Lisinthir dressed in wine red instead, and black, and answered the implicit command of the card. The ache of his legs and hips as he walked up the final flight of stairs felt like a warning, rather than the usual consequence of making the long climb. The guards let him in without announcing him and there, as yesterday, was the Emperor, one clawed hand already curled atop the brandy bottle's stopper.
"You look well," the Emperor said.
"I am well," Lisinthir replied, not coming closer, not sitting. These encounters were now battles and he would meet them on his feet.
"I did not expect you to answer my invitation."
Lisinthir cocked a brow. "Why ever would I pass up such an invitation?"
"I chose wrong words," the Emperor said, pulling the stopper free with a pop. "I did not expect you to be capable of answering my invitation. The Eldritch female could hardly bear my touch. Alliance citizens dissolve into cringing slaves when I use them. Yet here you are."
"Yet here I am," Lisinthir agreed. "And here you are. Pouring for me again."
The Emperor hissed a laugh. "Is that... fire I hear? Do you actually attempt to insult me again?"
"I'm thirsty," Lisinthir said casually, and folded his arms over his chest.
Even expecting the attack he couldn't follow it. The Chatcaava moved too quickly, with a swiftness that seemed more reptilian than mammalian. This time, Lisinthir reached for the Emperor, determined to show no desperation but also to give no quarter.
When dark claws pinned his mind with the Emperor's alien hunger and his body with the Emperor's alien weight, something black in Lisinthir rose to meet them. His vicious kick punched the Chatcaavan onto his back and Lisinthir lunged, locking his small jaws around the scaled throat. He almost succeeded in choking the male upon whose whim he lived before the Emperor flipped him, smothered his mind and violated his body. Lisinthir howled into the rumpled carpet, partially from pain—all in frustration. Laughing, the Emperor hauled his head back by his hair and breathed into his ear, mocking, forcing him to listen to his pleasure.
Emptied again, Lisinthir stared at the floor and shook. He had no idea what to do with such anger, and was still struggling to contain it when a glass appeared in front of him. He eased himself up to a seat, wincing, and downed the entirety in one swallow. A refill appeared and Lisinthir looked up.
Across from him the Emperor was standing. His arm hung stiff at his side and he absently rubbed his midriff... and this time the low light touched beads of blood on his side. Scrapes, no doubt. But deep enough.
Lisinthir breathed hard over the glass, letting the alcohol put a wall between himself and the pain, and the fury.
"For a body without claws or teeth, you make do," the Emperor said, studying him.
"Perhaps next time, I will more than make do," Lisinthir answered, the growl in his soul marring his voice.
The Emperor smirked and toasted him.
The Slave Queen believed the Ambassador to be a male who meant his promises; she also knew herself to be a non-entity, as she had been all her life. Thus the following morning she stood in the center of her suite and warred with herself over whether to prepare for the Ambassador's arrival or resign herself to his failure to appear. At the last, she brought out a small floor-table and pillows. She sent for juice and candied flowers. She brushed her own hair and dispensed with most of her jewels, knowing they would only call attention to her status as one of the kept in the alien's eyes and thus distress him. Then she sat on a pillow and waited... and as she had trusted, he came.
Dressed in brown, which was not a color she would have thought would suit him, but it did. Brown like burnt sugar and a blouse so crisply white it seemed silver, held together with black laces. He had dressed impeccably for her and yet he had only to stand on the landing for a few moments for her to know that he suffered.
"Are you wounded?" she asked, rising.
"Not anymore," the Ambassador said dryly. "Your Surgeon is remarkably apt, if impoverished with words."
"He does not talk much," the Slave Queen said. "Few people know him, or anyone Outside. It keeps them safe."
"I suppose it must," Lisinthir said. He walked to a side table and picked up the book he'd forgotten there. "And here's where I left that. It seems so long ago, does it not?"
She did not answer—how could she? Every day here seemed so much like the next that time and its passage never concerned her. Like Second, the Ambassador seemed to spend his agitation in movement and so she watched; watched and wondered that he was able to move so freely after a second encounter. The Surgeon's touch was deft.
"I think he is pleased," the male continued after a while. "Amused, even."
"To have invited you again with you barely recovered from the first test... surely so," the Slave Queen said. "You should celebrate, and—" she searched for the word, "—/weep/."
"There will be time for /weeping/ later," he said. "For now I am glad to be on my feet and not too much the worse for the wear. Save my dignity." He joined her in front of the table, and seemed too large for it. She sat across from him after he'd made himself comfortable on one of the pillows. "And you? You are well?"
What a bizarre question. "My world changes very little, Ambassador," she said. "As I am today I shall be tomorrow, and very likely the next. I am more concerned with you."
"He did not do more to me than he did yesterday," the Ambassador said. "Remarkably less... or else I weathered it better. I will survive, lady. Somehow. And I will accomplish my aims."
Hearing it, she believed him and marveled.
He lifted the book. "Shall I teach you to speak?"
"Are those stories?" the Slave Queen dared to ask.
"Music, actually," he said. "But also stories in the lyrics, and they are our oldest stories. You like stories?"
"I used to," the Slave Queen said, fighting the uncomfortable sensation of regret. "When there were those who told them to me."
"Well then, I will tell you stories," the Ambassador said with relish. "It will serve us, since to teach you to speak I must teach you to think as we do."
"That you shall never accomplish!"
"We'll see," he said with a grin and flipped through yellowed pages. "But which story to tell. You must forgive me if I go slowly."
"Is it so difficult to choose?" the Slave Queen asked. On the passing pages she saw only lines and curves, none she could make sense of.
"No... it's just that these are Eldritch songs."
"And you do not sing," the Slave Queen guessed.
He laughed; it was not a laugh free of his recent experiences, but that he could laugh at all was an accomplishment. "Oh, I can sing, though a bard I won't ever be. It's just that they're in my tongue and I am teaching you Universal. I will have to translate." He stopped on one page. "Technically I should not be telling you these stories at all. My people observe a habit of secrecy that has its own name... we call it the Veil, and we are not supposed to part it for outsiders. We do not teach them our tongue, tell them our histories or stories, or reveal ourselves personally. We don't allow medical tests or research. We rarely, in fact, travel."
The Slave Queen folded her arms around her chest. "And you will tell me these stories because I am a non-entity, and you do not feel compelled to wear this Veil for me?"
He looked up at her with intent eyes. "I part this Veil for you because you have earned my trust."
"I wish I hadn't," the Slave Queen said, ducking her head. "I wish you would see me as all the others do. I wish you had not brought me these questions, these feelings."
He set the book down. "I have offended," he said, though his tone was careful, probing.
"No," she said. "You have been nothing more than yourself. But just by doing so, you have complicated my life." She closed her eyes. "The Surgeon speaks to me, and perhaps he does that to all things that can talk back. But Second now addresses me as if I know things that are useful." Opening her eyes, she looked at him. "What is the value of bein
g a person? Why should I want this thing? Why should your trust mean so much to me? I suffer enough. I wish to court no more suffering."
He looked at her with great sobriety. "Perhaps I do you wrong, lady. I act selfishly, because I cannot bear to see you so completely enslaved, when the truth is that only you can decide what the benefits of freedom are and whether they are worth their price. But to treat you like furniture... I cannot do it. Send me away, if that is what you wish, but to use you the way Chatcaava use you is not in me."
She shivered and looked down at her lap, at her folded hands there. She did not want him to go. But she wasn't sure she could bear the changes. She wanted to hear the stories, but not to offer a bed for discontent. She'd thought Laniis would be trouble, but Laniis had been a prisoner like her, resigned to the reality of a lifetime in the tower. The Ambassador was true peril.
"I am afraid," she said, because between loneliness and comfort she couldn't choose.
He offered her his hands and she looked at them, surprised. When he didn't withdraw them, she slid her palms over his, rested her fingers delicately on his wrists. What he felt through his skin she couldn't guess but he did not flinch, nor even make any sign that the gesture had significance beyond the simple touch.
"This is what I offer," he said.
Tired, the Slave Queen laughed. "You make it sound so simple when you have given me to know how much you do just to hold my hands."
"It's merely a connection," the Ambassador said. "Whether it's mind to mind or flesh to flesh. Whether you feel comforted by the heat of my skin or the knowledge that I know your thoughts. It's all the same, lady. It is a bridge."
"It is a choice," she said.
"And choosing is hard," he agreed, for he knew her ambivalence. His grip firmed and he squeezed her hands in his long ones. "I will not force you. Shall I give you time?"
"I... " Somewhere in the words she'd lost control. No. Somewhere in the past weeks she'd lost control. This was not the life she was accustomed to, not the life she understood. She fought for some point of similarity with the events she'd weathered throughout her life and said, "Is there any undoing it?"
"No," the Ambassador said.
"And you are not leaving," she said.
"No," he said.
"Then tell me the stories," the Slave Queen said, though fear quickened her breathing.
He let go of her hands and took up the book.
On the fourth night, the Emperor tangled himself in the comforter lying across the couch. The seconds he lost yanking free gave Lisinthir enough time to press that long neck into the pillows and give back three nights' worth of anger and humiliation. The Emperor's wings flailed wildly around his head but he ducked their vicious thumb-claws with an agility born of desperation. He even bore the punishment he received for his insolence with less anger than usual, though he fought it so hard he wrenched all the muscles along his side and won himself a new set of tears along the other. That night he walked down to the Surgeon and presented himself for healing without even wiping the bloody streaks from his face.
In his chambers, washing before bed, Lisinthir remembered that at home what he'd just done would have seen him put in stocks; in the Alliance, he would have been tried and possibly imprisoned, depending on which set of laws claimed him. It seemed a strange and distant realization. What was criminal for the Alliance was a triumph to the Chatcaava—to best the Emperor in violence, to make him choke on his own sheets. What it said about him that he'd been capable of it, Lisinthir didn't know. Only that when the opportunity had come no part of him had been unwilling. It had given him little emotional satisfaction, though his body was replete.
But that he'd worried his hosts, he had no doubt; his mailbox still contained no responses to his requests for meetings. The trek to Third's offices had revealed that Third had been sent away on some business... but Second most assuredly was in the capital, for Lisinthir had seen him at supper each night. Despite that, Second never seemed to be in his office when Lisinthir made the journey, nor did that male stop by.
Let him stall. He'd soon learn respect when he found Lisinthir hopping the pillows. And in the mean, it gave Lisinthir needed time to keep himself all of one piece. To go every night to brutality, to let it enter his mind through bruised grip and swift blow, and then to let it flow out of him in time to eat a cordial after-breakfast meal and teach the Slave Queen of freedom, love and personhood... that required more of him than he'd ever needed to give. Not even the pettiness of Ontine had prepared him for this. Dueling had made his body flexible. The Alliance had stretched his mind. Together they proved a poor education for an impossible enterprise.
Surely soon, he would accomplish what he'd entered into this relationship to gain: the Emperor's confidences. Until then, he would do all he could to remain himself, apart from what he did. Unmoved. Somehow.
The passing days made the Ambassador's stories no less boggling. He spoke of queens who wielded power so great that males bowed to them and begged to sire their offspring. He spoke of battles in which single individuals proved so powerful they defeated entire armies. In his stories, love moved people to feats of incredible stupidity... and then saved them from the consequences. There were no slaves, though prisoners there were a-plenty. And while not all the stories ended happily, all of them resounded with stern triumph and an alien consistency.
Every morning, she sat and listened, and learned new words from the lips of a male who sometimes sat straight as a tower, and sometimes drooped with palpable exhaustion. But always he came, and she passed the mornings in his company and wondered that the Emperor had not slain him yet.
She wondered too, that the Emperor had not seen her since the Ambassador's entrance to the testing; thus her guarded curiosity when he did arrive one evening after supper. He did not leap for her, nor command her to any task... as he hunted in the chest near the landing for whatever he sought to use on her, she almost heard him... thrumming. An absent noise, self-satisfied. Astonished, she waited on her knees as he moved with the deft languor of the well-pleased. He turned to her with ribbons and wraps and gestured for her to rise.
"The statue wants finishing," he said.
Compliant, the Slave Queen posed herself as he had dictated the night the Ambassador had been brought before him in the company of guards. She locked her gaze on the banister so as not to draw attention to her surprise. He so rarely came to her without agitation in his heart. To have him winding ribbons around her thighs and threading silk cord through the perforations in her wings, content with such a trivial obeisance, left her unnerved.
He had tied her legs together and her wings apart when Second shuffled up the stairs and bowed before him.
"A pleasant surprise," the Emperor said. "You do not come up here enough, Second. Sit, sit."
"Thank you, Exalted," Second said, though his voice was heavy.
"Shall I tie her arms up or to one side?" the Emperor asked. "I should like her to represent Ease."
"Ease," Second repeated.
"Perhaps I should have had her lie down first," the Emperor said. "But I want a beautiful curve, one that suits the eye."
"Exalted," Second said. "There are several matters I fear I must discuss with you."
"I am listening," the Emperor said, and his voice grew just crisp enough for the Slave Queen to know that Second had drawn him out of his reverie.
"Third has been absent too long."
"Third is on assignment," the Emperor said. "Doing work I sent him to do. Work he is good at."
"Work he will use to attempt to curry favor," Second said.
"He may succeed," the Emperor said, then hissed a laugh. "I wanted to give him the opportunity. He has disappointed me too much, too often."
"You could take a new Third."
"But training a new subordinate is tiresome, and I am busy," the Emperor said, and looped a ribbon around the Slave Queen's neck. She ducked her head demurely, and from this angle could not see her master, but
could see Second—and his worried frown—well enough.
"You need not spend so much time on what keeps you busy now," Second said.
"I needn't, but I can," the Emperor said. "That is what fascinates me."
"It's been two weeks," Second said. "Almost three. Surely there is nothing new to see."
The Emperor laughed. "Spoken like one outside my antechamber. Is it not enough that he comes to me every night, survives me and returns for more the following evening? And there he sits on the fifth pillow, and the court mocks him and fears him and wonders why he's there when he does not look injured. And yet I injure him."
"You give honor wounds to an alien," Second said. "If the court discovered it, they could accuse you of devaluing honor."
"Let them come to me every night for nearly thirty days and tell me that the alien has not earned that honor," the Emperor said. He lifted the Slave Queen's head with a hand beneath her jaw, positioning it with a slight tilt. "He fascinates. I push and he does not yield. It is new, Second. I am curious."
"He is no different from the others," Second said, and in his voice the Slave Queen marked the rasp of desperation. "Not at core."
"Ah, but he is," the Emperor said. "What other Alliance Ambassador has dared what he dares?"
"He cares about creatures unworthy of such regard," Second said. "He cares about slaves, Exalted! Surely his rescue of them should tell you that much!"
"He did it to prove himself against me," the Emperor said.
"He did it because he could not bear to see females in their proper place," Second said. "I speak truth, Exalted! How can anyone who values the lives of slaves be worthy of your claws?"
Now, at last, the Emperor's brow furrowed and he turned from his pleasure. The tension in his back pulled his wing-vanes taut. "You suggest he saved them because he was too soft to watch them suffer."
Even the Wingless Page 21
