The Steam-Powered Princess

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.]

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.