As if she’d sensed Leia thinking the word strange, Amilyn piped up, “Look at this!”
They had made it through another thick patch of woods into a wide clear space with stretches of slope completely free from trees; whiteness stretched out below them in nearly every direction. But those slopes were too steep to easily walk down, especially when one of them would have to pull the travois.
At least the path was easy to spot. “That’s the way we came up,” Leia said, pointing toward a rockier line that traced its way downhill, maybe two hundred meters west. Sssamm hissed that he could just make out Chassellon’s group farther down that path; with his sharp Fillithar vision, that meant the others could have been nearly two thousand meters ahead.
“When I was a little girl, I used to love tobogganing,” Amilyn said.
Leia managed not to snap. “That’s nice for you. Once we get back to the path, it’s going to be too uneven for the travois. Kier—” She felt awkward about asking him this, which made no sense, so she kept on. “Do you think you can carry Harp?” He nodded, though he looked more wary than certain.
“What I loved best about the toboggan is how fast we could go.” Shrugging off the straps of the travois, Amilyn began digging around in her pack.
When Sssamm hissed that he thought he might be able to balance Harp in one of his coils, Leia was going to object because the danger of them rolling out of control was too great. But the vision of them hurtling downhill made her realize what Amilyn had been saying—just as Amilyn pulled something bright yellow from her pack. She flung it down, at which point it popped obediently into its full shape, an emergency tent.
As Amilyn stepped on the corner of the tent, she bent down to tether two of the flexible poles together. “See, if we can flatten it out—”
“—we’d have a toboggan big enough to carry all of us,” Leia finished. “Why didn’t you just say so from the start?”
Amilyn frowned. “I did. Didn’t I?”
“It’s too dangerous.” Kier knelt by Amilyn’s side, shaking his head. “We’d pick up speed quickly, and with that much weight on board, it would be hard to steer. If we crash, we could all wind up with broken ankles. The field generators protect us only so much.”
That was when Sssamm slithered closer, hissing excitedly. He curled onto the tent-toboggan, expanded his coils to hold out the edges, and stuck his tail into the last unfastened flap. Then he lifted it to form a perfect sail, which he turned that way and this to prove how easy steering would be. Kier began to smile, and Amilyn clapped her hands.
For the first time, Harp looked hopeful instead of depressed. “Can we try it?”
They didn’t need Leia’s permission. Really she should’ve said so. Instead she began to laugh. “Let’s do this.”
The entire descent after that was a rapid blur of snow-spray and distant trees. Sometimes they’d slalom from side to side so fast Leia thought they’d topple over, but Sssamm always managed to right their course in time. Harp yelped a time or two when they hit a ridge—or when they’d briefly go airborne before touching down—but most of the time she was laughing, just like Leia.
It occurred to her that she hadn’t had this much fun in a long time. And she hadn’t had this much fun with people her own age since…
Since ever? I think ever.
As the sun set that day, Chassellon Stevis and his group trudged up the steps of the chalet, each one of them clearly exhausted and miserable. That made it so much sweeter to watch them come into the great room, look at the enormous fireplace—and see Leia and her friends lounging by the hearth with oversized mugs of mocoa.
“Where have you guys been?” Harp called. She had an emergency bacta bag on her foot and foamy cream on the tip of her nose from her cup of mocoa. “We’ve been waiting for ages.”
Chassellon sputtered, “You couldn’t have—how could you—”
“They did it by showing some ingenuity, Stevis,” said Chief Pangie, who had taken the second-comfiest chair by the fire, leaving the best for Harp. “And by showing some compassion, a quality your group could use a little more of.”
“You’re having a good laugh, are you?” Chassellon held his chin high, looking as impressive as he could given his sodden clothes and damp hair—which wasn’t very. “We’ll see who’s laughing when Queen Breha hears about you abandoning us!”
Leia shrugged. “I’ve been talking with the chief. Turns out this part of the challenge was my mother’s idea in the first place.”
“But—a queen—she would never—”
“Push us hard?” Leia could’ve laughed. “You’ve obviously never met my mom.”
Chassellon deflated so pathetically that she almost felt sorry for him. From the corner of her eye she observed Kier lifting his chin as if in pride, maybe at the toughness of his monarch. He might give Leia a hard time occasionally, but she could tell a loyal Alderaanian when she saw one.
Chief Pangie lifted her mug toward the second group as if in a toast. “Since you failed to show any teamwork out there, I’m going to have to assign some extra duty for the group as a whole, next time. Say—carrying the others’ packs for them? That sounds about right.”
Thinking about the way Chassellon’s face looked then amused Leia the rest of the evening, and the entire trip back to Aldera. As she walked back into the palace, worn-out and rumpled but exhilarated, she tried to find the right words to describe it. Like one of those wilting vines from Harloff Minor. No, that wasn’t it. Like TooVee that time when I was a toddler and ran straight from my bath into the formal dining hall. That last memory was one Leia had been told so often she wasn’t sure if she remembered the event itself or the retellings, but it was easy enough to imagine 2V’s horror at her tiny, wet, naked charge barreling into a diplomatic dinner.
“Good evening, Princess,” said the guard standing duty in front of Bail Organa’s stateroom, a kind of signal flag as to her father’s location. The guard didn’t immediately step aside to give her the door, but probably he assumed she’d want to wash up before presenting herself to her parents. Not this time, though. She couldn’t wait to tell them everything. They’d be proud of her, maybe proud enough to erase the stain of her mistakes.
“Good evening.” Leia’s face almost hurt from grinning. “I’m here to see my parents. They’re in, aren’t they?”
“I’m sorry, Your Highness.” The guard tried to say this gently, which only made it worse. “Your parents are in conference about their next banquet and gave strict instructions that they weren’t to be disturbed by anyone.”
It was a long moment before Leia decided to risk the question. “Not even me?”
“No, Your Highness. I’m sure they’ll be eager to see you when they’re finished.”
When they’re done planning their next dinner party.
“All right. Thank you.” Her voice sounded calm, didn’t it? Like a princess, and not a hurt little girl?
Maybe not. The guard looked so sad for her, almost pitying, and she couldn’t even hate him for it.