Order and Chaos

Dream of icy volcanos

"I went back through the mountains to Cordonia, but the dream sort of broke down into incoherence after that. There a volcano that erupted, but because the mountain was so cold my brain figured it should be deadly ice magma, somehow. It was really as if my dream got disinterested in itself once the meaty question of my conduct as royalty was disposed of."

Already, the memory of what had happened was fading as I woke. It was interesting that my recurrent dream tormentor from my childhood — Sir Nose, the subliminal seducer, the Boogieman — returned, only to be vanquished, perhaps once and for all, by my making the ultimate sacrifice as queen. I set down my calligraphy pen and closed my dream journal. It was time for the day to begin.

My servant entered the room ringing a small bell, punctual as always. "Your Highness, if you are finished with your dream journal, it is time to get ready for the day to come," he said.

"Yes, thank you Edward." I said. The next hour or so was spent being bathed (which is fine because Edward is blind and he does it with a long stick;) then applying the first layer of underclothes; then applying my make-up (besides the nose and nails;) then the elaborate, gaudy second layer of overclothes (which took the longest and was protested the whole time, as elaborated above;) taming my hair (which took nearly as long;) and finally, applying the paint to my nose and fingernails.

Immediately, to "wake the body," it was off to the first class of the day, which was just murder. My battle instructor, an old (and I mean OLD) friend of my father's, had strung up a man on a stake, one arm raised and the other at his side, with a bag over his head and a full suit of armor over that.

"Now, today I want you to go for the shoulders," she said, handing me my sword. I sighed and set to work. Once I had literally disarmed the man, by sliding the sword in between the joints of his armor, his arm loosely flopped off his shoulder, hanging by the skin, which I had to awkwardly slice off in multiple clumsy hacks until he stopped screaming and convulsing. "Good," she said, "or at least, good enough. You don't have the strength to cut through the whole arm in one fell swoop yet, but he couldn't very well have counterattacked in that condition. But you did leave yourself open when you swung, and he could have got you then! You must work on that."

The next classes, to "wake the mind," were under a different tutor. First up was politics and military tactics.

"I think," I told him, "I want to be a more peaceful queen."

He laughed once. "You don't have the chance. All of the territory your father conquered is kept in line only by their personal fear of him, not on his virtue or allegiances. As soon as he kicks the bucket and all their eyes fall on you, they will all be asking themselves, is she made of the same stuff as her father? Does she have what it takes? What can I get away with? They'll have to test you. Revolts will spring up like wildfires across the whole kingdom, and your brother and gods don't even know who else will most definitely try to kill you to take your throne.

"The world runs on blood. Your father only got where he was by spilling the most blood, and you're only here because of your blood relation. Your power might be absolute, but only so long as you keep the blood flowing. Next you'll be telling me you want to marry for love. Now, today you're going to continue to learn the value of a calvary..."

The same man was responsible for my class on poise and manners.

"I thought you said you wanted to be loved?" he taunted me. "How could they love a queen who can't dance?" I had to learn twice the dances, following as a princess and leading as a queen.

Language. That meant penwomanship, enunciation, vocabulary, rhetoric (of which he considered himself a master — see the above), grammar, and occasionally even literature.

I handed him my dream journal, my homework. "What do you think it means?" I asked as he flipped through it.

"What does it mean?" he said. "It means your handwriting and sentence construction is immaculate. Dreams are junk. I want you to write this stuff in Tilish from now on. And don't use made-up words like 'radiator' or 'robot.'"

After that, he took a break for food, and I was sent back off to the battle tutor for horseriding. I didn't get a break, because my mother had stopped allowing me food during the day because I was too chubby. It made me so hungry, I considered eating the horse I was riding.

We would run off into the wilderness, and my tutor would teach me how to "rough it" and survive off the land, make fires, tie knots, as I might have to do in an emergency.

After that was technically archery, but I was not strong enough to arm the bow for distance. My tutor put it delicately:

"Oh, we don't have enough arrows again," she lied, handing me an ax. "Go chop down a tree into splinters and run each one around the castle once to test their aerodynamics." Did I mention that I didn't get to change out of my cumbersome, heavily-layered princess costume for any of this?

Now exhausted and half-starved, I returned to the other tutor and was expected to keep up with advanced mathematics; religion, which was just rote memorization of the thousands and thousands of gods and their idiosyncrasies; history; and then a ludicrously labyrinthine law code, which, it was acknowledged, would not apply to me in any way, besides that I would be trusted to apply it.

My day was not even close to over. While everyone else in the castle had another food break, I was sent to the royal library to read. Everything. Fiction, non-fiction, almanacs, the news, ancient scrolls. It was the longest stretch of the day — though it was practically self-supervised, except for the guards that stood over me the whole time, making sure I was always reading, not trying to escape or sleep. I arranged to have some of them sneak in food for me, but not others, and I never knew who would be my guards for the day. Today, I was not lucky.

My mother would fetch me. My mother, the queen-consort, had been the queen-consort of the previous regime before Malcolm Vindictus, the one that had sired my older brother. My political tutor tried to insist that this was a shrewd political move by the king to garner goodwill and an illusion of regime consistency — indeed, my mother had managed to keep everyone on the court who hadn't already been slaughtered, and much of the bureaucracy and general society of the country, by the grace of Malcolm's disinterest in all but war. I had a suspicion, though, that it was more like Malcolm thought that he had simply inherited the king's wife by having murdered him, and the queen-consort was eager to play along, unaccustomed to life outside queendom.

She very badly wanted to be helpful to me and ensure that I would lead the country well after the king's passing. She took it upon herself, personally, to teach "queenly duties," which she didn't quite realize were very different for a consort and monarch, even if they were both queens. For example, the first thing was sewing, which I can't imagine I'd have to do myself as queen. Then we'd take those same needles and go do some surgery, then I'd have to clean a room of the castle until it was spotless, then I'd practice the proper ways to blink and wink (which my manners instructor could never hope to capture, according to her) for half an hour straight, then she'd teach me rules and strategies for all the games that might be played among nobility, all of which were taken far too seriously to allow for fun in the playing, then she'd teach me how to play various instruments and about music history and names I simply must know and have an opinion on to not look the fool and the strict, strict, strict rules of composing, then it was time to paint, and not just my nose and nails, but on canvas, then I would have to practice holding my breath underwater for as long as I could — a vital skill for a queen-consort, it goes without saying, and one that my mother could perform for 31 minutes on end, and inversion of my paltry 13, and then, finally, we'd cook ever-more-elaborate dishes that nobody was allowed to so much as taste, which was essentially torture for someone who hadn't eaten since they woke up, what, 41 hours ago?

Almost all of these subjects were completely useless, but arguably, I learned more about how to practically operate as a monarch in this period of the long day than any other, since lessons were constantly interrupted by her attending to pressing business, since, in the absence of a king who gave a shit, it was down to her to wheel and deal and bail out sinking ships and negotiate and glad-hand and generally keep the kingdom operating, while I was sitting right beside her, watching.

After all of that, Edward would regroom me from scratch, and put me in a third set of overclothes, somehow even fancier than the last.

At last, it was time for a grand dinner, with the whole castle in attendance — including me! Somehow, I was expected to be the one to start eating last, even though I am served first, before the king (if he is present) then my mother and brother, and then also to eat small portions, very slowly, when I did get to start. It was always the height of rudeness to ask for seconds, and my mother would kick me under the table for it, but I couldn't let that stop me.

After that, my time was nominally my own to do with as I pleased. Though I would usually use the time to get a few hours of sleep before the 2-day-long-day began all over again, I was to turn 20 in 7 weeks, and on that same day I would be wed, as is culturally mandatory. I was free to provide my own spouse, but if I didn't, one would be provided to me by my parents. (My mother had mentioned that she had one set up already, but kept who it was secret.) If I wanted to try and find one for myself, it would be wise to start sooner rather than later, perhaps by schmoozing at the post-dinner dance, or perhaps by pouring over the country's national and international political situation and arranging a marriage that would bring in a beneficial alliance. Or I could sneak off from everyone's view and go swim in the moat like I've always wanted to. Or just go to bed, because I still have 7 whole weeks. What should I do?