Right after the war ended, there had been a time I flew into a goddamn fit, insisting my room smelled of blood. In the end Sir Scabbard had to come himself and put me down by force.
I never thought coming to this world would leave me with a memory worth kicking the blankets over.
Even so... I could still smell it.
"Your Highness. We have arrived."
Before a door set in a corner of the palace, the maid turned toward me and bent slowly at the waist.
"His Majesty is waiting within."
"You're here? I was waiting."
Father welcomed me with the formality gone from his voice.
"...Hello."
I ducked my head just as awkwardly, then lowered myself onto the chair in a half-crouch. Awkward. Four years of dropping onto roads, onto stones, onto chairs had made a habit of it.
"Sit comfortably."
He glanced at me as I folded my legs in tight, and smiled.
"The reason I called you today is nothing other than..."
"Is it the betrothal?"
"Hm?"
He asked it back as if he had no idea what I meant. Caught by a reaction I had not expected, I floundered.
"Ah, well. I'm of age now, and — what's-his-name. I thought you'd called me because a marriage talk had come up with the Empire's third prince..."
"No, no. Nothing of the sort."
"...It wasn't."
Father shook his head, smiling, and quietly set the teacup in his hand down on the table.
"In the parliament, there has been talk. Of sending you to the Academy."
"...The Academy?"
For a moment I wondered whether we even had such a thing. Father went on.
"Thirty years ago, a peace accord was signed among the four nations that quarter this continent. You remember."
"Ah..."
"At that time, as a symbol of the peace between them, they built an academy inside the Inviolable Territory at the center of the continent."
They named that place of learning Polaris Academy. A symbol of peace, and the guiding star — Polaris — meant to lead the next generation of humanity.
"A request has come from that Polaris Academy. They wish to invite you as a special student."
"From Polaris Academy? To our kingdom?"
I asked it back, startled.
Polaris Academy had been founded jointly by the four nations, and yet it belonged to none of them — a completely neutral ground. For a place like that to officially invite a dignitary of any one nation was the sort of matter that could, handled poorly, swell into a diplomatic incident.
"You needn't worry on that account."
But Father only shook his head, smiling.
"You are, shall we say, Failon's — no. The hero who kept the fangs of the Demon King's Army off all of humanity. Not our kingdom alone. The whole continent has its eyes on you."
"...R-right. I see."
In other words, they meant to admit me specially not as the hero of the Failon Kingdom, but as the hero of all humankind. Put that way, there would be no problem. On paper, at least.
Father smiled, and added one thing more.
"And if you — as good as a symbol of Failon — are seen getting on at the Academy without trouble, we can show the other nations that our kingdom still stands."
"I see."
"The parliament recommended you enter the faculty of military studies. That way, they said, you could make the most of the name of war hero."
Listening, I thought it over. After everything I had been through, I had never imagined I would be sent to an academy. As I recalled, though, Polaris took its students at seventeen, and I was eighteen. I was turning over whether my age might raise some belated trouble when Father spoke again.
"...Everything up to here is what I tell you as the king of a nation."
I had nothing to say to that.
For a long while he fidgeted with the blameless teacup. Then he looked at me.
"...Eva."
Eva was a pet name for Evangeline. Here, where nearly everyone called me Princess, it was a name only Father and my mothers were permitted to use.
"It's far too late to be saying a thing like this. Even so, I... I want you to be able to rest now."
The fingers closed around the handle of the teacup were quivering.
"You don't have to listen to those fellows in the parliament. You don't have to go into military studies. Literature would be fine. Philosophy would be fine. The arts would be fine. Science would be fine... Learn whatever it is you want to learn..."
Each time he opened his mouth, the tail of the sentence trembled a little more and went thin.
"Like the other children your age. Like any other young people... Go to school. Make friends. Skip a class now and then. Play together..."
I could not answer him.
"Haven't you done enough? Born a princess of this nation — the price of everything you would receive from it across a whole lifetime — haven't you paid that price in full, these four years?"
Father's head sank, slowly. His voice, thick as if something had stopped his throat, began to stumble and come apart.
Karl Failond never managed to finish.