His Princess (A Royal Romance)

Y
es
, I am really named Persephone. My parents are hippies. Especially cruel hippies.

Sometimes, in my darker moments, I have wondered if that’s why he chose me: because I was named for the queen of Hell.

“
P
enny
?”

Melissa’s voice shakes me out of my daydream. It was a pleasant daydream, the meandering kind where you drift through nothing in particular. I was thinking about ice cream. It’s been six months since I’ve had ice cream. I’ve been living on military-surplus MREs for the entire time I’ve been here. It’s a point of honor for me. I eat the same food that the settlers do.

I was thinking about ice cream less for the taste and more for the cold. It’s
hot
. Solkovia is one of those places that’s like a time-share sales pitch from hell: Freezing cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and in between a constant rain and chill that makes your bones sore.

Barely bigger than Massachusetts, landlocked Solkovia sits in a vast historical crossroads. Every big-name invading army has passed through here at one point or another. Romans, Huns, Mongols, Turks. It was occupied by the Nazis during World War II and bitterly clenched in Moscow’s fist until the Berlin Wall fell.

Now, after all that squeezing by iron fists, this little land has been thrown away. There’s no oil here, no strategic reserves, no uranium or coal or bauxite to make into aluminum. The land isn’t dead but isn’t very fertile either. Since the only interest the Soviets had in this territory was passing through it, they never developed any kind of industry here. It’s too far from anywhere to make a useful manufacturing hub.

Solkovia hides her bloody history beneath a blanket of green. The land is beautiful. To the east, the plains stretch out in rolling waves to the Nevet river. Far to the west, barely visible, like distant clouds, the Carpathian Mountains loom with ominous mystery. It looks like something out of a fairy tale.

Dusty wind whips the flap of my tent. The prefab houses are coming along, but, like the other volunteers, I’m roughing it and living off the land with the settlers. When the rains come hard, the tent roofs buckle and spill water through badly patched seams. Dust storms from the south sometimes blanket us with a fine layer of silt that gets everywhere, clinging to my hair and every fold in my skin for days no matter how much I scour myself clean.

There’s just enough international aid to get some farms going. The tractors lined up along the road are fifty years old, but their owners have cherished them until they look new. As I step outside, the smell of freshly turned earth fills my nostrils as I breathe deep of unspoiled air.

It’s not a bad place. It’s not a bad place at all.

The bad place is to the west. Along a disputed border, Solkovia’s neighbor, the Principality of Kosztyla, eyes these lands and people. Kosztyla resisted the Germans and they resisted fought the Soviets, and they did it without Western aid. Sitting on gold mines and the only oil reserves in this part of the world, Kosztyla is one of the wealthiest small nations on the planet.

Barely bigger than Solkovia, it has over a thousand times the gross domestic product, though ninety-nine percent of the wealth is controlled by the ruling family, headed by one of the last crown princes in the world. Just last year the crown prince announced that his country had just discovered massive deposits of rare earth metals, further increasing their wealth.

It’s hard to take a deep breath here when you have that looming behind your back. War could break out anytime. With no allies and no real value to the international community, Solkovia would end up as nothing more than a Twitter hashtag if Kosztyla decided to cross the border. The States wouldn’t even bother dropping a bomb or sending a cruise missile. Kosztyla is too important.

Our mission here isn’t supported either. I’m on my own.

My best friend in camp is Melissa Greene. Her parents weren’t hippies. She wears her cross around her neck prominently, prays three times a day, and preaches her evangelical faith to the motley assortment of Solkovian faithful. There are Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, a small number of Jews and Muslims, and an even smaller number of keepers of what they call the
old faith
, a kind of folk magic.

Melissa is tall, breezy, has natural blonde hair and freckles, and all of the village boys are enamored of her, and a fair share of the men as well. Her modest ways and demure dress only seem to make her more enchanting to them.

“Break’s over,” she sighs.

She’s talking about my planning period. I’m a teacher here, educating the children of the village in our Western ways. Other volunteers aid in the construction efforts, the farming. The hope here is to turn a tent city in the wilderness into a thriving community. If we can get this place in shape, we’ll be connected to the power grid next year. The well is almost done and soon we won’t have to ration water.

I hope so, because I need a shower. Badly.

The school is a prefab building, basically a big shed, or so it looks from the outside. Next to it, a diesel generator chugs to power the computers and lights while a big satellite dish brings us glorious one-megabit-per-second Internet, which is a miracle out here. It’s the only way I can keep in touch with my family, other than my weekly turn on the satellite phone.

If you’re thinking that I’m out here because I wanted to go to the edge of the world and hide, you’re mostly right. No Facebook, no smart phones, no Twitter or Tumblr or blogging or social media or anything of any kind. Simple stuff. I teach from books using old-school methods, and my kids mostly work from a library of donated volumes that grows by five or ten books every time a shipment comes in from the church.

The classroom—there’s just the one—is one of the only structures in the camp that has air-conditioning, and it drops from ninety-five degrees and high humidity outside to a glorious eight-five degrees inside. Any cooler and the generator will blow. We tried that once and sweltered in here for six weeks until replacement parts arrived from the capital.

The kids light up when they see me. They range in age from six to fourteen. Eventually we’ll divide them into two classes but right now there’s no point. We’re teaching all of them the basics. When Melissa and I first arrived, only two of the forty-six children could read.

There are no older children in the school. They’re out working with their parents. They “graduate” when they turn fifteen, so I’m going to lose some. The classes will grow soon. The crèche where three of my colleagues watch the younger children and toddlers while their parents build their new lives has over a hundred kids in it. Most of them are young. Most of the teenagers, two thirds, are girls.

There was a war, and around here they don’t turn you down if you can carry a rifle. There are a lot of old men and young boys here. Even though they’re surrounded by their peers, the boys can’t get enough of me and Melissa. I dress a
little
more casually than she does, though I still conform to the standards set by the church. That means a sundress. Being treated like a pinup model was flattering for a while but now it’s just tiresome. I have so much to teach them and so little time.

I handle the older kids.

For the most part they speak good English. They started learning when they started school. We’re hoping that by picking up the international
lingua franca
they’ll be able to find a competitive place in the world. It’s the little things that lift a whole country.

When you’re teaching thirteen-year-olds who can barely read and still can’t handle basic arithmetic, it’s hard to swallow that line of thinking. I want them to succeed so badly, but it’s like staring up the slope of a tall mountain that you have to climb. Nominally the kids are divided by age, but the six-year-olds and the fourteen-year-olds have the same skill level, so Melissa and I end up teaching the class together.

More esoteric subjects like history will have to wait until everyone can read the books. The younger kids are picking it up easier than the older ones. It’s strange to watch them as we break them into groups to read from the English texts we’ve been supplied by the church. You’d think the older kids, especially the boys, would be annoyed with their younger peers, but they submit themselves to tutoring with kids half their age without a second thought, sounding out the words and struggling to pick up what their cousins and younger siblings are doing with ease.

There’s an extra chair at every table. Melissa and I rotate through the room, helping the students with difficult words or just flat-out reading passages to them as they scan along. The little kids eventually give up and listen to the stories. I spend an hour reading
Charlotte’s Web
to a group of six students, four girls and two boys.

It’s strange how pliant and attentive they are. I don’t mean to knock the students I worked with back home, but when I was an intern doing pretty much the same thing, it was like pulling teeth. I had to hear lectures from twelve-year-olds about why the book was dumb, I was dumb, school was dumb, and the world was dumb.

It’s probably been the same through the ages, but something about them bothered me. I used to think that kids were growing up too fast, too interested in taking on the trappings of adulthood. Twelve-year-olds got into these fights over boys and dated and they all had smart phones that they’d constantly be checking in class, in flagrant violation of the school rules.

Sitting here with these kids, I realize what growing up too fast really means. I don’t have to hear the stories, and they don’t like to tell them. You can read it in their eyes. When you’re ten and you see your sister step on a land mine, or soldiers drag your mother away, it leaves a mark on your soul.

Young teachers, or interns as I was, I guess, are used to a strange tug-of-war with their students. They want to pull you into their childish world and they want to use you to pull themselves into adulthood. They want you to be a peer and are confused when you’re not. They don’t see where the line is. I was an aide, so I was in a subservient position to the teacher. That
really
confuses them.

It’s not like that, here. When one of the boys summons his full command of the English language to tell me I look like an angel, he’s not complimenting my looks. To him, I came from heaven.

For my first few months here I felt fat compared to the kids. I started to lean out on the MREs. They’re not bad, if you get the right ones. The vegetarian bean burrito is
great
. The other stuff, not so much. The chicken stew, my God. Sometimes a bunch of the volunteers get together and dump the nastiest, gloppiest varieties into one big pot, pour in a bottle of hot sauce, and make a disgusting but somewhat more palatable stew.

I really don’t care. There’s nothing for me back where I came from, and these kids need someone like me.

Class drags on until five in the afternoon. Tomorrow I don’t have to get up—local teachers provide some of their education in their native dialect for three hours in the morning. Melissa likes to get up, unfortunately. She’s read
Charlotte’s Web
about five times and has these stacks of lesson plans she’s never going to use. It’ll be a victory if we can get them to grasp the basics of the story.

They’re all smart as hell, they take to the computers and tablets we provided like fish to water, they just don’t have the tools to understand. I’m amazed that kids who have been through so much can even bring themselves to care about the hackneyed wisdom of a talking spider.

I mean, to me, Charlotte’s Web is just a cartoon. I didn’t even read the book until I came here.

Exhausting as it is, I still feel good about myself at the end of the day. Older boys and girls, kids really, have come back from the fields and construction projects to walk their siblings and cousins home. Some of these kids are the heads of their households, and take care of their younger family and their grandparents at the same time.

I get a lot of attention from the boys but quietly and graciously ignore it, doing my best to greet them and wish them well in broken Solkovian. I speak the language at about a fourth-grade level now, pretty good for six months in. Melissa is a better speaker. She’s been here for a year.

I’m not really afraid anything will happen to me, but we have a buddy system. The two of us walk back to the volunteer camp together. Along the way, Brad shows up.

He tests Melissa’s vows of chastity. It’s funny to me how blatantly and obviously she gets horny just at the sight of him. I can practically hear her getting wet. She turns beet red, stares at his package and coughs, then keeps looking at him as he draws near.

The man has a similar effect on me. He’s been with the org for two years now, and however he looked when he left, it’s given him a great body and a rich, dark tan that contrasts with his sandy hair in a strangely macho way, like some fifties bodybuilder from Muscle Beach. He’s covered in dust and soot and it only makes the effect more intense, like a sexy construction worker from a calendar. Short shorts show off long, carven legs without an ounce of fat, bulging muscles, and an ass that could crack bricks between his cheeks. The tank top he wears shows off his massive shoulders and pulls tight around his thick, broad chest.

I’m sure if Melissa could, she’d run over and lick his stomach. She’d be pushing me out of the way. Conceptually, anyway. I’m not really that interested in him. He’d be good for a lay, but he’s too…cheery. One day he and Melissa are destined to settle down, have passionate missionary sex, and breed a new generation of missionaries.

Heh, missionary.

I snort and make to wipe my nose as if it were from the dust. Brad jogs up, pecs flexing mightily, and my lusty animal brain forces my eyes down to his package. He’s the missionary girl’s dream, all muscle, all for the Lord, and his libido held in check only by faith. I kind of fear for Melissa when she finally hooks up with him. She’s not going to be ready for that thing.