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 herself 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 by 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.

“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.”