The Silver Princess needed more than the freezing temperatures of her native heights. She needed the magnetic fields that ran through the Elucian rock to feed on.
Professor Haldren's monograph had been right about everything. Up on the ledge, I'd watched her copper-bright filaments weave through the stone along the magnetic lines, using them the way a vine used a trellis. I'd measured the fieldstrength up there with my instruments and felt the readings climb the higher we'd gone.
I thought I could compensate with artificial magnetism, but I wasn't fooling the Princess. It wasn't the same.
I could chill her. I couldn't magnetize her, not with a field strong enough to feed a plant that had evolved at thirteen hundred meters on a mineral-veined slope.
"What's the matter?" Gavon asked. "Why are you frowning again?"
I sighed and turned to him. "Survival isn't the same as health. She needs the magnetism, and I can't give it to her. She may never bloom again, and she certainly won't set seed. I can't propagate her. One specimen teaches me almost nothing. To study her properly, to breed a hardier strain, to actually derive anything from her, I'd need her in situ. On the slopes where she grows. Across the border."
The words sat in the cold morning air between us.
Across the border meant Elucia. It meant another expedition into the range that had already swallowed Moran and Voser and very nearly Gavon, and I had sworn that I would never again make a decision that put other people's lives in my hands on that mountain.
I'd meant it.
I shelved the thought, but it refused to cool all the way. Some ember of it kept its heat at the back of my mind, a pull I couldn't reason away toward a place that had cost me far too much but held the only thing that could complete my work.
"You know that you can't go back there. Just keep her for decoration, living in that box and glowing faintly, like a very expensive nightlight."
"Your Highness." Ursa walked outside, curtsied to me, and cast a haughty look down her nose at Gavon. "You asked me to remind you about the fitting."
"Oh, yes. The fitting." I rose to my feet. "I wish I could forget."
It was the third one this week.
"You need to wash up beforehand, Your Highness."
"Yes." I turned to Gavon. "Do you want to go inside or are you going to stay out here?"
"I'll stay." He sighed dramatically and pulled the pen from where he'd tucked it behind his ear. "I'll stay out here and continue working on my script."
"Good luck," I said as I followed Ursa inside.
She closed the glass doors behind us and snorted. "He doesn't need luck. It is I who needs it to fix those deformed feet of yours, Your Highness."
"My feet are not deformed."
"Whatever you say, Your Highness."
In the bathroom, Ursa had prepared a soaking station, with one bowl on the floor next to a chair and another one on a side table next to it. Both contained warm water and an assortment of oils intended to soften my calluses. She wedged my feet in the basin while I dipped my hands in the bowl on the table.
After some vigorous scrubbing, starting with my hands and moving to my feet, she uttered another long-suffering sigh. "It's as good as it's going to get for today, but I'm not giving up." She pulled my feet out of the basin and patted them dry. "By the time I dress you for the ball, your hands and feet will be callus-free."
All washed up and wearing a dress for a change, I arrived at the fitting room, which occupied a long gallery lined with mirrors. Bolts of fabric stood propped along one wall, an assortment of sky blues and silvers, the colors of the royal court of Tarina.
We would all wear variations of them to the Catonian ball. My mother in deep slate-blue and old silver, Cardilia in something paler and more luminous as befits the heir, Lotian ina coat the color of a winter sky, and me in whatever my mother and sister decided would look good on me.
I didn't care.
I stood on the dais while the seamstress circled me with a mouth full of pins, and I tried to hold still.
"If you shift your weight one more time," the woman said around the pins, "I will draw blood, Your Highness, and it will be your own fault."
"Then we'll match the silver with red," I said. "Very striking."
"Idrilia." My mother's voice came from the chaise where she presided over the fitting. "Please act as the adult you are. You endured the mountains of Elucia, you can endure a fitting for a gown."
