Page 70 of Falling Princess

“What you need is a wig,” I giggled, to no one.

Lucky me—a fabric-covered head form, which my maid uses to practice styling my hair, sat on my vanity, still sporting the elaborate design she planned for the Midsummer festival. I affixed it to the center of the two legs, replaced the white gown, and howled with laughter as the absurd thing marched aimlessly around.

“I ought to send you up to the Sky Shrine in my place. I doubt the goddess would notice any difference.”

I chortled at my own joke. My father hasn’t mentioned the dreaded journey since I arrived home, and I won’t be the one prompting him to remember. Every year, I have to go into the horrid freezing pond and freeze my tits off, wearing little more than a nightdress. I have no idea how my mother did it. She swore the water was warm, but it never has been for me. Not once.

The last time I went, right before we left for the Olympics, my father was so disgusted with my poor performance that he vowed never to accompany me again.

“Your mother used to spend hours there, praying. You barely lasted twenty minutes,” he raged.

Yes, because it’sfucking freezingup there.

As lonely as I am here, I’d much rather be messing around with machinery than tossed into a coach, driven up into the Mountain District, and dunked into an icy pond.

Unwisely, I sent my heinous, hilarious video to Raina via satellite phone. Then, wanting to share my joy, with Sas and Cata.

Saskaya was the first to respond via text.

A) quit wasting data, Princess. Satellite service plans are pricey and you know it comes out of my technology budget, B) delete that video immediately. You KNOW we can’t risk Skía hacking our systems and finding out about our secret weapons.

I groaned and lay back on the bed. A hard lump beneath my shoulder made me scramble to sit up. “No, no,no!”

Too late. The costumed leg apparatus sped up, crashed into my changing screen, turned, bumbled into my heavy canopied bed, turned again and smashed directly into my freestanding mirror.

“Shit.”

My first-ever audible curse word was swallowed up by the cacophony of wreckage clattering on stone. The legs fell over and continued to churn uselessly. As dismay worked through me, the gown’s skirt caught in the moving metal feet and ripped. Loudly.

Two guards rushed in, followed by my maid, who shrieked at the sight of my shredded gown, the head form rolling drunkenly in a half-circle, and the wig splayed like a dead sea creature on my rug, surrounded by broken glass and the remnants of my crushed three-panel screen.

I sighed. Belatedly, I found the remote control and shut down the aimlessly churning legs.

Since it couldn’t make things any worse, I snapped a photo of the wreckage and texted it back to Sas with a resigned;I doubt I’ll have sat phone access after this.

Saskaya:Gods in garters, WHAT DID YOU DO?

Me:Princess fail. Again.

Saskaya:[facepalm emoji]

Me:Yeah.

* * *

After the rogue robot legs incident, my satellite phone was indeed confiscated, which limited me to paper communications for the remainder of the summer.

Raina sent me a nice letter about how she was applying the lessons of her pre-med studies to Myseci and Covari medical knowledge, filling in gaps and studying field medicine. Useful. The kind of thing I should have been doing.

Everyone in Auralia learns how to stitch and dress a wound, splint a bone, make antiseptic ointments and brew medicinal teas. (Everyone, except me, of course.)

Less from genuine interest than in a transparent bid to get her to write to me again, I asked her for details about her work.

A week later, Raina sent me a long treatise on the basics of how to not die of minor infections, reduce fevers, and not get pregnant if you don’t want to. (Cata and Saskaya had already covered the last one, but it never hurts to review the material.) In a lengthy P.S., she wrote:

I lacked the courage to do it at Midwinter but I swear I’ll kiss Lorcan this summer, as soon as he passes back through River Bend. I need to know whether there’s a future for us. I want there to be so badly. He’s so difficult to read, even when you know him well. I won’t know unless I ask, so I must, even though I risk making things awkward between us.

I wrote back quickly with a stern reminder:You do remember these letters are screened by my father’s secretary, right?

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