The members of her hold were all standing outside the vessel at parade rest, awaiting him. He liked them all, from the disgruntled Seersa medic to the wild-haired human computer specialist. They were just what he’d been hoping for when he’d resigned himself to the need for help: like the crew of the courier that had rescued him, they were eager for the fight.
“And that’s everyone,” Osgood finished. “Except for our loaner… and here she is.”
There was a woman descending the short ramp from the hatch and his breath caught at the sight of the white-furred tail. By the time she stepped foot on the ground he didn’t need her to face him to know her. He crossed the ground between them in two strides and what he saw in her eyes when she looked up at him confirmed his welcome.
He swept Laniis Baker into his arms and laughed. “And here is my wayward, whom I thought would stray!” he said in Chatcaavan, triumphant.
“Did you?” she said, beaming up at him from the shelter of his arms. “You should have known better, Ambassador. The moment they released me to duty I went back to the border. I pay my debts…!”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you do. I knew you would.” He snorted. “And yon Night Admiral tried to tell me you might not be capable.”
“Lying to your face,” Laniis said cheerfully. “I’ve been on duty for months now.”
“I forgive him it as it means you’re here. Are you ready to wreak a little vengeance, arii?”
She tightened her grip on him, her joy washing through him in pulses. “I’d follow you into Hell. Just lead the way!”
Lisinthir kissed the top of her head and stepped back to find the entirety of his new crew staring at him. Several of them were baffled; the Aera was grinning. Meryl was watching him with interest.
“We have been through rather a lot together, Laniis and I,” he said. “I am glad she was available for reassignment.”
“I see,” Meryl said. “We’re all at your disposal, Ambassador. Your luggage is onboard… if you’re ready?”
“Past so,” Lisinthir said. “Let us be about our work, aletsen.”
The flight agent had given Jahir a choice when he’d called to amend his reservation for the flight home, but as he had no desire to sleep alone in the suite he’d shared with Lisinthir he thanked her and chose the awkwardly timed shuttle that left in the cold hours of the night. It seemed fitting to end his wild tryst thus: not in comfort, but in urgency, surrendering to restlessness and eager to go home to the beloved, and then… to the waiting. How he would weather the waiting with grace he had no idea, but knowing there would be an end to it should help. Touching the talisman under his clothes, Jahir knew there would be that end. One might give a rampant rampant, boldly colored and ornamental, as a lover’s gift… but a secret rampant, meant to pass unnoticed, was a prayer for safety, not a proclamation of public affection.
Such a pas de deux they danced, of secrecy and boldness, of privacy and display. They could kiss in a public place, knowing the censors would sweep up the inevitable imagery recording it… but could not admit to affection with words, not and believe it. He’d used an entirely different language to express it, knowing that their own was too freighted with years of masks and lies for either of them to trust it.
That too he would fix one day.
Jahir returned to the suite to pack. The amulet was the surest memento, but Lisinthir had left him the blanket and he took that, along with the mask, secured in its case. He stopped at the door leading out to look one final time at the place he’d lost his virginity and found something more essential, and left it forever.
He discovered, then, just how much his cousin had been paying for the Maven horses, and laughed at the price tags on their sparkle horses before engaging his cousin’s for the afternoon. With his luggage in storage and nothing to fetter him, he found himself before the forest on the restive Jackson Pollock, a dancer on hooves who tugged at the reins as if skeptical of his newest rider. Jahir ran an absent hand down the horse’s warm neck, staring past the pricked ears at the path, dappled now with late afternoon sunlight. The smell of pine duff capered past on the same wind that pushed his hair over his shoulders, and flooding his lungs it made him aware of every inch of his skin. He trembled once, face lifted, eyes closed… and then smacked his heels into his mount’s sides. As they surged forth, he stretched his awareness outward, sensing the world opening before him, the distant susurrus of the minds of the starbase, and on the velvet nap of that starfield, the burning sun that was his cousin, fading, stretching, falling away.
Lisinthir had given him this. Had given him his body. Had unshackled his mind. The horse plunged into the variegated light and shadow of the woods and he guided it unerring, trusting himself, panting, urgent, alive. The steed tested him, fierce and unyielding; the forest’s mazing light and many obstacles demanded. He whipped the horse around them all and urged him faster and faster until they broke together from the shade and into the glory of a sunset on the plains, and as they sprinted into it he laughed for joy and knew himself forever changed. Lover, mind-mage, sword and healer: he was Jahir Seni Galare, and he was companioned by great powers, and he was alive.
The war was coming. He was ready.
CHAPTER 18
She did not die.
This did not startle her, for when had she ever died despite all that had been done to her? She expected survival, for survival was worse punishment than any surcease, no matter its permanence.
No, what did surprise her was knowing that she had almost died, and this she discovered because she’d dreamed of floating in warm gel, breathing its strange, astringent scent; dreamed of seeing the world through a rippled blur that cast everything in a greenish light. When she woke again she was on a clinic bed, a place reserved exclusively to males. Staring at the pillow, she wondered if the new Second realized how futile his fight against the Emperor was, when his very rebellion caused him to embrace ways that should have been anathema to him.
Waking brought company. Triage first, eyes flicking to the monitors, assessing them in silence. After his departure, the Surgeon, who did the same. Unlike Triage, he met her eyes, and that acknowledgment at last made a shiver traverse her spine. She felt naked and insubstantial, light-headed.
“You’ll live,” he said at last.
“Did I almost die, then?”
“You would have.” The Surgeon pulled the sheet down. “Turn on your stomach.”
Twisting, she lifted her wings—but nothing pulled at them, no weight, no stretch where they should have tugged at her back. The shock of it sucked a moan from her, and she pressed her mouth into her arm to stop it up, to gag herself before she could make another such noise.
“Good to practice that,” the Surgeon said. “Don’t let him know how much it troubles you.” She felt his hands along the edge of one of her wing arms, near the elbow joint. “Can you feel this?”
“Yes,” she managed past her tight throat.
“Good. Sometimes there’s nerve damage. You seem to have been spared.”
This was mercy? She’d had no idea how much her wings had mattered to her until they’d been stripped. When they’d been whole, they’d been an expression of her identity—when mutilated, symbols of her oppression. But they’d always existed, and now… now she knew they’d been her hope for a future when she could fly. Maybe not with them, literally, but in some way. She was Chatcaavan—was winged, could Touch and Change.
She’d been Chatcaavan. Now she was truly a freak.
The Surgeon touched her shoulder. “I am sorry.”
“Have you ever… can you…”
“Regrow them?” The Surgeon gently folded the arms and tucked them against her back, as if reminding her how to move them now that she no longer had vanes to guide them into place. “It’s not been done. Males don’t suffer this injury and live.”
Not because they were weak, but because to suffer it was to become un-male, un-Chatcaavan, and so they preferred to die. She forced hers
elf to still her tremors before they became shudders. She was not wearing eyes capable of weeping, and to keen her grief here… no. She could not allow herself any weakness now or she would be incapable of controlling it later. “Has he said what is to be done with me?”
“No. Only that you were to be kept alive. And that he was to be informed when you were well. I will have to tell him, now that you are awake.”
She tried sitting. The world swayed and then sank into place around her. When the vertigo faded, she said, “You must not risk your status.”
The Surgeon watched her without visible emotion, but she thought she’d surprised him. “You believe I will remain.”
“I know you will. The safest place during a coup is Outside.”
“You do not blame me for this.”
She looked up at him. “No. Because when my Emperor returns, you will prefer him to Second. And you will help him.”
“And you are certain of this.”
“Should I be less so?”
He canted his head, then looked away from her, and because he’d stripped her wings from her, she pressed. “Should I?”
The Surgeon did not immediately reply and this time she let it lie, until at last he said, quiet, “They were not beautiful. Could not be, when they’d been hacked and pierced and lacquered. But they were yours.” He lifted his head. “They should have been left to you.”
The Slave Queen exhaled, shivering. Then she pushed herself onto her feet and steadied herself with a hand on the bed. “You may tell Second I am ready to receive him.”
She was sent for.
This was novel. Never since she’d been relegated to the tower had she been sent for. Males had always come to see her, and until she’d received this summons she had not fully appreciated the deference implied by their visits. Even when the Emperor had become her lover he had never summoned her to his tower—he had asked the Ambassador to bring her, or come to her and escorted her himself. The Slave Queen might be the most debased of all females in the Empire, but she was also the most exalted, and if her tower was a prison it was also a court and had belonged only to her. To be sent for, like a menial… that was new. She disliked it.
At very least her confinement in the clinic made the distance traversable. Had she been in her tower, she would not have been capable of the walk to the fields where the males ate in the evenings. As it was, she arrived almost too shaky to appreciate the view, for when had she seen this aspect of the court life? It was barred to females, this casual group of low tables and pillows, in the rough square that circumscribed the dueling grounds where the Ambassador must have killed Third, and the Emperor Second-who-was. She found it strange to look upon it and find it banal: what about this setting deserved to have hosted such momentous events? It smelled of brine and turned earth and roasted meat, and she hated it almost as much as she hated being exposed to it with her indecent injury on display. That the males did not seem to note her when the guards brought her to a pillow at the edge of the square only humiliated her more. Sent for, but not as entertainment, and not as the object of attention… then what? As witness?
How many revolutions would she spend, forced into the role of witness to the acts of males? How had she come to resent it so quickly when all her life she’d been resigned to passivity?
No one offered her food. It was just as well; her appetite remained depressed, and the Surgeon had not forced her to accept anything. She concentrated on making herself as invisible as possible and wondered why she was here.
Second was. On the only raised table, he sat on a pillow alongside the empty cushion that had presumably once held the Emperor. He talked to the other males, drank, ate, seemed completely at his ease. And yet she was here. She cast her gaze over the remaining company, finding it aggressive and nervous. Subdued, she thought; too loud and prone to sudden silences. They were attempting normality in the Emperor’s absence. He had cowed them too well for them to act as she would have expected, freed from his oversight. Not one of them held her interest, so she returned to regarding Second. Did he even notice her on the corner of the square?
He looked up once, directly at her, and grinned that ugly fanged smile. She refused to flinch and felt a chill at the amusement that welled into his eyes.
They were into the third course of the meal when another male walked into the square. As the males around him talked and stripped the meat off the bones of their selections, this male headed straight for the central table, walked up the graded slope… and sat on the Emperor’s pillow. He did it so naturally that no one noticed, initially. But someone stopped talking and then they were all silent, their faces turned toward the single black cushion and the male on it, who was not eating or talking, but sitting cross-legged with his hands on his knees. There was nothing casual about his posture or his gaze. No cruelty, no arrogant slouch. But the Slave Queen shuddered at the sight of him.
The wind whorred into the silence, stirring the brown grasses, and still the congregation waited.
“I am the Emperor,” said the new male.
The Slave Queen never knew what brave male said, “We already have an Emperor,” but he spoke with conviction.
“You do,” the new male agreed. “I am he.”
A great hesitation. A coup should be accompanied by violence; even the Slave Queen understood that. One did not arrive and claim the Thorn Throne by sitting on its owner’s pillow and declaring it done. One fought a bloody duel for it, proved oneself more vicious than any challenger. No one knew what to do with a male who stepped into a vacuum without a fight.
“What happened to the old Emperor?” said another, finally.
“He is fighting some backwater world for control,” said the new male. “He will not return. Or if he does, I will kill him.”
“You do not look capable of killing the Emperor.”
“I am,” said the new male.
Nothing else. There was no bravado in his voice, no boasting. He was stating a fact.
“Are there any other questions?”
“And if we don’t believe you?” said the first male.
“You will learn otherwise with time.”
“And if we choose not to accept you,” said the second male.
“Kill them,” said the stranger. Behind him, three males stood, pointed weapons at the first and second speakers, and shot them dead. They toppled onto their tables. The males seated alongside them froze as the bodies spilled blood over their meals, their knives, onto their pillows.
“This is now how things are done at the court of the Thorn Throne,” said the new male. “I am your Emperor.” He paused, then continued, his voice unmodulated by satisfaction or anger. As if, the Slave Queen thought with horror, he was not flesh and blood, but machine. “Are there any other questions?”
This time no one dared speak.
“The wine, Exalted,” Second said, offering a cup.
The stranger took it, sipped, and beckoned a server forth. Conversation seeped back into the field, furtive and strained. Sitting on her pillow, the Slave Queen tried to quell her shudders and failed.
She had hardly had time to lie down in the clinic before she was summoned again, this time to the Emperor’s tower, and a climb she had undertaken gladly when escorted by the Ambassador was grueling under these circumstances. She could only imagine what the male guard forced to accompany her was feeling, trapped on the interminable stairs; she would have resented it had she been able to fly. But she couldn’t, and so she went up by foot, step after step, wondering how the Ambassador had managed it not just in health, but wounded and bleeding. That first night the Emperor had raped him… he’d somehow come all the way down this tower and all the way up the harem’s to reach her suite at its pinnacle. How had he done it? How much blood had he left in his wake? What servant had been forced to walk up and down the stairs, scrubbing up the stains?
Her mind chased these thoughts. They helped keep her from lingering on the fact that she’d been summoned b
y the false Second to the Emperor’s tower. Her Emperor’s tower, where she’d once known such joy. She hadn’t found the climb fatiguing then.
She’d also not been struggling with the aftermath of a crippling injury, either, or her distress at what she’d witnessed on the field.
The door to the Emperor’s antechamber was open, and there she found her nemesis. He was not alone. One of the males she recognized from the field was sitting on a chair… and on a third perched the Usurper, his posture stiff and erect. Second radiated an arrogant power so effortlessly that he eclipsed both the other males, and yet she was far more frightened of the Usurper than of Second. Something in his eyes… as if he was Outside and analyzing everything Inside, not out of curiosity over its contradictions, but because he had dismissed those irregularities, had decided they needed regulation. He looked at her and saw not a threat, not a curiosity, and not a female… but a thing out of place that was about to be put back.
“This is it?” asked the Usurper.
“This is it,” Second confirmed. “The orchestrator of the mass exodus from the harem tower.”
The Usurper’s eyes narrowed. “I’d assumed you’d already taken care of it.”
“I have,” Second said, studying her with a predatory smile. “I am now, in fact. Part of that process is for her to see you at work. How did you enjoy it, female, to see your weak Emperor so easily overthrown?”
So many of the questions leveled at females by males were rhetorical. She held herself very still, emptied her eyes of any emotion.
Perhaps he took that as a sign of distress, for he continued, “No doubt you were thinking I was the usurper, and tucking away everything you’d observed of me, so that if you were able to contact your master again you could report it to him. Useless, that, as he already knows me. We are the best of friends, your master and I. Or we were.”
“Does this speech serve a purpose?” the Usurper said. Any other Chatcaavan would have sounded bored. He sounded impatient.
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