“It does, yes. I intend her to understand what her master will be fighting.”
“Because?”
“Because she thinks she is involved. I wish to show her how wrong she is.”
“Because?” the Usurper said again.
“Because she likes to meddle,” Second said, still holding her gaze. “And while her meddling has been inconsequential up to this point, I will not discount the possibility that she might—by accident—irritate us. You have already learned the cost of your interference, Slave Queen. By the time we are done, you will learn its futility.”
Futility. As her life had been futility up until the Ambassador’s arrival. She held her tongue, her wing arms aching.
“Lord of the Twelveworld.”
The last male in the room broke his silence, sitting up to say, “Second.”
“You have long admired the Slave Queen.”
That, she thought, was a trap, and this new lord knew it, for he squinted as he stared at her. “That was before I knew her to be unnatural.”
“Ah, good. Then you understand when I say that she needs to be dealt with. I trust you to exercise this mission on our behalf.”
“Go on, Second.”
“You will take this unnatural female and send her to the most remote of your worlds. Immure her there in your harem… and let her live out her life there.” Second grinned. “Tell her how her Emperor dies—or let her suffer in uncertainty—whichever suits you. But imprison her there, far from anything and anyone, and let her die there, impotent.”
The lord of the Twelveworld ran a finger down his nose, thoughtful. “And if she sees some use in the course of her education in impotence?”
“Her education I leave to you,” Second said. “The rest of us will be busy. Perhaps you will give the task of guarding her to someone else, once you know what we are about.”
“Which is?” The Lord of the Twelveworld looked from Second to the Usurper. “If it may be asked.”
The Usurper stirred. “Certainly the keeper of some of the most lucrative trade worlds in the border sector may know. We go to war.”
“War,” the Lord whispered.
“With the Alliance,” Second said. He looked at her and smiled slowly, his lips peeling back from his wet teeth. “At last.” To the guards, he said, “Take her to the Lord of the Twelveworld’s suite. No doubt he will want to make arrangements for her disposition as soon as possible.”
“Oh yes,” the Lord hissed. “Yes, I have far more interesting things to do.”
“Goodbye, false Queen,” Second said, low, as the guards took her by the arms. “We’ll send news when we destroy everything you have so unwisely allied yourself with. Or… we won’t.”
She lunged toward him, heedless, unable to think of anything but her desperation. To be sent away—yes, that had been her plan, but not so far that she could affect nothing! And under guard, but not by males warned that she had power…!
“Yes,” the Usurper said as Second turned his back on her. “Everything is going according to plan.”
The Species of the Alliance
The Alliance is mostly composed of the Pelted, a group of races that segregated and colonized worlds based (more or less) on their visual characteristics. Having been engineered from a mélange of uplifted animals, it’s not technically correct to refer to any of them as “cats” or “wolves,” since any one individual might have as many as six or seven genetic contributors: thus the monikers like “foxine” and “tigraine” rather than “vulpine” or “tiger.” However, even the Pelted think of themselves in groupings of general animal characteristics, so for the ease of imagining them, I’ve separated them that way.
The Pelted
The Quasi-Felids: The Karaka’An, Asanii, and Harat-Shar comprise the most cat-like of the Pelted, with the Karaka’An being the shortest and digitigrade, the Asanii being taller and plantigrade, and the Harat-Shar including either sort but being based on the great cats rather than the domesticated variants.
The Quasi-Canids: The Seersa, Tam-illee, and Hinichi are the most doggish of the Pelted, with the Seersa being short and digitigrade and foxish, the Tam-illee taller, plantigrade and also foxish, and the Hinichi being wolflike.
Others: Less easily categorized are the Aera, with long, hare-like ears, winged feet and foxish faces, the felid Malarai with their feathered wings, and the Phoenix, tall bipedal avians.
The Centauroids: Of the Pelted, two species are centauroid in configuration, the short Glaseah, furred and with lower bodies like lions but coloration like skunks and leathery wings on their lower backs, and the tall Ciracaana, who have foxish faces but long-legged cat-like bodies.
Aquatics: One Pelted race was engineered for aquatic environments: the Naysha, who look like mermaids would if mermaids had sleek, hairless, slightly rodent-like faces and the lower bodies of dolphins.
Other Species
Humanoids: Humanity fills this niche, along with their estranged cousins, the esper-race Eldritch.
True Aliens: Of the true aliens, four are known: the shapeshifting Chatcaava, whose natural form is draconic (though they are mammals); the gentle heavyworlder Faulfenza, who are furred and generally regarded to be attractive; the aquatic Platies, who look like colorful flatworms and can communicate reliably only with the Naysha, and the enigmatic Flitzbe, who are quasi-vegetative and resemble softly furred volleyballs that change color depending on their mood.
The Languages of the Pelted Setting
Eldritch
Most readers of this series will be familiar by now with some of the conventions of the Eldritch language, particularly that of shading words with colors meant to inflect their meanings. In the spoken language, these moods are indicated with single-syllable prefixes; in the written, with colored ink if people want to bother with them. (And as we learn in this text, the color modes are carried into other formats, like music.)
So, to refresh, the seven modes (three pairs, one neutral):
Gray is the normal/neutral mode, and requires no modifiers. It has one, though, if one wants to stress one’s neutrality.
Gold is the best of all worlds, and foil to Black’s violent, angry, dire, or morose connotations. This pair is the extreme emotional end of the spectrum, good and bad.
Silver is the positive, hopeful shading, foil to Shadow mode, which gives negative (cynical, sarcastic, ironic, dreadful, foreboding, fearful, etc) connotations to words. If gray is in the middle of the spectrum and black and gold the ends, then shadow and silver are between them and the gray center.
White is the mode for holy things; its foil is Crimson, for things of the body. (If you want to be technical, Eldritch illustrations put it on a perpendicular line from Gold/Black, with gray still in the center: white above, crimson below.)
Eldritch is an aggressively agglutinating language: if it can make a word longer by grafting things onto it to add meaning, it will, and if that makes it harder for non-native speakers to pronounce anything without stumbling, so much the better. It’s also fond of vowels, and almost inevitably if you see an Eldritch word with more than one adjacent vowel, they’re pronounced separately (thus, Araelis from the novel Rose Point is properly ‘ah rah EH lees’). There are also no “silent” vowels (so Galare is not ‘Gah lahr’, but ‘gah lah reh’ or ‘gah lah rey’ depending on your regional accent). There are some cases where I’ve misspelled things, or I’ve continued to write out diphthongs instead of using diacritics, but for the most part if you pronounce every single letter you see in an Eldritch word separately, you’re probably doing it right.
Like many of the languages of this setting, Eldritch was originally a conlang, created by the people who would become the Eldritch as a way to set themselves apart from the people they fled. It has been several thousand years since then, though, and the language has only become more convoluted since, a reflection of its people’s needs.
Chatcaavan
On the other hand, the Chatcaavan tongue likes it
s consonants, dislikes agglutination, prefers its verbs separate from its nouns, and is littered with many other features that contribute to it sounding “choppier” than Eldritch does to the untrained ear. Where you see multiple vowels in Chatcaavan words (like the word ‘Chatcaava’ itself), they are intended to convey syllable stress, not phonetic differences: thus, chat CAA vah. (And the ‘ch’ is actually pronounced ‘sh’... sorry about that.)
Lisinthir’s description of the reification of concepts in Chatcaavan is accurate. It’s also one of the most crucial distinctions previous ambassadors failed to grasp, through no fault of the Seersa who were sent to document the language; they didn't miss the linguistic differences, they just failed to map them accurately to the culture, which they were poorly prepared to grasp. This is one of the few times we see anything grafted onto nouns in Chatcaavan (that I know of). The difference between ‘treasure’ (the concrete thing a dragon hoards) and ‘Treasure’ (the abstract ideal, the platonic perfect ideal) is that the abstraction takes tense on the noun rather than the verb.
So, for the ideal:
Past-Beauty moves me > "Beauty moved me."
Future-Hope strengthens my fleet. > "Hope will strengthen my fleet."
Versus normal concrete nouns, taking the tense where English-speakers would put it, on the verb:
The wind buffeted me.
I will do that thing.
Or, to use the examples for the ideals:
Beauty moved me > A Chatcaavan named Beauty dragged me somewhere.
Hope will strengthen me > A weapon, or a ship, or a person named Hope will strengthen my fleet.
The idea there is that concepts exist throughout time, and all acts revolve around their permanence; while normal people and things do their time on stage and are gone. They don't get to exist forever. Titles, like abstractions, take tense on the noun. This is one of the reasons Chatcaava want them so badly; they imply immortality, significance. So here you can see the differences between a Chatcaavan named Knife and “the Knife”:
Knife pushed me. > A Chatcaavan named Knife shoved me around.
Past-Knife pushed me. > The Knife (the Chatcaavan wearing the title The Knife) pushed me around.
Universal and other Languages of the Exodus
There’s no discussing the languages of the Alliance without mentioning Universal, which is not just the lingua franca of the Alliance but the native tongue for those Pelted races that rejected the need to create their own language to sever themselves from their origins. Universal began as American English, with the Seersa as its stewards—but putting the Seersa in charge of any language project inevitably involves its expansion, since they are the Alliance’s premiere linguists. There are many, many loanwords into Universal from not just the Seersan tongue, but from all the languages the Seersa made for other Pelted races (including languages that were adopted and instantly abandoned, like the Glaseah’s). For the most part I’ve spared you those loanwords, save for the most common (like arii and alet)... but it is apparent to everyone in the Alliance that Universal is “sticky” and keeps rolling around in other cultures and coming back with new words clinging to it. This is one of its charms: it reflects the overarching Pelted culture, with its big tent philosophy.
Arii and alet, interestingly enough, are not loanwords from the Seersan tongue, but from Meredan, the Exodus language. This was a pidgin that began formation on Earth, where it was used by the Pelted (before they were called the Pelted) to communicate with each other without being understood by their owners. Meredan did not become a full language until after the Exodus, and its heyday was brief—it was spoken on-ship and then fell out of use in favor of Universal not long after the first settlements. The reason for that abandonment is still hotly debated today; you will find many academic dissertations on the topic if you browse a Pelted library in the historical linguistics section. The most popular theory is that its association with victimhood and powerlessness made it less popular than Universal, with its implication that the Pelted were free to use the language of their oppressors without fear of retribution. But no one’s sure why Meredan use dwindled, and to this day its study remains an eccentricity particular to scholars. The few words that have survived in the Universal lexicon are assumed by laymen to have been borrowed from Seersan.
Author Sketches
It's typical for me to do sketches while writing, a sort of mental doodling as I work out events and character arcs. These sketches are not intended to be the final word on what the characters look like! In fact, I usually have trouble pinning down people's looks; notably in this section of the canon, for several years I confused Lisinthir and Jahir’s face shapes. (Jahir is the one with the square jaw and Lisinthir’s the one with the pointed face, but for a while I had it backwards.) Anyway, though I don’t have as much time to draw as I like, I find I work better when I'm thinking with a pencil as well as a keyboard. I've selected a few of the sketches I've done of characters relevant to the Princes’ Game series, and hope you enjoy the peek into the artist brain.
1. Vasiht’h with Scarf: As the most difficult to visualize, I present images of Vasiht’h first. I always liked this one for the way it makes the big-cat-like body clear. (Bonus: that’s a scarf Sediryl knitted him.)
2. Jahir and Vasiht’h at home: Unfinished, but typical, and one of my favorites of them together in one of their most habitual poses (Jahir on couch, Vasiht’h on the ground.)
3. The Slave Queen: Moving on to the Chatcaava, of all the images I’ve drawn of the Slave Queen this remains the one that I think of when I think of her. Also, don’t ask me how I did that shoulder yoke with the multiple ball sockets. (And don’t ask me to do it again!)
4. Imperial Thorns: This is the other Slave Queen image that works best for me (and gives you a close up of the wing perforations).
5. The Emperor, Flying: I think this might be the only drawing I’ve ever down of a Chatcaavan in flight. It is naturally the Emperor. (I also like it because of the suggestion of the towers of the palace behind him.)
6. Marks: The Emperor isn’t particularly easy to draw, but this is the image I think of when I think of him. It was a bookmark I drew to go with Even the Wingless, and in fact was on its first edition cover.
7. The Ambassador: Segue then into Lisinthir, this was one of the first drawings of him that looked like him in my head. (Nose like a blade.) I like it particularly for the jewelry: on the right breast, the Galare unicorn and the Imtherili drake; on the left, the Alliance’s ambassadorial crest. That is also typical Eldritch attire; the coat goes over it.
8. The Duelist: The other Lisinthir image I think of when I think of him was this one of him at Ontine, dressed for a duel, with Imtherili’s swords. This is the young man Liolesa looked at and said, "Yes. Him."
9. The Dragon and the Unicorn: While writing Book 2 of this series I did a handful of abstracted drawings symbolizing Jahir (as the Galare unicorn) and Lisinthir (as the Imtherili drake). This was the first, and responsible for my mental conception of Lisinthir's gift to Jahir. (You can see all the others in the Dragon and Unicorn folder on my DeviantArt account.)
10. Alive in Your Arms: This piece is so old. SO OLD. That you can tell how long this book has been waiting to be written. (The date is 2002, if you can’t read it.) It’s also the piece that gave me Jahir’s jawline. (“Ah-ha!” said young artist me. “He’s the one with the square jaw!”) Years and much experience and skill later, I still like this piece... and I’m glad I finally wrote the story it belonged to.
Acknowledgments
The longer an author develops a series, the more canon its new books must adhere to, and the more difficult it is to remember it all. This is particularly true of settings like the Pelted universe, which have multiple standalone series with interlocking timelines. My first readers are golden folk and catch not just typos and issues within the book... they also catch continuity errors referring to multiple other books as well, and Amulet Rampant was an especially thorny problem for u
s all.
This novel, then, would have been far poorer without the services of Madison (Schaeffer), Sarah, Lola (McCrary), Bertha, Jennifer, Phil (Olynyk), and Anastasia. Your comments made me laugh, reassured me that I was on the right track, pulled me up by the nose when I wasn’t, and gave me plenty of fodder for future stories because Good Gracious, you are all full of questions. Watching you interact with one another while debating your differences of opinion over this scene or backing each other up on problems with that sentence was one of the more rewarding experiences of my career. I loved every moment of it. Thank you so much.
Thank you also to the fans who tell me that they like my brand of mixing intimacy, philosophy, and conflict in a single story. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, so every time someone sends me a note, leaves me a Livejournal comment, or writes me a review saying ‘more like this’, it matters.
From here on out, the war gets going. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride.
—M
About the Author
Daughter of two Cuban political exiles, M.C.A. Hogarth was born a foreigner in the American melting pot and has had a fascination for the gaps in cultures and the bridges that span them ever since. She has been many things—web database architect, product manager, technical writer and massage therapist—but is currently a full-time parent, artist, writer and anthropologist to aliens, both human and otherwise. She is the author of over 50 titles in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, humor and romance.
The Princes' Game series is only one of the many stories set in the Paradox Pelted universe; more information is available on the author’s website. You can also sign up for the author’s quarterly newsletter to be notified of new releases.
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