The Stars and Green Magics [Sapphic and Nonbinary Epic Space Fantasy]

S1: The Truthspoken Heir - Chapter 24: The Truthspoken Heir

"There are ten rulers for every dynasty, ten chances for a dynasty to rise to glory or ride out history as an immense failure. We've yet to see a dynasty that did not, overall, rise to glory. And our Twelfth Dynasty, I dare say, has been the most glorious of all!"

--Lord Mynin Jadiar, from The Collected Speeches of the General Assembly, Fourth Edition

Dressa sat back, her whole body feeling shaky, wrung out. Ceorre would do it. If she gave her all for just those few moments, when Ceorre would need to confirm that she was, in fact, Arianna and telling the truth, and not under coercion, Ceorre would do it.

Dressa could do that, too. Be Arianna in truth. She could fully, fully be Arianna for those few moments, and then never again.

Dressa reached for a light healing trance to calm her body's responses, but it only soothed some of the pieces, not the whole of it.

None of this was fair. It wasn't fair to Ari, certainly, but then, it wasn't fair to Dressa. Why should her father punish her when it was Ari who was sick?

No, that also wasn't fair. It wasn't Ari's fault, and she didn't know who to blame, and that was part of the problem. Why should Ari have to lose her position through no fault of her own? Why should Dressa have to be the Heir, when that was the very last thing she'd ever wanted?

Was this the right choice? Couldn't she just hold out for a few weeks or months, be Arianna, and then resume her life? But what life, after those few months, would she have to resume? She couldn't make it that long. And Ceorre's arguments that Ari might not get better, or might always have a weakness for the nobility to exploit, were valid. Her father had also maneuvered hard for the marriage contract with the Javieris—it was vital that contract be signed.

She couldn't marry Lesander as Arianna. Absolutely did not want that union to be poisoned from the start. She'd seen the results of a sour marriage with her parents and would never do that to Lesander if she could help it. So none of this was fair to Lesander, either. Adeius, where did the unfairness end?

She pressed her hands to her lips, holding in the tension, trying to think. She had thought of this before, in her prep room—no, Ari's prep room—no, it would be her prep room anyway if she became the Heir, wouldn't it? That was always the Heir's apartment. And she'd thought of it on the way to the Adeium, and she'd made her decisions, but Ceorre had given her information she hadn't had before. But was there truly enough time to think it all through? This was the rest of her life. This was the future of the kingdom, and if she was going to do this, she'd have to do it now before her father could stop her.

What if Ari did recover? She'd come back to a life that no longer existed.

And what of Dressa, as the Heir? She would assume all of Ari's duties, and she'd have to take up her Truthspoken training again in earnest. Her father had let her training lapse these last few years—given up on her as a useful Truthspoken, she'd thought, and that didn't speak well for any of this.

She would, one day, rule the kingdom. She'd been trying not to think about that part of it, she'd set it aside as a problem that had years left to be solved. But here, in Ceorre's office, she couldn't ignore it. No matter what she'd said about this being temporary . . . she'd known it wasn't. Could she do that? Could she rule the Kingdom of Valoris and its one hundred and eighty-seven worlds, and all their various nobles and people and . . . everything?

Adeius, how did she possibly think she could do that?

Did she have a choice? If the only other choice was to traumatize herself so much she couldn't function, and the only other choice for the kingdom was to have an Heir and ruler who had a vital weak point their enemies could exploit, and the only other choice was to break or poison an engagement contract with the person who would be half of the next generation of Truthspoken—no, she didn't have a choice.