Short Story
The Citidel of Weeping Pearls
- by Aliette de Bodard
- in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2015
Amidst royal intrigue and military escalation, in a place far from Earth and a time thirty years after a princess and heir to the throne vanished along with the citadel where she lived, the disappearance still occupies the minds of an ensemble of people, One of that ensemble, Diem Huong, was a girl when the citadel stole her mother away, but now Diem Huong is an engineer on a project which is determined to travel back those thirty years.
Mother had gone on ahead, Ancesters only knew where. So there was no way forward. But somewhere in the starlit hours of the past—somewhere in the days when the Citadel still existed, and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh’s quarrel with the empress was still fresh and raw—Mother was still alive.
There was a way back.
