The Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald

Author:Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald [Doyle, Debra & Macdonald, James D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780812517040
Publisher: Tor
Published: 1992-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m going to starve, thought Beka, smiling in her best regal manner as she held out a hand for the head of the Ovredisi Bankers’ Guild to kiss. I’ve been living on pink cakes and little pale sandwiches for a solid month. I wonder what they’re feeding the lowlife out back?

She hated these parties. The tight sleeves and fitted bodices of this year’s fashionable gowns left her with no convenient place to hide a knife. The sheath strapped to her upper thigh, just below where the skirt flared outward into a filmy cloud of pale green, gave her some comfort, but not much.

And nowhere to carry a blaster at all … I feel like I’m walking around naked.

She swallowed a laugh. I’m getting as bad as Dadda.

“Is something wrong, Your Highness?”

She shook her head at Marchen Bres. “No, gentlesir. A momentary spasm, only … a hereditary affliction, I’m afraid.” She smiled at him again. “Fortunately it’s not a serious one, though it’s kind of you to ask.”

The banker positively glowed.

Right about now, she thought, if I asked him for a million in cash he’d hand it over and not ask for collateral.

She’d never thought they could carry it off, back when the Professor had laid out his plans on board Crystal World, the tiny but extravagantly appointed pleasure yacht he’d brought out of mothballs for the occasion.

“Sapne?” she’d asked. “Sapne? Professor, nobody is from Sapne. That whole damned planet’s nothing but a bunch of ruins and a few mud huts. The locals wear fur loincloths and trade colored rocks to each other for flat beer. I’ve been there,” she finished. “I know.”

“We will be the Royal House of Sapne-in-Exile,” the Professor repeated. “An off-world branch of the family.”

“It’ll work,” said Jessan. “There’s already two Kings of Sapne and a Sapnish Pretender running around. The way planetary royalty intermarried in the old days back before the Magewar, a Rosselin of Entibor’s probably got as good a claim as anybody else anyhow.”

“You’ll notice the Rosselins never bothered to assert one,” Ari grumbled. They were gathered on Crystal World’s observation deck; like everything else about the little yacht, it was an exquisite miniature, and Beka’s brother had been moving for three days now with exaggerated care, as though he expected to break something the moment he let down his guard. The caution had not improved his temper.

The Professor ignored him. “You, my lady, will be the Princess Berran, and Lieutenant Commander Jessan will be her brother, the Crown Prince Jamil. And Mistress Hyfid, if she agrees, will be Her Highness’s companion-chaperone, the better to further the illusion.”

Llannat looked abstracted—Beka was reminded of somebody trying to remember the date of the last solstice by counting the weeks backward—and then nodded. “I can handle it.”

“Handle what?” Beka asked.

“Keeping us from being recognized,” said the Adept. “The easiest way is with a single wide-range illusion—language, for instance. None of us know Sapnish, but give me some tapes to listen to for a few days and I can manage to convince everybody else that we’re speaking it.

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