The Eldritch was still in the bathroom when the door chimed. He looked up and said, “Come.” And she was standing in the hatch, alone. She stepped in and the door slid shut behind her.
“I can’t imagine,” Khaska said in flawless Throne Chatcaavan, “why you would ask me here. That’s why I came.”
“I admit I didn’t think you would.”
“Why?” Her ears flipped back. “Did you think I lacked courage? Do you think I fear you?” Her eyes narrowed. “I have seen you naked and sobbing, Exalted Emperor. I don’t fear you.”
“Anymore,” he said, because he heard it clearly in the silence at the end of the sentence.
The Seersa lifted her chin. “Anymore. You’re right. You held complete power over me and you used it to torture me. You raped me repeatedly. You beat me. You shaved me. You treated me like a performing animal when you didn’t treat me as a toy. So yes, I did fear you. Did you want to hear me say it?”
“No,” the Emperor said, trying to understand his own feelings. “Yes.”
Khaska wrinkled her nose. “No? Yes? Which is it?”
“I needed to hear that I was someone who made others fear him…”
“Because you need to prop up your sense of power?”
“Because,” the Emperor said, “I need to never forget that my behavior was that reprehensible.”
The Seersa backed away, one step. “You want me to believe you’ve changed. Is that why I’m here? To forgive you?”
“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” the Emperor said.
“Good. Because I don’t.” She looked away, ears flat against her pale hair. “You didn’t deserve what the Worldlord did to you. But it needed to happen to you.”
Her choice of words was… curious. “You have not said you hated me.”
“I don’t want to hate any person,” Khaska said, her words clipped. “Hatred hurts me more than it does the object of my hatred. But I admit, it’s really… really hard not to hate you.” She turned her orange eyes back to him. “Until I look at you.”
“I look no different now,” the Emperor said.
“Oh, your body’s the same,” Khaska said, flicking a hand in a Chatcaavan shrug. How confident her use of their language was! “But your eyes… your eyes are completely different. If I’d never met you before, I would probably have liked you.”
“An extraordinary statement,” the Emperor murmured.
“You have no idea.” She stepped forward, one step. Then another. She wore boots now, and he didn’t recognize the sound of her footfalls after months of keeping her. “You’ve been raped now. You’ve been beaten. You’ve had Chatcaava pierce your body parts against your will, decorate you in demeaning jewelry and clothes, collar you. You’ve had them rip open your skin with their talons, talk about your disposition in your presence as if you were nothing more than meat. You’ve suffered the same depredations I did. But you only suffered them for a few handful of days.” Another step took her right in front of him, her toes almost overlapping his. “I spent an entire terrestrial revolution in your harem, Exalted. An entire revolution. You know what happened to me there. You were responsible for most of it. And it went on, day after day. Month after month. Season after season. You think what you went through compares to that?”
“No,” he said. “No, it does not. Nor do I expect your forgiveness. I wanted only to tell you that I was wrong. That what I did to you was inexcusable.”
She reared back, ears still slicked to her mane. “The hells of it is, I think you mean that. And I hate that. Do you know why?”
“Why?” he asked when she seemed to be waiting for a reply.
“Because if I think you mean it, I can’t keep thinking of you as someone deserving of my hate, if I lapse into hating.” She stared at him. “I can’t believe that I’m talking to you at all. A revolution ago, if I’d been this close to you and capable, I would have killed you and called it saving the universe. And now…”
“Life is complicated.”
“Oh, is it,” she said, mouth twisted. “So you finally get it.”
“No. But I am trying.”
She looked away again, tail lashing. Then she sat on the coffee table across from him. Even draped over the top, her tail-tip flicked. “The Ambassador loves you.”
That, at least, he could answer without doubt. “Yes.”
“I don’t understand that either,” the Seersa said, searching his face. “Either my conception of the Ambassador is wrong or my conception of you is. And the Ambassador led me into the Worldlord’s harem and back out, and he… he hasn’t changed at all. Not really. He tells me you’ve changed, that you changed even before your experiences as a human slave. Logically, I should believe him, and the evidence.”
“But still, you hate me.”
“I…” She bared her teeth. “I am angry at you. I don’t want to hate anyone. Even you. But yes. I can’t believe it. The Ambassador is a good male.”
“Yes.” He remained very still, not wanting to agitate her further. “He gave me his pattern. Perhaps that is why I changed so much. I took him into me, and there he stayed.”
She looked up sharply. “You can become an Eldritch.”
“It was my first shape.”
“You can become an Eldritch,” Khaska murmured. “Then… I could show you how much I suffered in your harem. I could make you feel it. I could give you those memories.”
His heart stumbled once. He had lived through Lisinthir’s anguish on the rack. Surely he could survive the addition of Khaska’s. And did he not owe her that? Shouldn’t he know what he’d done? And with her, often without even caring. She’d been there to accept his violence, that was all. “You could, yes. Shall I Change?”
“Just like that?” she asked. “You would do it.”
“Yes.”
“It could take hours.”
“An entire revolution of torment would take much longer. Days. Weeks.”
“And you’d do that,” she pressed. “Go through it. Every day, until I ran out of memories.”
“Should you bear them alone, when I am responsible for them?”
She mistrusted his complaisance, he could tell. He maintained his body calm, waiting to see what she would decide. After all this time, thinking he’d finally plumbed the depths of sapient psychology, to discover that he’d left entire swathes of it untouched was… diminishing. All the softer emotions remained mysterious to him, and people like Khaska, who combined them with the crueler emotions he knew better, he could not predict at all.
“Then… we’ll do it,” she said abruptly. “Every morning. We’ll be on this ship for a long time, finishing our stealth escape and then heading for the back of the Empire. You’ll be trapped here, and every morning we’ll revisit what you did to me. Until I say we’re done.”
“Very well,” the Emperor said. “Shall I Change now?”
She jerked her chin up, eyes flashing. “Yes.”
The Eldritch shape was more familiar, less effort to wrap around his skin. Had not the Queen told him once? That practice improved the speed of the Change? He folded his arms around his knees and cupped his wings around his body and bowed head, and it wracked him from the inside out until he melted into the delicacy of an Eldritch frame. His head remained on his knees, hair shrouding his face. It made him wonder what happened to the rings he’d had glued to his horns. Had they been lost with his first shift to human after their application? He felt back along his temple, through the thick hair, and twitched when his fingers grazed the first of them, hidden on his scalp. How did his body decide what part of a hornless body would correspond to the horns he’d lost? Would the alien in the clinic want to dissect a Chatcaavan to find out, the way the Emperor had sent dead aliens to autopsies to sate his curiosity?
A quiver ran the length of his side. He lifted his head to find Khaska staring at him, eyes wide and ears sagging. When his gaze met hers, though, her expression stiffened.
“I am ready,” he s
aid.
“Good. I am too.” She grasped his wrist.
Nothing. Then, abruptly, the wall between their minds fell. Her ambivalence had the force of a blow: her rage, her grief, nausea, unease, all braided together with a compassion that glinted like a sullied thread of gold, dull and unwilling but present all the same.
“Let’s start,” she said, lips pulling back from her teeth, “with them stripping me naked and collaring me. On your orders.”
Useless to protest he hadn’t specifically ordered her preparation for the harem. He had let that order stand from emperors past, hadn’t he? Because wingless freaks were the property of the strong, and he had been one of the strong. He bowed his head again and let her memory dig into him with clawed fingers, and relived it with her: the mortification. The sense of powerlessness. The fear. The despair. It reminded him too keenly of the experience he’d only just escaped, and the numb distance he’d achieved fell apart before that onslaught. He struggled not to hyperventilate, not to cry. He thought he failed in the latter, but the former he managed despite a growing tautness in his ribcage that threaded his ribs with nerve-thin lines of fire.
Arms slipped around him, strong and familiar. He wanted to turn into the Ambassador, but could not allow it. This was Khaska’s time—no, he knew her full name now, from her own memories of repeating it to maintain her sanity—this was Lieutenant Laniis Cariadh Baker’s time, and he would not steal it from her. He remained rigid on the couch until words flowed over him. He did not understand them, or wouldn’t have except they echoed through the Ambassador’s skin in delayed translation. Or preceded? Because the meaning formed before he made the words, the alien words the Emperor assumed to be the Eldritch tongue, something layered with fleeting veils of color that conveyed mood and flavor.
“Is this necessary?”
“He offered. I said yes.”
“You told me you did not want revenge.”
“This isn’t revenge, my lord. This is justice.”
He could not continue to listen. “She is correct,” he said, unsure whether he spoke Universal or Chatcaavan. “I said I would do it.”
Silence then. Laniis loosed her grip, withdrew her hand, left him hollow and haunted. The Emperor opened his eyes to meet hers, saw her through a film that shivered as the drops on the ends of his lashes fell off them.
“Will you stop us?” the female said.
The Ambassador’s formidable self-control kept all but the subtlest of emotions from leaking between their skins, just the faintest breath of distress. In the absence of that data, the Emperor found himself distracted instead by the warmth of Lisinthir’s skin, and the dampness that made his arm stick to the Emperor’s back.
“No,” the Ambassador said at last. “If the two of you are agreed, I will not stop you.”
She nodded once and rose, her movements jerky. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“I will be here,” the Emperor said, low. When they were alone, he sighed and let himself sag into Lisinthir’s body. “You do not think this wise.”
“I am withholding judgment for now,” Lisinthir said. “If it becomes baneful, I will say something. But if you will take my advice?”
The Emperor snorted, a soft puff of breath from this alien nose, so short. “Go on, then, Perfection.”
Lisinthir said, “See Andrea in the afternoon.”
The Emperor lifted his head.
“Laniis is your past, and your past is part of you,” Lisinthir said.
“But Andrea is my future?”
“Andrea allows you to have a future not defined by your past,” Lisinthir said. “If you dwell too deeply on what you were, Beloved, you will fetter yourself. To leave that male behind, you must be taken on your own terms, as you are, right now. And yes. I believe Andrea will allow you to see who you might be, and give you the freedom to become that person.”
“And you?” the Emperor asked, quiet.
“I do not walk before you. Only beside.”
“Are all Eldritch poets?” the Emperor asked, resting his head back down. “Or are you merely exemplary?”
Lisinthir chuckled softly. “Flattery does not suit you, Exalted.”
He couldn’t help it… he laughed. It was so much like their repartee before they’d loved one another. “Too witty by far, Ambassador. Take care lest you attract the attention of dragons.”
“Mmm. Too late.” Lisinthir stood and offered his hands. “Come. There is work to be done. A war does not prosecute itself.”
“No,” the Emperor agreed, and allowed himself to be pulled from the couch. “I was employed in reading Uuvek’s packets while you were in the bathroom, and can continue.”
“In that body?” Lisinthir wondered.
The Emperor touched his head where the rings were hidden beneath the fall of silken hair. “I have used it for loveplay enough. I would see what it is like when set to other purposes.”
The Ambassador chuckled. “And when you have explored these shapes will you devote each one to a singular purpose? One body for war, another for lovemaking, a third for swimming, another for poetry….”
“I think I will find they are not so simply understood, nor categorized. But I am here to learn.” The Emperor thought back to his early career. “It is the one thing that has remained constant in me. I need to learn.”
“It may save us yet,” Lisinthir offered him the desk and a data tablet.
“We shall see,” the Emperor said, and accepted it.
CHAPTER NINE
The pirate king was a queen. Naturally.
It was only the last of the many assumptions that had been stripped from Sediryl when they’d been discovered. She’d hoped for incompetence, but the pirates had seized her vessel and the Faulfenzair’s in unbreakable hitches and disabled their major systems with pinpoint strikes. Maia had handed over two earrings and vanished mid-sentence when something had shut down all the computers on both ships. Sediryl hadn’t had the time or privacy to discover if her D-per had survived, or been banished back to Alliance space.
The pirate base had constituted another unpleasant surprise, because she’d been expecting something slovenly and hacked together and been confronted instead with a hideout delved with consummate skill into an enormous asteroid, like an Alliance sector starbase writ small. The pirates pacing it were disciplined enough to ignore her and her escort. They’d separated her from Daize, when she’d hoped to have been presented together. And now, she had come to the lair of the admiral himself and found him female.
Ordinarily this would not have troubled her; her second lover on leaving her homeworld had been a woman, after all. She was confident she could still achieve the desired effect. But as this woman glided off her poorly-disguised throne and approached her, Sediryl became cognizant of a slight hiccup in her plan. Women and men she had seduced before, but they’d been human. She did not find the Pelted attractive at all.
From the greed in her eyes, this Karaka’An did not share her bias. If the Goddess was kind—and didn’t want Her daughter to die in this endeavor—the pirate would fail to notice Sediryl’s lack of reciprocating interest. And if She was truly beneficent, Sediryl would manage to contrive the attack on the Chatcaava before she was forced to discover if she could deceive a lover while in bed with her.
“Well!” the woman said, coming to a halt before her. “What a welcome surprise.”
Sediryl arched a brow. “That the Eldritch would send someone to you?”
“And another woman!” The felid smiled and it didn’t touch her eyes, which remained… wrong. Too avid. Did she even blink? “You understand how rare it is to find women in power in our line of work.”
“Perhaps amid your kind,” Sediryl said. “Among mine, women hold all the most powerful positions, and it is men who do our bidding.”
Would a comment that blatant work? It seemed to, because the pirate laughed in delight. “Obviously I was born under the wrong sun. But come, sit.” She waved to a bench
near her peculiar throne. The anachronism of the furs strewn on it puzzled Sediryl until she glimpsed the end of one of them and saw the five-fingered shape, now loose and wide where once it had wrapped round a living person’s digits. Her gorge rose. She disguised her reaction by settling on the offered seat in a rustle of suede. The boots remained irritating: focusing on them kept her attention off the intolerable aspects of this situation. She had just arrived. She could not lose her nerve this soon.
“You can return to your quarters,” the pirate said, interrupting Sediryl’s thoughts. She was addressing someone tucked into a shadowed alcove and there… oh, surely Goddess and Lord smiled on her errand. There was no mistaking those eyes, that face, the carriage, even blurred by the ungainly uniform. That was the Chatcaavan Queen. She was here! Here, and… mutilated? Her wings were not shrouded in the dark, as Sediryl had assumed, but missing their membranes. The Eldritch inhaled too sharply for her hostess to miss.
“Ah, you know the Chatcaava?”
“I do, yes.”
The Slave Queen betrayed nothing in her gaze, turning from them and leaving. Perhaps she hadn’t recognized Sediryl?
“You hate them?” the pirate asked, curious, sitting again on her throne. “Did the sight of her disturb you? I can have her removed from the guest bloc.”
“I fear no one, least of all Chatcaavan women, who are our sisters in adversity,” Sediryl said. “I was merely disturbed at the sight of her… maiming.”
“Ah, yes.” The Karaka’An hissed. “They did that to her. The animals.”
Who had, Sediryl wondered. Dare she ask? If she did, would she receive an honest answer? Was this woman even sane? Where had the pelts on her throne come from, and how could she bear to sit on them? If she even knew what they were? “So,” she said. “You are the leader here.”
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