The Steam-Powered Princess

THE STEAM-POWERED PRINCESS

by Aimee Ogden

When the steam-powered princess was born, she did not cry out in terror of the new world like a normal infant should have done. Instead, she opened her tiny mouth, and out came a puff of vapour that scalded her poor doctor's nose. Then she closed her mouth, and her sky-grey eyes as well. And only because a nurse opened the little door in the princess's belly and peered inside was it discovered that the newborn girl contained an engine.

Now the nurse was no technomancer, but she could clearly see the scanty mist left in the wee girl's water tank and she knew what must be done. One of the royal attendants ran to fetch a pot of boiling water from the fire. Together they crammed a funnel into the baby's mouth and poured hot water down her tiny throat while the queen screamed.

The baby opened her eyes, smiled very prettily and belched grey smoke and white steam. She quickly grew too hot for anyone to hold, even for a very determined attendant, and so she was carefully swaddled inside one of the castle cook's enormous oven mitts. The peacefully sleeping babe was presented to her mother, who wept and sweated and placed one tiny kiss on her new baby's scorching-hot brow. But she burnt her lips rather badly, and perhaps that was why she never tried again.

•••

[You know this story. Once upon a time, there was a princess. She is a friend to creatures great and small, and though she may be lost, she is always found. She learns, she grows, her heart finds a place to rest safe and quiet. You know this story, and it knows you. Does it sound strange, turned back on you this way?]

•••

The king and queen had wanted a child very badly, as kings and queens and many others often do. But because they have read the same stories that you and I have, they did not write to Her Royal Wit who lived at the far end of the long river to Fairyland, nor did they seek out cabbage from the garden of a local witch. Instead, they bought the services of a particular wizard at court. His workshop was littered with unfinished creations, dead things that lay upon tables with glass eyes half-closed and metal limbs a-tangle. He promised that he could grant their hearts’ desires in exchange for a certain spark of life, one that only the dark secret places in the queen's body might provide. Of course, a wizard will promise you a kiss from the face of the moon if it will get him what he wants.

So the wizard slipped an iron ring onto the queen's finger, and he painted runes—he called them diagrams—on the walls of her bedchamber in metal smelling grease. The king's eyes clouded with thought as his wife's belly swelled. And when at last the princess was born, the wizard was draped with honour and riches. But a king's gratitude can be as fickle as a wizard's promises. Even as Anathenia’s father stood in front of a cheering crowd to place a medallion about the wizard’s neck, his soldiers were destroying the arcane workshop upon his orders. All the wizard's writings on technomancy were burned, and all those too in the university library and the Institute of Thaumaturgy and anywhere else the king's soldiers could find them.

As for the wizard himself, the king ordered the Lord High Sorcerer to bind his lips and exile him to the other side of the world, where there is magic but it is all upside down and backwards from what we know. But the wizard disappeared before the High Sorcerer could practice his fearsome art, and it is not impossible that he had some help from others of his kind, perhaps even from the High Sorcerer himself. A king's promise to one wizard, once broken, casts his good word in shadow thereafter.

•••

[This is a story. We tell it when others stray from the ways that are known: as a warning to them, as a reassurance to ourselves. This is a story and we all know how it ends. This is a story and it's too late to change how it began.]

•••

The princess was christened Anathenia, and she grew up quickly, in the way that little children do. Unlike other children, though, she did not simply blossom upward. Rather, new rings grew out of the iron joints at her shoulders, elbows, and knees to lengthen her arms and legs; seams widened and sprouted bolts at her waist and hips. And unlike other children, she did not grow strong on green spinach and the crusts of sandwiches, but on coal and sawdust and all manner of chemical concoctions devised by the royal chemists.

Anathenia's smogs and vapours made her royal parents cough terribly, and they begged of her to control her emissions. She wanted very badly to obey them, as mechanical princesses are by their nature very much inclined to obedience. But it was only with the assistance of her father's talented chemists that she was able to comply. We cannot change our nature through mere obedience, after all.

Still, she had birthdays and crowns and gold-embroidered dresses, as princesses are accustomed to having. And she grew older and wiser, until she was old enough and wise enough to recognize an awful fact: that her parents might have been better satisfied with a daughter whose belly concealed a tangle of veins and grey glistening intestines than with one who had a glass water tank and six churning pistons. They were not unkind to her but they were distant, for it is hard to hold a hand that will scald you—even if that hand is small and dimpled, and even if you wished very hard to hold it in the first place.

She had no other siblings, and the servants' children did not linger to play with her when they appeared to deliver clean laundry or a bolt of fabric. When Anathenia was nine years old, she told her parents over supper that she would like to have a younger sibling. Her mother half-choked on her meal, and her father grew very red in the face, and when the queen had recovered, they both told Anathenia to go to her room. She lay atop her bedspread—leather blocking sewn together with steel thread—and stared at the ceiling and wondered if she had said something very rude, or something very true. Very rude things and very true things can be difficult to tell apart sometimes.

Anathenia read the storybooks, the same ones that you and I have read. They were full of princesses, though none of them ate coal or breathed smoke. Breathing smoke was something dragons did, not princesses. Some of the girls in the storybooks had no mother or father, while some had wicked ones. But none of them had soft, withdrawn parents who looked thoughtfully at them and then glanced away.

Anathenia read the stories, and each one left her feeling more alone than the last.

•••

[This is not a story about true love, the storybook kind, the forever kind. This is a story about true love, the difficult kind. The kind of love that shares your shape but that goes wandering nonetheless and must be carried home kicking and fighting all the way. This is a story about true love, the kind that is as close as the face in the mirror and just as hard to touch. Keep reaching for it, though. Keep reaching.]

•••

When she was sixteen years old, Anathenia went about solving her problems in the way common to girls in her position. Royal couriers took down the message she dictated, and they carried it out to all parts of the kingdom: that the Princess Anathenia sought a knight to complete a quest on her behalf. Her parents' curious gazes hung heavy on her at the supper table, but they did not ask her about the quest and she did not tell them, in case that would rob the simple magic of its power. Princesses in storybooks sat in their towers alone, without their parents' hands on their shoulders to guide them.

The first knight to come and bend his knee wore plate mail that shone in the sunlight, even as it showed the subtle scratches from the polish he had used to buff out its scrapes and dings. When he took off his helmet, its silky feathers tickled the peach-fuzz on the underside of his chin as he asked how he could serve her royal highness. 

"I would like to be happy," she said. The princesses in her stories might struggle and suffer, but they always ended up happy. Anathenia had not been happy—or successful—when she tried spinning straw into gold. She had not been happy after stealing a secret kiss from the baker's boy and neither had he, even though she had been careful to do it only after taking a long coolant bath. And so she asked to understand happiness, and the knight saluted her with his sword, and went off into the world to find a way to make it so. 

For half a year Anathenia waited for her knight to return. It was not so bad—she had been waiting her whole life—and at least now she had a hope upon which to hang that waiting.

When the knight finally returned, there were dents in his armour and the feathers in his helmet were bedraggled and torn. His beard had come in thick and red, but it parted when he smiled, and offered up to her on his open palms three apples plucked from the Tree of Joy which grew at the top of the highest mountain in all the world. Apples did not burn quite so well as dry sawdust or kindling, but they did burn, and she ate them while he eagerly watched. 

And when the last pip was gone, he said, "Now you know how to be happy." 

She smiled and agreed, because a mechanical girl by her nature is too obedient for her own good. (This is true of many girls, but mechanical girls have it even worse than most.) He bowed and thanked her for her favour, because he did not know that what he brought her was not happiness but an opportunity to practice deceit. The princess wondered if all stories were written by knights.

The trickiest part of learning to feign happiness is that it is difficult to know when to stop, or how. But the worst part was that the king and queen accepted her rigid smiles as if they were earnest.  They praised her cheerfulness at supper, though she did not utter a word more between mouthfuls of her chemical soup than she had before. And when she thought that happiness was not the lot of steam-powered girls, she did not raise the subject with them and they did not think to ask it.

She still did not know how to be happy and now could not ask anyone else. Perhaps, she thought, what she needed was to find a way to accept the space in life that had been allotted to her. Again she dispatched a message through the royal couriers, and again, a knight came in answer. This knight's hair had long since frosted grey, and her skin was as weathered and lined as the leather armour she wore. But she bent her knee anyway and asked how she could serve. 

"I would like to learn how to be at peace," the princess said. 

The princesses in the stories were always content, whether they were trapped in the underworld all winter long or stuck at the top of a dragon's tower until a prince rescued them. There were books on contentment, but when Anathenia tried their calming breathing exercises, the flames in her belly guttered for want of fuel, and she found herself gulping air desperately down. Perhaps somewhere out there was a way that a steam-powered girl could find some peace? The knight swore it would be so.

For a year Anathenia waited. She spent so much time gazing out the castle's windows that they grew terribly scraped by the joints in her fingers where she had wiped the condensed steam away for a clearer view.

When the knight finally returned, she had a scar on one cheek, but she held her head high. She smiled and offered up to the princess on her open palms a crystal vial full of clear sparkling water brought from the secret pool beneath the bottom of the world, which was guarded by a dragon with skin of magma and teeth of obsidian. One sip of that water was rumoured to wash clean all regrets and unease. The princess took a sip, but felt nothing, so she drained the rest. The fragrant water splashed into the tank in her belly, but still she felt nothing. 

The knight said, "Now you will never feel discontent again." 

Anathenia smiled and lifted her chin, and thanked the knight. She had not learned how to be content, but she had learned not to stare wistfully out of windows.

Princess Anathenia was seventeen years old now and her parents had begun to seek out suitors from lands near and far. She did not particularly want to be married to a prince or a princess, a duke or an earl, nor a count or a countess, but her opinion in the matter had not been requested.  She was, after all, a mechanical girl. The king and queen received and entertained many a noble supplicant, while their daughter sat between their thrones and tried not to belch too much smoke. Some of the prospective spouses gawked when white steam left Anathenia's mouth along with her words of polite greeting.  Some only stared at the floor at her feet, their shoulders slumped and their mouths pulled downward. They were no more content with the prospect of marrying a steam-powered princess than she was with being one, and they had not had seventeen years to get used to the idea.

Anathenia did not want to marry one of these strangers whose faces crumpled with disdain or despair, did not want to fill a cramped little life with steam and smoke and have to share that space with an unwilling companion. She endured being put on display for disappointed young royalty for three hours here, a morning there. But the idea of a lifetime of frowns and stares and whispers behind fingers overwhelmed her. She sent out the couriers once more, seeking knights brave and true for a final quest on her behalf.

The knight who arrived had a grey beard that caught in the collar of his armour, but his plate mail shone so brightly it might have been brand new, never before challenged by sword-point or lion claw. There were lines around his eyes and white in his hair. He met her at the window over her private gardens, and when he bent his knee she told him what she most desired. 

"I would like to know how be brave," she said, and he lifted his face toward her.

"But how can you learn to be brave," he said, "behind stone walls and behind your father's swordsmen?" And he held out both open palms, empty though they were. "If you would be brave, come with me now."

The princess looked over her shoulder at the trappings of the castle, her home for all her seventeen years. A cool draft ruffled the tapestries on the walls; in the hall outside, a guard's boot scraped the stones. She wanted, suddenly and intensely, to know what lay beyond. Anathenia put her bare hands in the knight's gloved ones, and stepped down out of the window, and together they strode across the palace grounds. When they reached the palace wall, the knight waved one hand, and the bricks rearranged themselves into a staircase that carried him and Anathenia up and over.

They walked very far, out of the city and into the hills, to a workshop in the woods where the knight took off his helmet, and smiled, and told her she was a very brave lass indeed.

Then he locked the door behind them, and cracked her metal torso open like a walnut shell.

•••

[You know this story too. O God, O God, how many of us have written our blood onto these pages?]

•••

He took apart her legs first to inspect all the pistons and flywheels that once had let her climb tower stairs and dance quadrilles, and he spread these pieces of her on his tables. Next he took her arms that she had used to turn the pages of books and sip exothermic potions from her mother's favorite teacups. And worst of all he thanked her, thanked her, for the chance to study the nature of physics and engineering, and technomancy, which her parents the king and queen had banned seventeen years before. 

One day he let her water tank run nearly dry, then poured ice water down her throat, so that she guttered and gasped and her phantom limbs jerked and the pistons in her belly spasmed and shuddered until the water came a-boil once more. Another time, he crammed her so full of red-hot coals that she felt about to burst apart—though, of course, with the front of her belly already prised off, she had no danger of that.  While the false knight slept or ate,she thought that she had wasted her quests on foolish dreams. There was no happiness to be had here, dissected like a festival goose, and no one could dream of being content in such a state. And she thought that she could be brave now, brave enough to break the false knight's bones and scream boiling anger into his face, and she would not have needed anyone's help to figure out how—except that now she had neither legs nor strength to stand on.

 Soon, while he worked, the false knight was not content to merely tinker with her innards. He uttered words that sounded like the turning of rusty gears and drew runes on eggs of all sizes and colours. He placed an iron collar about the neck of a female lion, whose belly grew distended even as she grew thin and sickly where she lay chained to the wall. New shapes took the places of the eggs, runes, and even the lion. And terrible shapes they were. There was a dragon, and a manticore, and a harpy. For a time there was a hydra too, until the false knight took him apart to reuse the coils, tanks, and gears inside, and cursed him out as a waste of parts and space. 

These dire creatures crawled, but they did not walk; they shuddered, but they did not fly. They breathed, and rasped, but they did not speak, and the princess was not sure they were meant to. Whether the false knight's artifice was not up to the task, or whether there were secrets still hidden inside the princess that she hoped he would not yet search for in the space behind her eyes ... it did not matter why they were the way they were, strange and twisted and ugly. The workshop grew hot and humid, and the false knight kept shorter hours. The creatures' metal bellies scratched the bottoms of their cages while he slept, and Anathenia turned her face away, until the scratching stopped.

Then one night, when the moon hung small and frightened in the sky outside, the scratching gave way to a sharp metal sound: two rough seams rubbed together. Anathenia awoke in a cringe of fear, and met the dragon's polished glass gaze straight on. He was, she realized, keening—in the only way afforded to him. She moved one shoulder toward him, but of course she had no fingers to stretch, no hand to lay along the jagged lines of his snout. 

"I'm sorry that you were made for this," she said, "and all because of me." 

And the dragon keened again, and the manticore joined in chorus, and the false knight bellowed down the workshop stairs for them all to be silent so he might sleep, or worse than the hydra's fate would be waiting for them come the morning. So the beasts lay still and silent in their cages, all except for the harpy, whose clawed feet tapped, tapped, tapped against the floor.

Over time, the false knight grew more adept at crafting limbs and forging joints. Anathenia's companions moved with more grace, though they still could not be called graceful. And the princess still lay helpless and broken upon a tabletop, while the dragon's yellow eyes fixed on her as a screwdriver dug into his innards, while the harpy's sharp teeth clanged and clacked against her own fingers. When the lights went out and the scratching in the cages started, Anathenia sang them songs, if she had the steam in her tank to allow her. She sang quietly enough that the false knight would not—she hoped—overhear and punish them. Songs of hope. Of patience. Those were things she had learned all on her own, without a questing knight to bring its empty reflection back for her. Patience was a sort of bravery in its own way, too. And Anathenia waited.

And so when the false knight fitted her with one arm, just one arm, to examine once more the particulars of a fully functional shoulder joint, Anathenia made herself very patient, to wait until he tipped her onto the floor to heft the manticore onto the examination table instead. She made herself very strong, to drag herself quietly along with only the one hand. And she made herself very brave, to dig her fingers deep into the sack of saltpeter that lay upon a low shelf, and to pour it into her open maw, mouthful after mouthful.

She belched grey smoke before she felt the heat inside her, and she screamed as her open belly blazed purple-red. But no: there was no time to sit and suffer. Suffering has never saved anyone, not all on its own. She dragged herself across the room on her good hand to where the false knight cowered. He put his hands up to stop her, his technomancy sputtering and dying in his mouth as his palms hissed against the skin of her face. When she put her hand on his throat, the smell of scorched flesh seared the air.

She held on very tightly, for as long as she could, though she thought her water tank was melting, and though she thought the fury in her belly might burn her clean through. She held on until the job was done because, after all, she was a very patient girl. But finally the saltpeter burnt itself out, and Anathenia's fingers slackened. She fell to the floor beside the false knight. He would sally forth on no more quests. Anathenia thought she might have liked to try her own quest one day, but with the saltpeter flames dying inside her, she resigned herself to share the false knight's fate.

A brush of motion caught her eye. She tilted her head—a small movement, but all she could manage as strength and bravery fled her side. Her vision blurred with darting black spots, but she watched the dragon press his head against the red-hot line of her side. She fell onto her back with a gasp.

The manticore approached shyly, the basket of kindling from the fireplace clenched between his jagged teeth. The harpy, red eyes flashing, darted in past him and snapped her beak where Anathenia could not see. Ash crumbled inside Anathenia, freeing up the holes through which air flowed into her firebox. She gasped, and the manticore offered her his basket.

One handful, then another. It went down more easily than the saltpeter, grinding wholesomely between Anathenia's teeth. She swallowed it, and asked for water, which the dragon brought her in the cauldron from the fire. Anathenia drank from the shallow cup of her palm, then let her hand fall back into the water. Rust was the last worry on her mind right now. She looked at their eyes, yellow and red and amber, and knew how it felt to fit ill in the little space life had carved out for you. 

"I could unmake you," she said, "if that is what you would like, though it will take some time with only one arm."

But the dragon edged forward, nudging at her, until his head lay under her hand. "Perhaps," Anathenia said, "perhaps ... "

•••

[It is too late to change the story's beginning. But its cast of characters can change and bend and grow. I know this story, and so do you. But which of its roles will we play?]

•••

In the little cottage outside the city where she had grown up, Anathenia cast aside false happiness and false contentment and bravery for its own sake. Sometimes she screamed and wept; sometimes she held her companions when terror or rage seized them. Allowing oneself the chance to feel things, especially ugly things, is a kind of bravery, and one little praised in songs and stories. Slowly she put her other arm and legs back into place, though they never worked quite as well as they once had. She tinkered with her companions, too, but had as little success as interest in building familiarity with the false knight's technomantic work.

She cleaned out the workshop and buried the ugly tools and twisted metal wrecks in the yard. The cottage windows opened to fresh air and light. There was kindling and water aplenty in the woods all around. She planted an herb garden too, to sweeten her hot chemical breath and that of her companions.

She did the things she wanted to do, and sometimes that meant staying abed all the day long, and sometimes that meant long walks in the woods. Sometimes she played with the bits and bobs left in the workshop, those that had seemed useful for other work than technomancy. She twisted wires together to fold bouquets of fireproof flowers, chained glass shards together in dancing patterns that spilled coloured light over windowsills and walls.

And once, only once, she wrote a letter home. To reassure her parents that she was fine, and that she would not be coming back. The words, drawn out of the false knight's pen—her pen—reassured her, too. She put on a heavy cloak and walked the long winding road back to the city, and slipped the note through the heavy bars of the castle gate. Then she went home, and wept, and made a pot of tea.

It was another year before the first knock came at her door. She had many fears about who might be there, but gathered her hopes tightly to her chest and flung the door open. The girl who stood on the step quavered in fear; the tiara on her forehead glimmered with morning sunlight. 

"Are you the witch of the Woodland Way?" she whispered, and her clasped hands went out before her like a prayer. It is so easy, sometimes, to pray to what we do not understand. "Please, please, I need your help."

Anathenia looked down at ebony hair and shining eyes and saw herself in that warped mirror image. 

"Yes," she said. "I think I can help you. Come inside, for a spell, sit down by the fire, have some tea. And then, when you are rested, you can tell me your story."

•••

[This is a story. It is only a story, and that is its strength and its failing. Tell me yours, the story of you, and we can share that burden for a time.]

AIMEE OGDEN is a former science teacher and software tester. These days, however, she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, Escape Pod, and Intergalactic Medicine Show.

The Steam-Powered Princess can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 1.2.