"Just that," Lisinthir said, amused. Then, more gently, "Now tell me the real reason you have been unable to sleep."
Jahir didn't try to deny it. "I worry about Vasiht'h."
"He'll do well enough when the fight starts. It's having too much time to think about it that cripples him."
His cousin made a brief throwing-away motion, a little twitch of wrist and fingers. "Not that. We will do what we must. It's what comes after that troubles him."
"What comes after," Lisinthir repeated, watching his cousin.
"Because I doubt this is over. You said yourself the war is only beginning. And if I have some part to play in it... where does that leave Vasiht'h, who doesn't want anything to do with it?" Jahir rubbed his temple. "It's not fair to him. But I go where the Queen sends me. She sent me here, to you, and that was surely for a purpose. When we make it home, then what? Will she send me out again? You will remain in play... that may mean I will too. I don't know what purpose I could possibly serve in the conflict, but I may be one of the only Eldritch positioned to do so. How many of our kind even understand the world outside the homeworld? Much less the immensity of the conflict poised to affect us? I live in the Alliance, Lisinthir. Even if she does not send me to battle, the battle will come to me all the same. I have a responsibility to guard our interests. I may be one of the few people to even see how they are being threatened in time to ensure their defense." Jahir drew in a shuddering breath, head bowed. "I hate fighting. But to protect us, I'll go as I am directed. But my partner... he pledged himself to me, and my world, and my family. But he didn't anticipate a war. And he doesn't want to die for us." Scrubbing his face: "I don't want him to either. But I go where I'm sent!"
Lisinthir waited to see if all the words had spilled or if more were forthcoming. When the silence lengthened, he studied his cousin, saw the wire-taut tension through his shoulders, down his spine. He sat up, pushed himself off the bed. "Come."
"I... beg your pardon?" Confusion, grief, worry. Far too easy to read.
"I said 'come,'" Lisinthir said, pulling on the robe at the foot of the bed. "You are too agitated to sleep. If you lie down you will twitch and flinch and hunch your body more and more tightly until you pull a muscle. So come with me."
Jahir rose. "Where are we going?"
"To bleed some of that energy from your flesh and see if it drains some of the energy from your worries." Lisinthir grinned. "Isn't that how it works, Healer?"
"Sometimes," Jahir replied, wary now. Lisinthir was glad to hear it; he preferred it to the desolation and fear.
"Come," Lisinthir said a third time, and his cousin followed.
The gym was deserted, unsurprisingly. The crew slept in shifts, but they still observed a "day," and even under emergency power constraints they dimmed and re-colored the lighting based on that schedule. The dim red glow and darkened walls reminded Lisinthir of blood-colored moons, which was not an inappropriate image for his frame of mind. He thought of the smell of the Slave Queen's skin near the horn, the way her gasps had felt warm and damp against his ear when she bent to him. So much truth and poetry in flesh, and all of it denied his people.
"I hope you haven't asked me here to resume our weapons practice," Jahir said, subdued.
"You didn't dance."
Curiosity now, despite the fatigue. A little asperity, as well. It whetted Lisinthir's appetite, that spark of rebellion. "You didn't seriously bring me here to dance. In the middle of the night!"
"You need to lose some nervous energy," Lisinthir said, calculating the tone: a little casual, a little mischievous. It won him a smile and a frown in quick succession, and he tried not to laugh. "You said yourself that you do."
"All of us dance."
"Some are better at it than others," Lisinthir said. "And I think you are one of them."
Jahir folded his arms, unimpressed. "And you have derived that knowledge how?"
"You were tapping your heel when your partner was dancing. And your fingers, too, but it was syncopated. Very nicely done, that rhythm." Ah, he had Jahir's attention now. He began circling him, as he had done with Vasiht'h earlier.
"I had music lessons in childhood."
"Of course you did. So did I. But those lessons didn't take in me the way they did in you," Lisinthir said. He paused behind Jahir and leaned toward him, voice softening, "You sing when you heal, in the mind."
Jahir paused, surprise tightening his arms and neck. "I... do. I do?"
That was a good place to leave him, Lisinthir judged. Let him work through his own memories and wonder at them, be loosened by them. It was the truth: Lisinthir had heard it while Jahir had been building the nerve block, the hint of Eldritch lullabies, sung not just in a single voice but embroidered with harmonies that the originals didn't have. While his cousin considered it, Lisinthir padded to the wall, woke it, asked it to put together an evolution. For its genesis, something baroque and mannered... for its endpoint, something wilder and more sensuous. He let the computer build the journey from one end to the other: marvelous toys these Alliance algorithms. Then he rejoined Jahir and bowed with a flourish. "Shall we?"
"Dance," Jahir repeated, bemused. And hearing the music softly rising, "As if we were at the summer court."
"We both learned the forms, yes?"
"One dances them with the opposite sex!"
Lisinthir laughed. He would never have thought these bloodless battles would be so exhilarating, but it was fun—fun—to draw Jahir out of himself. He loved the unpredictability of an Eldritch prince's upbringing reinvented through the lens of an Alliance citizenship, an Alliance beloved. "The steps are not so difficult. I'll even take the women's part if it will make things easier for you." He mimed a curtsey with invisible skirts, the Chatcaavan robe luffing at his knees. "May I have this dance, Seni's Heir?"
"You are incorrigible," Jahir said, exasperated, but he bowed, reached forward... stopped.
There. That was the moment Lisinthir had been waiting for. Because the Eldritch dance required props, tools to stand in for the touch they denied themselves. A man should have touched a dagger's hilt to a woman's fan or wand, and instinctively Jahir had raised his hand before realizing he had neither.
Lisinthir met his cousin's hand with his instead, slid his fingers in the curve of Jahir's, let the fingertips trail along the insides of Jahir's fingers to the palm. That shudder, that was delicious. "This is what we have refused ourselves," he said, the caress light, learning. His cousin's palms were wider, but not by much. "Doesn't it strike you as ridiculous?"
"Yes—no—no, not when your touching me like that clouds my reason." Jahir laughed at himself, rueful.
Lisinthir clasped the hand fully, taking his cousin's uncertainties and pleasures and wants and fears into himself. He breathed in, settling them, and said, "And now... I step to the right, and you to the left—" He began, and Jahir fell into the form, constrained as everything Eldritch was, leeched of any connection to the senses. Lisinthir obeyed the forms but only for how they stressed the contrast of skin on skin. He felt the heat of Jahir's palm against his, knew the moment his cousin decided to curl his fingers closer by the graze of their tips against his knuckles, over Imthereli's ring.
"You think to demonstrate something."
"Do I?" Lisinthir watched Jahir's face, enjoying the sight of the other man making connections, racing from one thought to the next.
"You must, because you feel to me as if you're positioning yourself for another battle."
"And if what I want is to distract your mind from its fretting?"
"You are doing an admirable job, but only by puzzling me." Jahir let his fingers go to bow and back away, then turn to keep Lisinthir in view: it was for the woman to parade around the man, so Lisinthir did so... though he couldn't help subverting the form by prowling rather than promenading. The flush it brought to his cousin's cheeks was pleasing.
They resumed touching and stepping. Lisinthir let his cousin pace him and said, quiet, "
Our error was in too much distance. Do you know why?"
"Why?"
"Because the moment of danger is always here... where we are now. In the moments before intimacy." The music was accelerating, showing signs of infection with something wilder. Lisinthir let it carry him closer, so that each step took him nearer, near enough to sense his cousin's body heat in the chill of the room. "Our kin were wrong, cousin. They thought that intimacy was the moment of greatest peril, but it is in fact when we are vulnerable together that we are safest."
Jahir had stopped moving. Lisinthir kept his hand and kissed its knuckles, tasted the sweat in the hollows between them, pulled his cousin closer by it. "We have sex," he said. "And just before we push into another's body... that is danger. We eat, and the moment when the food is rising to our mouths... that is danger. We may be rejected. The meal may be dashed away. Anything can happen between that moment and the moment of consummation." Another kiss, this time at Jahir's shoulder. "But then we push in. Then we bite, we swallow. We are one. The communion exists, and we are safe." A last kiss, at his cousin's ear, and the shiver there was something he could feed on. "And then we pull out, then we are empty again, and in danger. When we hold ourselves apart to keep from being hurt, we accomplish nothing but the denial of nourishment. And when we draw into the midfield, wanting to hold that distance but acknowledging a need, we do nothing but destroy ourselves. This—" Cupping Jahir's face. "This is safety." That kiss he drew out, long and slow and knowing. When he paused, his cousin was shaking.
"When you are so close," Jahir said at last, their faces near enough that Lisinthir could feel the shivery breaths they rode, "you are also close enough to be hurt."
"Hurting requires you to draw back enough to separate yourself." Lisinthir brushed his lips against Jahir's. "When you are deep in one another, there is no separation."
"Cousin," Jahir said, his pain acute. "I love him, and I'm afraid that we'll be torn apart."
"He knows the only truth that saves." Lisinthir touched a finger to Jahir's mouth. "If he is with you, truly with you, in you, the way he is... then that is safety. No matter where you are or what happens. Now... dance. In and out of range, in and out of danger. Like battle, like sex, like everything vital." Lisinthir gave him a gentle push, caught his hand.
How sweet it was that Jahir obliged him... and his cousin danced like a poem, the grace of wind in trees, a thing of Air and a musician's perfect attunement. It salved something in Lisinthir to watch the changing pattern of the music loosen some of the chains that fettered his cousin so tightly. And this worked until Jahir seemed to notice the song. He started laughing, stopped, holding his midriff. "Did you ask the computer to pastiche NeoBaroque with Slink? The computer?"
"I thought maybe it would encourage you to make acquaintance with your hips," Lisinthir said, amused.
Jahir pressed a hand to his brow, mouth twitching.
"And now you will say not all dancing moves from the hips, and I will observe that in you music works its way in through your extremities and ripples inward…." Lisinthir set a hand on his cousin's chest and walked him in a circle as if in pas de deux. "And it is lovely. But you won't move me that way."
"No," Jahir agreed, catching his hand. "You are all predation, cousin. And I am drained and so are you."
"Are we?"
"We are—" Jahir paused. "You are about to kiss me."
Lisinthir grinned. Even the end of the fight was still pleasure. "Ah, then I shall not. It wouldn't do to be predictable."
In some time before the endlessness of this voyage, Jahir might have laughed and withdrawn to sit at the edge of the room and catch his breath. But now he wanted to know his own power, and if he had it. Too many new concepts, or old ones given new breath. If he was right… if he stilled himself here before the hunter and let his hope well into his eyes… if he let his shoulders loosen and his attention narrow….
Lisinthir stopped abruptly, touched fingertips to Jahir's lips, which is how Jahir found they were parted. Just a little. Just enough for Lisinthir to brush at the division. Jahir kissed them and had just enough time to smile at the frustrated noise he evoked before he received the kiss he'd decided he wanted after all. He even leaned into it on purpose this time, experimented with the sensation of not being passive, but of being willing.
"Yes," Lisinthir answered against his mouth. "Invite the stranger into the temple. And the world—" Another chafing kiss, soft and dry and electric, "—is the stranger."
So Jahir cupped his cousin's face and asked for more, tacit, and received, and took a different instruction in how to be pleasing that way. Who was the Jahir who could speak with the body as well as the word? What did he want? Was it worthy of shame?
"Enough," Lisinthir murmured, touching a finger to his mouth. "Or I will forget my fine vows and have you on this mat." His laugh was husky. "You learn quickly, cousin."
"I have an exemplary teacher," Jahir answered, and kissed the finger.
"Ah!" Lisinthir snatched it back and laughed again. "No! None of that. If you want to rest, sit. We'll both sit."
Strange how desire could be urgent and restful. How did that work? Jahir retreated to the wall and sat with his back to it, and his cousin joined him, shoulder to shoulder.
"Shame," Jahir said. "It is contextual."
Lisinthir's attention grew focused. "Go on."
"Cultural. A tool shaped to encourage social and biological necessities." Jahir touched his own lips, now hypersensitive. Would they always be that way, or would he get used to kissing? Or would that take as much kissing as Lisinthir had become accustomed to? Not likely to happen to him, certes. "And our particular culture's notions of shame are bound up in the limitations of our technology, limitations we are aware of, because we did not always have them."
"That was long ago. Dare I say it."
"Even Eldritch have a long ago," Jahir said. Such a curious sensation, this calm. How could it feel so companionable to sit alongside someone so? Someone who made his blood sing? He thought lust would make him desperate; instead, it seemed to gentle him. Maybe it was the relief of not having to fight it? Would it ever make sense to him?
"You are trying to work this out with logic," Lisinthir observed. "It is not a thing of logic. There is only one useful question."
"That being?"
"Would you love and cherish Sediryl, and would she you, and would your children be healthy were they born?"
Jahir ignored the dart of yearning that stung him, spreading fire through his body. "That is three questions."
"They are branches from the same root. The root is whether the two of you together would work within the context of the society in which you plan to live. So then. Would you?"
"I… I don't know," Jahir said. "I don't know where we would live. Or when. She has a lover, I have a partner. Short-lived both. I wouldn't draw her away from the life she has now… and I am not ready to go home…."
"Who says you must go home? Now, or even in three hundred years? You will live a good fifteen hundred, cousin, perhaps longer. Barring misfortune, you have the time. Stay in the Alliance. Go back to the homeworld. Maintain two residences! Marry your woman, and let her spend fifty years on some project and then come back to her. What is your rush? She will pace you through the years."
Jahir considered that for long moments. Then, quiet, "If I ask her. If she says 'yes.'"
"If you ask her, cousin," Lisinthir said, brushing the back of a curled finger against Jahir's cheek. "She will say yes, because you are absolutely irresistible."
Jahir accepted that because Lisinthir's belief in it was in his fingertips, in that caress. "And you? Will you go home one day? Revitalize Imthereli? The Queen will give you anything, you know."
"Will she?"
"If the Alliance is saved from the Chatcaava it will be because of you." Jahir paused, then said, "Because of the safety you and the Emperor made in one another. You left yourself in him, and he in you."
"And bo
th of us in the Slave Queen… and she in us. Yes. You understand." Lisinthir sighed a little. "I don't know, cousin. To go home. And do what? Have children with some Eldritch woman?" His laugh was curt. "Can you imagine if I had wed as my father had required? I might even now be your stepfather."
Jahir covered his eyes with a hand.
Lisinthir slid an arm around his shoulders and tugged him closer. "Yes. Rather too incestuous even for me, and I like our little cousin-play." He kissed Jahir's brow, breath warm. "It is hard for me to think that far ahead. I want—need—to see my lovers again and know that they're safe. I need to live with them, to have that life with them, however long that life might be. I can't think past that to the time when they've dissipated into the Living Air."
"I understand," Jahir said softly.
"I know." And then a smile in his cousin's voice, wry. "Though if the Queen cares to endow me with my family's lands again, perhaps that wouldn't be so bad. Given how many fights my parents had over Imthereli's losses to both Galare and Asaniefa, and my mother accusing my father of contemplating divorcing her to hitch his fortunes to the latter and maybe win back that land."
"You could be Lisinthir Imthereli," Jahir murmured.
"Keldi Imthereli," Lisinthir agreed. "It would feel strange. But I carry my father's swords, not my mother's. And I am more the drake than the unicorn, though there is a little unicorn in me also."
"And you do not hate her," Jahir said, feeling through the nest of conflicting regrets he sensed through their touch.
"Hate… the Queen?" Surprise colored Lisinthir's voice. "Should I?"
"She sent you into the Empire, unprepared—"
Scoffing. "Nothing could have prepared me for the Empire. Nothing ever prepared anyone for it, leastaways in the Alliance." A tender kiss brushed against Jahir's brow, almost absent, as if his cousin needed touch to clarify his thoughts. "I dreamed of her while I was in the Empire. She was my warning that I was changing, that I was straying too far from true." A faint smile. "She was my symbol of all things Eldritch. But she herself is very little like most of the Eldritch she rules. Maybe that should have been a sign to me. She sent me to evolve into an Eldritch who could survive a world outside our cloistered home. Just as she sent you. Yes?"
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