Kovihs grinned at him. “You’ll get used to it. Sehvi did.”
“We’ve already established Sehvi is a saint,” Vasiht’h said with a laugh. “But I guess if I can get used to eating my friends’ cooking, I can get used to anything. I’ll be right back.”
He didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know his brother was following him down the hall to the guest room. Because he didn’t want to have a fight he pretended not to notice, dumping Kovihs’s bags on the table and then starting on his own straps. He could sense Bret’hesk hovering at the door, no doubt deciding how to tell his brother that this was a bad idea.
So he was surprised when Bret said, “You’ve changed.”
“Not all that much,” Vasiht’h said, pulling his bags off and setting them beside his brother-in-law’s.
“You’re wrong about that—” Because even when paying a compliment, Bret couldn’t help but contradict him. “You’re very different. You carry yourself… differently.”
Facing him, Vasiht’h folded his arms and said, “If you say ‘like a man’ or ‘like a grown-up’, I will walk out on you.”
His brother leaned away, ears flattening. “But this isn’t a small step. Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”
In the past, he would have fought. Would have been offended. Would have been uncertain, would have objected, would have tried to justify himself. As trite as his brother’s unspoken observation was, it was still true: Vasiht’h wasn’t the callow wanderer anymore, searching for himself. He’d fallen in love with someone, made a life with him, helped hundreds of people with their problems… fought dragons, stitched up wounded ambassadors, and learned how much he still had to learn. But there was a limit to what a person could figure out on his own, or from his parents, or from his peers. Family had to extend forward in time, not just back.
“Yes,” he said simply, and brushed past his brother to head for the kitchen and the laughter he heard there. He knew in that moment that everything would sort itself out. He might have to walk through the thoughtless void to reach it, but the breath of the Goddess permeated all the universe, filled his heart. So long as he followed that breath, he’d find his way.
“Where’s your brother?” Dami asked as Vasiht’h joined them.
“I left him in the hall, looking for a fight.”
Kovihs snorted.
Peering at him, his mother said, “You left him there?”
“I’d rather make cookies,” Vasiht’h said with a grin. “So where’s this pepper kerinne? I might as well start acclimating now.”
The Queen’s life before the Ambassador’s tenure had been stagnant; during it, tempestuous.
She hardly knew how to characterize the life she was living now, waiting, walking a path that felt increasingly perilous. There were moments of tension, particularly as Second began arriving daily to partake of the harem. As he never came at predictable intervals it was hard to relinquish a lingering anxiety. And there were moments of fear, when the Knife reported to her on the steps he was taking to spirit them from the tower. But between those moments, she passed through such moods, so many, so rare and exhilarating. It was pleasurable to visit the nursery and see the transformation there. It was fascinating to experiment with the computer and learn the workings of the Empire to which she had been subject without comprehension. And it was… astonishing… to discover herself enjoying the company of other Chatcaava. The Knife, who was devoted to her, and surprising. Uuvek, with his peculiar opinions. The Mother, gentle and fierce and completely unexpected. The females of the nursery, reclaiming their lost voices with such zeal. And the Priestess, who among them all the Queen found the most amazing, because she had not found herself so easy in any female’s company since Laniis’s loss. The Priestess stayed in the tower’s upper stories, the better to follow Second’s movements, but once the Queen returned to her chambers for the evening, she came too.
They didn’t need to speak. But when they did, the conversations were memorable.
“What is this?” the Priestess asked one evening.
The Queen had assumed her ally to be entertaining herself and was sitting at her console, reading statistics on the numbers of worlds in the Empire and their division into the Empire’s quadrants of responsibility. Perplexed, she looked past her mutilated wing toward the closet. “What is what?”
“This… collection.” The Priestess appeared at the closet’s arch, holding a brass waist-chain. “You never wear jewelry, except what is required of you. Why this cache? Most of these colors would not suit you.”
The Slave Queen slid her claws from the interface. She slipped past the other female and into the room, found the little chest open, displaying its mementos. It had been long enough since she’d put anything inside the chest that she had let it fade from her memory. Lifting Flower’s ring, she said, “These are reminders to me. Each one belonged to a female who died in the harem.”
The Priestess’s eyes widened. She craned her head down toward the chest, hair sliding over one shoulder, and from the narrowing of her eyes she was counting.
“You are thinking there are fewer than you expected,” the Queen said.
“I am thinking there are more than should exist.” The Priestess plucked the ring from the Queen’s palm. “That females should die at the whim of males who destroy them seeking their own pleasure is heinous.”
“You would earn yourself a quick death by saying so.”
The Priestess eyed her. “I would have, before.” She poured the waist-chain back into the chest and turned the ring so that it caught the light. “How many of these did your Emperor cause to be put in the box?”
“Fewer than the ones my sire caused to be put in the box.” The Queen sat on the closet’s small stool, watching the Priestess examine the contents of the chest. “My Emperor did kill. They all kill. But he did not do it out of lust for killing.”
The Priestess’s nostrils flared. “Then why?”
“Politics. Most of those deaths were the result of gifts made to males who did enjoy it,” the Queen said. “Also accidents. Carelessness.”
“I wouldn’t have thought it of him. Carelessness. It doesn’t seem a good way to survive for a male as bizarre as he sounds.”
Should she be offended at the characterization? But then, by Chatcaavan standards, it had begun true and had only become more so after the Ambassador’s influence. “It was perhaps the one place he could afford to be careless. What female would have used it against him? What danger would have attached to his actions here? To hurt his own possessions…” The Queen shrugged, the hand-twitch she’d learned natively and the shoulder lift she’d absorbed from her alien lover. “Some would have seen it as evidence of strength, not weakness. It is the sort of calculus he would have worked through before allowing himself the luxury.”
“He’s clever, then.”
The Queen thought of what she’d been reading about the history of the Navy. “I think he may be brilliant.”
The Priestess glanced at her over her shoulder but whatever she’d been planning to say was lost to the sound they both heard in the chamber: the hard slap of wings on air? But who would be flying into her suite? It was not done. The Queen touched her fingers to the Priestess’s mouth to silence her and grabbed the waist-chain, letting it clatter as the links crushed together in her fist. With her shawl in one hand and the waist-chain in the other, she exited the closet as if finishing her errand in it, letting the curtain drop down before the arch.
There, standing at her table looking at the vase, she found Second.
She had seen him in passing, of course; there was no walking the tower’s length anymore without glimpsing him. She had not enjoyed the impression she’d formed of him and did not like seeing it corroborated by this longer exposure to his presence. Unlike the previous holder of the title, this Second wasn’t much older than the Emperor and it showed in the gloss of his hide, the suppleness of the wings, and the quickness of his limbs as he m
oved from one part of the suite to the other, studying cushions, pillows, the little nest-like depression in the floor the Queen so rarely used. Like the Knife, he kept his blond mane in the severe Naval style, falling in front of the military-cut tunic he affected. When he turned his face in profile, she found it classically modeled. He had a great many horns, a darker brown stripe marking the edges of his golden dorsals, and eyes a luminous turquoise. She supposed some other Chatcaavan might have found him striking. She found him disquieting. But he was Second and she had a part to play, so she dropped to her knees and bowed her head.
“The Slave Queen,” Second said. “You have not been made aware of me. I am Second. I have come to use your services.”
“My-b-better honors me-his-lesser,” the Queen said, not needing to falsify her stammer. In no universe should this new Second have made such a claim. To use the harem was one matter. To use the private and particular possession of the Emperor himself…? What was he thinking?
“Yes, I do.” His feet came closer, until his boots were near enough to touch. That was all the warning she had before he grasped her face and tilted it up to meet his scrutiny. “I have heard a great deal about you.”
“M-m-my-better? This one doesn’t understand.”
“I doubt that,” Second said with a smile that exposed the teeth on one side of his face. “But I will make myself more clearly understood, I think.” He leaned forward, pupils contracting in his glowing eyes. “I have come to have my wings oiled. Do this for me now.”
Trembling, she stared at him, unable to look away for he hadn’t released her yet. As she watched, his smile spread to the other side of his face and then, like the snuffing of a light, he dropped the expression entirely.
“Go get your tools.”
She ran for the closet as a well-trained female should and didn’t look at the Priestess as she pulled down the box. When she returned with the oil and the cloths, Second had found a stool and was sitting on it, reading from a data tablet. Her arrival caused him to spread his wings, and she kneeled between them to begin her work: her entirely useless work, because unlike the previous Second, this male needed no such care. His wings were flawless, flexible and strong, and stroking the oil down them made them glisten because the leather didn’t soak it. In places the oil even beaded and she was forced to wipe it with a dry cloth to keep it from dripping. But she performed the task with all the meticulous care she’d dedicated to the former Second’s wings, and as she did her mind raced. He had flown in—why? To show disrespect? To attempt to catch her unawares? Both? To come here and ask for the old Second’s favorite use of her suggested he knew that much about their history. But how had he found out? Had he asked someone? Or had the former Second’s files been more complete than she could have liked?
Would Uuvek be able to read them without someone knowing?
Was Second here to entrap her into doing just that? Or did he know nothing, and was this his attempt to find out? She thought of the look on his face when he’d held her by the mouth and suppressed her shudder. If he didn’t know, he was smart enough to wonder. The only question was, why did he distrust her? Because he was the Emperor’s loyal hand and the old Second had cursed her for a traitor? Or because he planned to betray the Emperor and knew she had meddled in politics before?
When she finished, the male stood, flexed and then folded his wings neatly… and left. No threats, no comments, nothing. She remained where he’d left her until the sound of his footsteps receded… and waited a while longer than that before rising and taking the box back to the closet.
Once inside it, though…
“What was he doing here?” the Priestess hissed.
“I don’t know,” the Queen said. “I don’t what he knows about me.”
The Priestess’s eyes narrowed. “You imply there are many things that he should not.”
“If you knew my history fully....”
“Maybe you’d better tell me.”
Her words were arrested before she could spill them from her open mouth. Uuvek and the Knife had assured her that her chambers were secure from surveillance, but she’d just had a stranger in her suite, one who’d been moving from one place to another in it before he’d seen her. Had he been curious about her rooms, as she’d assumed? Or had he been placing devices? How would she even know?
“Later,” the Queen said, and when the Priestess looked mutinous, she whispered, “Soon. Very soon. Go now.”
After the Priestess’s departure, the Queen sank into the hollowed nest in the center of the central chamber and rested her gaze on the moonlight silvering the stones of the floor. She remembered staring at that light after the previous Second had raped her for betraying the Empire to the Ambassador: how the bright pools had crept across the floor, receding from her as she waited for her body to stop hurting enough for her to move.
Their inability to contact the Emperor to ask after Second had not indicted Second—not incontrovertibly. It could be that someone else was behind the Emperor’s silence, and Second was in fact his loyal ally, using his visits to the harem as a way to lure the Emperor’s enemies out of hiding somehow. If she was wrong about him—if her paranoia was unfounded—then her decision to evacuate would be embarrassing. There was some potential for the Emperor’s enemies to scoop them up if they left the safety of the palace, perhaps, but if the loyalty of the palace’s personnel was assured then the most likely outcome of their flight was the discomfort of having made it for no reason.
But she had not lived at the whim of Chatcaavan males for so many revolutions to fail in her assessment of them. Leaving was the right choice.
Her eyes snagged on the stool Second had used for the oiling. The sight of it repulsed her. Taking it to the closet brought her back to the open chest, and sitting before it she petted the baubles. Rings, pendants, horn dangles, fillets and tail rings… she found she was looking for a specific jewel and let her hand drop into her lap where she could clasp its wrist. The Ambassador had showed her his ring once, the broad signet with its wingless, striking drake. A symbol, like these rings, but of agency rather than impotence. Death was the final capitulation to powerlessness. The Priestess would be the first to tell her it was her duty not to die. The Ambassador, though, had told her countless stories about death as a weapon, of the power of martyrdom.
And yet, he had fought. Or had he? Had his stay here been a form of martyrdom? It had certainly hurt him enough. She ran a finger over one of the tail rings and sighed. Why hadn’t he left her something? Some souvenir she could use to focus her thoughts. Some way to remember him concretely…
She was closing the chest as she thought it, and rested her brow against the lid in sudden exasperation. He had left her some way. He had left her himself, stored in her own body as a bone-deep pattern. Had left her more than a useless trinket, but the power to communicate with the voiceless, to bridge gaps, to imagine, to think beyond the narrow confines of the life she’d known. What would he say to her, if he was here?
He would tell her to trust her instincts.
He would tell her to trust the Emperor’s.
I have given you a weapon. You should put him to use while I’m gone.
Her hands smoothed over the top of the chest and she frowned. Why had he wanted her armed? From whom had he expected her to need protection? He had cowed the court—had put a male he’d claimed to trust on Second’s pillow. He should not have worried that anyone would harm her… if he trusted Second.
But if he hadn’t….
She lifted her head. A test. Nothing else made sense. He was testing Second, and probably placing him somewhere he could easily be isolated and eliminated. And he hadn’t wanted her to be defenseless if his suspicions had been correct. He had asked her if she was truly willing to help him, had attended so closely to her answer... you will serve me here better than you know. Or so I hope.
So her instincts and his were aligned. It was time to go. And remembering the Ambassador she knew why s
he’d been vacillating. The Ambassador hadn’t fled when he’d freed the first slaves: because he’d had more to accomplish; because staying had split the attention of their possible pursuers, and given the slaves a better chance at escape; and because he’d felt he had something to learn if he remained.
She’d worried that flight would remove her from the court where she could observe the Emperor’s enemies. She had forgotten that her actions were her own choice; that she was not being forced to walk a path, even one she’d decided on for others.
Was this the next step in responsibility, she wondered? To go from powerlessness, to responsibility for oneself, and then at last to responsibility for others?
Was this what had given the Ambassador the power to go on in the face of desolation and pain, nigh unto death?
Duty, she thought, finding the concept strange and frightening, but also compelling. She would have thought it an alien ideal, but had not Uuvek and the Knife spoken of it themselves?
The Queen rose. Once she was sure of her composure, she walked down the stairs to the harem proper. The females there were disposed in their usual lassitude and her gaze glided over them until she found the Priestess, sitting in rigid tension across from the door. “Join me in the use closet, Stripes,” she said. “We must choose some implements for Second’s pleasure.”
The Priestess pushed herself up from her seat. “Second has not indicated any desire for the items in the use closet.”
The Queen devoutly hoped he hadn’t, because it meant he might not know about it. “Perhaps he has not been made aware of the breadth of tools available to males of his station. We will make some selections and allow him to decide whether he is interested.”
The other females were watching them warily now, and under their eyes, the Priestess bobbed her head. “As you say, Mistress.”
They proceeded in silence halfway up to the Queen’s chambers, turning away at the landing to face the small door tucked beneath the final flight of stairs. There were no doubt ways to hide evidence of recent visitation, but the Queen did not know them and could only hope the fact that the use closet looked disused meant no one had entered it and left something there that could record their conversation. Turning on the lamp, she shut the door behind the Priestess and said without preamble, “Are you my friend?”
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