The latent violence he felt in those fingertips petted fire from under his skin, but he could have resisted it, somehow, had he not also felt the gentleness moving through them like the descant over a hymn.
"You are irresistible," Lisinthir said, laughing, and kissed the tip of his nose. His nose! Jahir stared at him in incredulity. "Oh, come now. What's that expression for?"
The words spilled out before he knew they were forming. "You don't seem broken to me."
"Did you think I would be?" Lisinthir canted his head, and his smile saddened. "Yes, I think you would have to believe it, wouldn't you. Well, let me illuminate the subject, and you can tell me then what your professional assessment suggests about my psychological well-being."
Jahir struggled to settle himself and waited.
"Tell me how likely it is that a person rises above their society's teachings."
"I beg your pardon?" Jahir said, surprised. He'd been expecting more exposition. "It's very difficult. Impossible in many people, particularly without external stimulus...." He stopped, his skin going cold, then flushing hot. "Oh," he whispered, and looked up sharply at Lisinthir. "You. You changed him. But how? How did you do it?"
Lisinthir's brows lifted. "Well done. And yes, I did. They shift shape, as you know. I gave them mine. And we...."
"Feel emotions through our skins," Jahir said, astonished and delighted by the sheer brilliance of it. "Oh, cousin! You taught them empathy! Was it really that easy?"
"No," Lisinthir admitted, and something in that word... all of Jahir's elation drained away. "No, it wasn't. Because for most of my tenure in the Emperor's bed, I suffered. I bested him when I could, and that was maybe a third of the time. But he discovered he could use the threat of hurt against others to compel me...." He stopped, ribs flexing against skin as he inhaled. "That would be how I learned I don't enjoy torture, or submitting to others."
What to say to that? Nothing, because Lisinthir no longer communicated largely through words. Jahir rested a tentative hand on his cousin's knee, distracting him from thoughts that seeped through their touch, dark and clinging and heavy.
Lisinthir smiled a little and threaded his fingers through Jahir's. "I did what needed doing to save the foreigners the Chatcaava had enslaved, to secure concessions from their government, to gain the ear of their Emperor. Some of it I enjoyed. Some of it... threatened my sanity. To fully instruct the Emperor in compassion for others, I allowed my own torture so he could experience it through our touch. That was the moment he was transformed." Lisinthir looked away, eyes and thoughts distant. "It was a gamble, at that. If he had not already been curious about aliens, if he had not already had a nature that valued knowledge for its own sake as well as for how it could be used against others... then I might have died on the rack in that attempt."
"But you didn't," Jahir breathed. "And you transfigured him." Stunned. "You effected a change of that magnitude in the Emperor of the Chatcaavan Empire?" And then, as the consequences raced out from that change, branching like lightning, "God and Lady, they are chasing you. Because they know you've changed him. And now he will attempt to remake the Empire in a new image, and every dragon in it will be against him? But he sent you away! Why?"
Lisinthir was staring at him now, his shock lapping through their twined fingers. "I admit," he said after a moment, "I am rarely caught so flat-footed, but I don't know that I've ever seen anyone's mind work so quickly."
Jahir tugged on their joined hands. "Why? Why did he send you away?"
"I was his weakness."
"Love is not—"
"Weakness?" Lisinthir halfsmiled and reached with their joined hands, brushing a thumb against Jahir's cheekbone. "Were you not just in this room confessing how love has broken you?"
"That's...." He paused. How could he say it was different?
"Love must have a context," Lisinthir said. "It is society's work to give it one. Where there is no context, there is violence, because love will force its way in where there is no place to receive it. There is no place for me there, yet. There never will be, if he cannot change the Empire. And to do that, he needs the time to consolidate his power... the time, and to put aside everything that might drive his allies from him."
"Oh," Jahir whispered, beginning to shake as the realization smashed into him. "The war is coming."
Lisinthir brought their joined hands to his lips and kissed the back of Jahir's hand. "Cousin. The war has already begun." He smiled against skin, wry. "And you and your beloved are in the middle of one of its opening skirmishes. Congratulations."
The magnitude of what they were now involved in was overwhelming, particularly since they'd come into it entirely by accident. No, there were no accidents. The Queen had the Sight, the weirdling talent he had only in vague outline. She must have known that sending Lisinthir might provide the catalyst the Empire needed for reform, to maneuver it into a position where it could become a friend to the Alliance, and to their own people, if the stars aligned just so. And he and Vasiht'h must have been part of that, for him to be here. But why? What possible role could he and the Glaseah play? They were not duelists, not warriors. He could not imagine surviving what Lisinthir had endured and coming out of it whole—
And he had believed it. Believed every word of it, despite how implausible the tale. That Lisinthir had transformed his rapist into his lover, and in the act, arranged for the Alliance's salvation? Was it not more likely that this was a story Lisinthir had created to help him live with the sacrifices he'd made? Jahir looked up, found his cousin watching him with unreadable eyes. Through their touch he felt Lisinthir's wry amusement, the weariness.
"You have finally stumbled onto the notion that perhaps you have been too credulous," Lisinthir said.
"It is my duty to evaluate you as dispassionately as possible," Jahir said, feeling it an apology.
"And how little I have to convince you otherwise." Lisinthir smiled, lopsided. "Save the one thing that you and I know cannot lie."
"I have been in your mind already." But the words lacked conviction. He had never been able to hold more than pieces of his client's memories when they were patients, and dying. It was a different matter entirely for someone conscious to share them. He had done it with Vasiht'h; had given of himself and the truth of his experiences, had received them. It would constitute what was real, both to Lisinthir's body—which had its own memory of events—and his mind, and if there was disconnect between the two, it would surface as something ill-focused, subtly off. Lisinthir wouldn't be able to sense the mismatch, but Jahir, as an outsider, would feel it.
If Lisinthir gave him a memory of his time in the Empire… that would be the closest they would ever come to knowing if he was telling the truth. And if the Emperor acted in a way consistent with that story in the future… if he really did push for changes in the Empire….
"So," Lisinthir said, quiet. "Would you like to have the test of it? Knowing that what you see may not agree with you."
"It is whether or not it agrees with me that I must know," Jahir said.
"I meant—" Lisinthir paused, then shook his head, just enough for a ripple to travel through his hair. "Later for that. If you come to me in this, you will trust me for that also. So. Will you?"
Jahir flexed his fingers between Lisinthir's, switched to their tongue, shaded it white for purity and soul's witness. "I attend you."
"God help you." Lisinthir smiled and tugged him forward, and he fell through air into history.
"You do not fear the drop," the Emperor observed. They were standing together on the balcony, the sun staining its stone tiles orange and carmine. The wind was tense and changeable, now insistent, then absent; it suited his mood, restless and hungry and too full of uncertainties. This could not continue. There was blood in his mouth again, and he never felt rested enough, never whole enough to gather all of the fleeting days before their inevitable ending.
The Emperor wore his Eldritch shape, too-sharp chin and lambent p
redator eyes. They were close enough that their shoulders brushed, and through the contact Lisinthir felt his lover's satiation and his curiosity, never far from the surface.
"No," he said at last, glancing at the balcony, which like so many Chatcaavan balconies had no rail. "If I fall, then I fall." He smiled faintly. "And you? In this shape you would be as helpless."
"I trust that somewhere before the ground I'd find the wherewithal to Change." The Emperor looked out at the open sky, pupils contracting visibly. "If I couldn't, then I would deserve the death."
From behind them, the Queen said, hushed, "Well, I would die in either shape, so I would prefer you both to come in…!"
He looked over his shoulder, found her wearing her own Eldritch shape, such a sweetness; she had some of the Heir's perfectly curved face and brows and a mouth that reminded Lisinthir of his mother's: legacy, no doubt, of her having taken the pattern from both Bethsaida and himself. But the character she invested in her face and her movements… that was all her own, and he adored it.
"Come," the Emperor said. "Let us oblige our Queen."
Once inside, she said to the Emperor, "You should not say it that way, Master. The Ambassador has his own Queen."
"Does he still?" The Emperor cocked his humanoid head, brows lifting, and touched his fingers to Lisinthir's mouth. "Tell me, Perfection. Do you still worship at that altar?"
Did he? Still feel allegiance to Liolesa? To his world? To the society that had done its best to negate him, that had humiliated his father to the point of destruction? A society that had created the immensely dysfunctional relationship between his parents, that had forced him to become a fighter or face the same humiliation that had unmade his father's sanity? Could he truly go back to that world, believe himself part of it?
And yet it had been Liolesa who had seen how much he needed to leave, to have some purpose worthy of a sword, of his intellect, of his aggression and ambitions. She hadn't warned him, but… if she had, would he have gone?
"Can one stop being what one is?" Lisinthir asked, finally.
The Emperor laughed then, leaned up and kissed him. "You would ask that of me? Of me. Now."
He grinned and rested his brow against the Emperor's. "Ridiculous, yes. I beg apologies, O Exalted." He caressed the more mobile mouth and pressed the lower lip down to win himself another kiss before sighing and reaching for the Queen. She fitted into them as if carved, her head dipped, and she brought to their skins the sense of her quiet happiness, and yes, her curiosity.
"I am what you have made me," Lisinthir said. "No less a transformation than I have effected upon you."
"Is it transformation?" the Queen asked, shy. "You said yourself once that you belonged to a dragon's house."
"Ah, the ring," the Emperor said. "Not the Eldritch Queen's mark, though you are of her bloodline. I had observed it." He reached for Lisinthir's hand and turned it to expose the Imthereli sigil. "This then. Your people's conception of a dragon?"
"Just so. It is my father's House." Their bent heads over it were suddenly too pale, too much like his kindred's. He longed for them to look up so he could see the evidence of their true natures in their eyes, the pupils just a little off from round. "I never quite suited my mother's. That would be why I am here."
"Because you have the violence in your blood?" There was no amusement beneath the Emperor's fingers. Interest, far too burningly focused.
"Before I came," Lisinthir said, quieter, "I was a duelist."
"What does that mean?" the Queen asked, hesitant. "You killed, the way we do?"
"No," the Emperor said, studying his face. "You told me yourself, in those first days. You had never killed a male before you came here."
He stroked the Slave Queen's hair to keep one hand from trembling. The other he rested on the Emperor's hip, once the drake released it. "Among us, we also answer insult with violence, but we cannot afford to kill. There are not so many Eldritch that any one can be spared, no matter how feckless or irritating. We don't have your gel tanks, Exalted, nor the Alliance's fine medicine. To step onto the dueling ground is to risk your death, and so few do."
"But you did," the Emperor said, studying him. "And often."
"My father's House was tarnished, and my father's honor much abused." He felt the silk of the Queen's Eldritch hair passing beneath his fingertips. "I was sent to court to find a way to renew his House's honor. My father had planned that I would do so by wedding some vulnerable woman and getting children on her. I chose a different path."
"You avenged the slights done your blood with blood," the Emperor said, satisfied.
"It wasn't my intention," Lisinthir said, slowly. "But the first insult I heard…." He found he could no longer remember the words, only the face of the man who'd spit them at him. "I called him out. And the next. And the next. Until no one dared speak ill of Imthereli."
"But you killed none of them," the Emperor observed.
"No." Lisinthir stilled the shudder, knew they felt his revulsion through their touches anyway. "No." He managed a rueful smile. "Part of the skill, Exalted, is to shame without killing, so that those who suffer might live to bear testament to your prowess. Yes? You do the same. You did it to me."
"So I did." The Emperor chuckled. "How little I knew what I would be inviting."
"Do you regret, then?"
They both awaited his answer, felt it as a quicksilver sweetness beneath his touch first, like a sigh cooling sweat-slicked skin. "No." The Emperor kissed the Slave Queen's brow, then Lisinthir's mouth. "That I do not."
"Then show me," Lisinthir said. "Show us."
"Again?"
"And again," he said, laughing, pulling them both back to the bed. "And far from the balcony this time, for the Queen's comfort."
They used the bed, and saw to the Queen first. Their Queen, Lisinthir thought while worshipping her, eating her pleasure off her belly, the insides of her arms, the curve of her collarbone beneath the rim of her metal collar... as if he could lap the emotion up through skin, this frail Eldritch skin that was so porous it barely sheathed the spirit. They loved her and tired her, spilled her languid and soft on the pillows, left here there, glistening, borrowed white lashes heavy over the orange eyes of a dragon.
And then they reached for one another with fingers curled and stiffened, blunt and brutal. The Emperor had used the Eldritch shape long enough to know something of fighting in it, but he lost more often than he won that way... too distracted by the sensitivity of fingertips, the flicker of an emotion caught off slick skin, the lack of talons, of true rending teeth, of wings, always the wings, that Lisinthir had never thought of as weapons until he'd caught one in the face.
The test as Eldritch was as much will as strength: who could ignore the tantalizing emotions gathered with every blow, every choke-hold, every love-bite.
Lisinthir won. And lost. And won again. Traded his laughter and exhilaration to his opponent, accepted affection and ferocity and amusement in turn. There was blood, inevitably, with thin humanoid skin, but the act was kinder, no chafing, no barbs, nothing but heat and friction and weight. And no lies, not skin to skin, not between Eldritch. They would not—could not—speak the name of what moved them, but it stole through them like the Chatcaava's Living Air.
There were hands on Jahir's arms, holding him steady, and that was well because he was still living in Lisinthir's shell in that memory of fever, felt the sheets crumpled under his back as if he was naked, flinched from teeth closing on his shoulder. He was trying to fall forward again, and fingers dug into his flesh, pushing him back into his body but doing nothing to dispel the haze. Would they bruise him? He glanced at one arm, swaying, saw the moment the fingertip bit deep enough to draw a single bead of blood.
Everything in him cried out for something he could not name—hadn't that been so in the memory? Things without names, begging for revelation—and in that moment he turned toward his cousin and his entreaty clouded his mind, his mouth, swelled to fill the
world. He was gasping for breath when he looked at Lisinthir's face, saw that his cousin was staring at the blood. And then Lisinthir bent and swiped it up with his tongue before gripping the back of Jahir's neck and kissing him—
—with the taste of blood in his mouth—
Jahir's world shattered... dissolved and took him with it. And it was glory, finally, to give in.
His next awareness was of his own lips sticking together, and he wondered how they'd become so dry. Wondered too at his own lassitude, and of the bliss that pooled in him, heavy as still waters. He thought his head was resting against Lisinthir's ribs. Was he still on the floor? Yes, and Lisinthir still in front of him on the bed. Somehow he was leaning on his cousin, and that was well because his knees would not have held him up unaided. He tried to speak, had to wet his mouth with his tongue, even then found it difficult to form words. "Cousin."
Through the touch, a hint of trepidation, smoke against the sunrise softness of the emotions he'd been resting in, on. "Yes."
Jahir said, tongue still slow, "Shouldn't... you shouldn't... body fluids. Blood. You shouldn't ingest them. Not advisable, could... transmit diseases—" And stopped when the ribs beneath his cheek flexed. Lisinthir was laughing, and then cupped his face in both hands, tipping it up.
"You are really lecturing me about hygiene as your first thought back?" Mirth lightened the midnight blue of Lisinthir's eyes. "So concerned for my welfare then?" A gentle kiss on the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and sighed out the words, quiet. "Oh, cousin. Beautiful cousin."
That had a resonance between their skins, a hissed whisper that suggested meaning other than the one he knew. Beauty, beautiful, perfection. Jahir accepted it with the wonder that felt like sunlight. "Why?" he asked, still disoriented. "Why... that feeling? What have I done to deserve it?"
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