CHAPTER 3

Was he relieved or anxious? It was possible to be both, perhaps. Jahir followed Lisinthir into the hall, allowing himself a surreptitious glance at his cousin as he started down the corridor. Jahir had expected Lisinthir to look better after almost a month convalescing, but he hadn’t anticipated just how much. The hollows between the tendons on the backs of his hands had filled, and the shadows beneath his cheekbones were less knife-like; his skin had reclaimed its nacreous gleam and the whites of his eyes were clear, leaving one with no distraction from the unusual darkness of his midnight eyes. This was the man he might have met in the Queen’s court on the homeworld, had they ever attended it at the same time. This extravagantly vital man, narrow and quick as a blade, every motion confident and practiced on a field more dangerous than a drawing room. What would he have thought of the heir to Nase Galare then, he wondered? Would he have found him as compelling?

It was a wonder their world had ever held Lisinthir at all. He did not belong there, for all he wore its costume with careless ease. He didn’t even belong here, in the luxurious halls of the Alliance’s cosmopolitan cities. He had been born to wrestle dragons, and Jahir wondered suddenly if he would ever see Lisinthir among the Chatcaava. What a sight that would be…!

“A coin for your thoughts?”

Jahir drew abreast of him, folding his hands behind his back. “Dragons.”

Lisinthir smiled at that, and did not press.

They gained the lift and took it, not to a Pad station or the city level or the port, but halfway down the wall. Surprised, Jahir followed his cousin out of the lift and onto a shadowed promenade lit with strung, colored lights, overlooking a twilit market thronged with people. There was no night on a starbase save that it was created, and this... this had been designed for atmosphere, for the drama of sharp shadows and backlighting, of fantastical lanterns and running lights guiding the throngs through the stalls, stairs, and mysterious shops.

“Stay close,” Lisinthir said.

“What else!”

His cousin flashed him a grin and threaded into the crowd. At least it was easy to see him: as varied as the Alliance’s peoples were, the Eldritch looked the breed apart that they were, taller than most, and pale. Lisinthir’s hair was an extravagance down his back, white banner on fabric gone dark as blood in the low light. And his cousin seemed not at all affected by the press… unavoidably, perhaps. He could not have survived the Empire had he been disturbed by touch.

Jahir, too, had acquired some resistance to the discomfort of casual contact. He didn’t like the crowd, but the market fascinated him. There were outdoor markets in Veta’s city, but this was more exposed technology than the Alliance typically favored as an aesthetic. There was no attempt to disguise the starbase’s metal walls and floors; the shops were cut into the walls and stitched through with glowing blue and purple lights, and glittering fabric swags hung from the balconies, or across the corridors that narrowed into a warren of tunnels: nothing like a true night sky, and yet reminiscent of one anyway. There were raised platforms with kiosks selling coffee and kerinne and alcohol, and alcoves tucked beneath spiraling glass and metal stairs leading to second floors, and third, and fourth. And the people here wore glowing clothes or paint, like deep sea fishes, luminescent and lovely.

Lisinthir touched his wrist, drawing his attention back. He ducked close enough to be heard over the noise. “The clubs are like this too, except with music. We will go to one later.”

“With music!” Jahir tried to imagine a club melded with this pastiche of phosphorescence and gossamer and paint. The music wouldn’t be dreamlike, he knew, but the sort of pounding bass and drumwork that would make the floor throb beneath his feet. He shuddered despite himself.

“Just so,” Lisinthir said, satisfied. “So we must find something to decorate ourselves with, yes? Or at least, I must. You may, or you may choose the alternate plan I believe I have waiting for you. I am curious to see if it will work.”

“Should I be worried?”

Lisinthir snorted, amused. “No? Yes? Pick.”

Jahir laughed, quiet. “Let’s find your warpaint. And eat.” He glanced at the flow moving past them. “Somewhere quieter than this, I hope.”

“Oh, certainly. It is raucous here, where you find the best of the artisans—I have been here several times on a multiplicity of errands. But the Trenches are only part of the Hull culture, which had its genesis in a fascinating twist of Alliance history.”

“Which… you will tell me about?”

“Over dinner,” Lisinthir agreed. “But our first and most important stop is here.” He gestured with a flourish and Jahir eyed him before stepping through the narrow hatch and into darkness. A truer one than the artificial twilight outside: the walls were swathed in black velvet, and there was some Alliance technology at work that made the shadowed spaces between the displays seem deeper and the people in them blurred and difficult to hear. Partial walls and columns further interrupted the room’s lines, swathed in the same draperies. The only lights in the store were bright spots trained on the wares, and they were masks… masks of such glory he almost didn’t move aside for his cousin to enter. Pieces of art, each obviously crafted by some artist, mounted above two small placards, a number and a list of materials. There were no prices. People who had to ask after prices would not be here.

The thought of donning such things was staggering, even to him, and he had worn chains of pearls and blue diamonds to court functions. With his back to the wall by the entrance, Jahir murmured in their tongue, “You mean us to go masked to the dance?”

“The club I have in mind requires costume.” Lisinthir slid a possessive arm around his waist, waited for him to object. Jahir considered it, but no one would see them in this carefully crafted salon, and he found he wanted the touch. “I care little what people think of me, cousin. But you are a man with a profession and a partner, and I knew not how much you wanted revealed, even fleetingly. A therapist needs to inspire trust, yes?”

“That presumes that we’ll be dancing in a fashion people would consider inappropriate.”

Lisinthir eyed him, lifted that brow, mischief and challenge and amusement all at once.

“You may be disappointed,” Jahir said, and immediately wondered why he’d said it.

“I won’t. Come. Let us find our costumes.”

There was something of a museum in the presentation, and yet the knowledge that there were people nearby he could not see well, and that all of them were here to buy disguises, lent the store an unavoidably erotic savor. He was unsurprised, given Lisinthir’s involvement, and accepted it in the intended spirit, looking at the works of art hanging on the walls and trying to imagine who he might allow himself to be if he knew he would go unrecognized. Phoenixes in filigree gold and copper metal, made from ores harvested from exotic locales in distant star systems; sly cats with hand-painted lines leading to suede nosepads fashioned from the pelts of animals he’d never heard of; peacocks with headdresses of gem-laced feathers that trailed down the shoulders, painstakingly harvested from the wings of rare birds that molted once every thirty years; crowns of flames in shaped leather and steel. The colors were riotous or delicate, the materials sensuous, begging to be touched. Each one was unique, irreplaceable.

They found Lisinthir’s midway through the store, a half-mask in black leather with sleek horns: the face of a demon, or a dragon, unadorned save for the starkness of its uncompromising lines. As they walked away from it, Lisinthir said, “No contest.”

“None, no.”

“And now thee, cousin.”

Jahir withheld a sigh. He had always avoided lingering overmuch on the examination of his own subconscious; obviously, or Lisinthir would not have been able to bring him to this pass. How to say he had not the first notion how to go about choosing?

Except that his choice was just as easy, in the end. As ornamental as Lisinthir’s had been austere, asymmetrical with stylized wings swept out from the eyes: like a swan descending, save that the bird was only suggested, abstracted into forms in silver, midnight blue, and white. There were gemstones… from the placard, the metal was in fact platinum, and there were mother-of-pearl panels set into the wings. It left his mouth and most of his nose bare, dared the wearer to trust to the arrogant beauty of the thing to distract from how much it exposed. The thought of wearing it stole his breath.

“Oh, certes. You must. In fact, I will give you no chance to say no.”

“Cousin!”

But Lisinthir had already vanished into the shrouded dark, no doubt to find someone to pay. Left to himself, Jahir looked again at the mask. He couldn’t imagine such a brief bit of metal and leather sufficing to disguise him, and yet he could not deny his avarice.

When his cousin reappeared at his elbow, he said, “May I at least pay for it?”

“You are too late. Alas for you! I have months of accumulation in my account, having had no reason to spend it among dragons, and every desire to use it now. But you can buy our dinner… and yes, it will be expensive.”

Jahir blew out a breath, aware of a tension he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in his shoulders. He sensed his cousin’s sudden interest, but said nothing, following Lisinthir out of the store.

“They’ll be delivered,” Lisinthir said. “This way, then. We want another seven floors to reach our destination.”

“Which is?”

Lisinthir nodded up, and Jahir followed his cousin’s gaze until he spied what he assumed to be an art installation. “Should I ask?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

He did, when they’d pushed through the throng and woven their way through the staircases, ramps, and lifts that finally brought them to the restaurant. The art installation was nothing of the kind, but a rather more terrifying statement of the Alliance’s power: what he’d taken to be steel and glass pods, evocative of flower bulbs, were in fact private dining rooms yoked by invisible force fields to a central foyer, bar, and kitchen. They floated in a gentle halo, their windows clear or filmed for privacy as their diners preferred, and Jahir had no doubt at all that he’d be spending the masks’ prices for their single meal. The maître d’, a sleek black Karaka’An feline in black formalwear, walked them past the bar over one of a line of Pads. There they found a table for two in a room with pale cream carpet and a low ceiling, hovering in serene silence over Trenches’ deep cavern, twilit and connected and interconnected with dimly colored lights and catwalks and diaphanous cloths. The muffled quiet of the room made the bustle seem very far away, which is why Jahir did not object when Lisinthir caught his hand and pulled him into an embrace once they’d been left alone.

“No fear of heights, I hope?” Lisinthir murmured against his jaw, where he was using his teeth: not enough to mark, but enough to shatter Jahir’s concentration.

“Less that and more an atavistic terror of the might of our allies,” Jahir confessed, and added shakily, “Cousin… please….”

Lisinthir smiled. “Kiss me first.”

When anyone could walk in on them—couldn’t they? How did the service in this place work? And yet, he could not say no. He dipped his head and touched his mouth to the base of his cousin’s throat, and accepted the hand he felt rest on the back of his neck with what he hoped was a mostly concealed shudder. Not that it mattered, when Lisinthir could feel his desire and ambivalence and fear through his skin.

“Sit.” Gently. “They need to be summoned to enter, and the glass is filmed by default. We’re safe enough.”

“Did you research this place in anticipation of my arrival?”

Lisinthir laughed, pulling out a chair. “Of course. What else? Who would you have brought to a restaurant like this? Who would have taken you?”

Jahir looked away.

“Ah, and there it is again.” Lisinthir leaned over, set fingertips under Jahir’s chin and tipped his face up, ever-so-slightly. “What is this, then? Money troubles?”

“Not… as such. But my situation has caused some friction.”

“The fact that you’re rich?” Lisinthir chuckled. “I would have thought lack of money a sounder recipe for strife.”

“If we’d both lacked for it, we would have been less aware of it.” Jahir finally sat, finding it strange that he was willing to accept his cousin pulling the chair out for him. “And if we’d both been well-heeled, again. But I have always had more than him.”

“And that made him uncomfortable, as the Alliance clings to its egalitarianism with all the ferocious claws of its Pelted progenitors.” Lisinthir settled across from him, his posture impeccable, as if the linen tablecloth and its spotless setting had drawn their shared heritage from him. It was very like an Eldritch high table, save that the candles had been replaced by glowing spheres, delicate as soap bubbles, held in place through some magic he could not divine.

“It is a relief to be able to buy something without having to hide how much it cost me,” Jahir admitted. “I love him, cousin, but the inability to share my stipend without apologizing for it is burdensome.”

“Fear not, then. With me you can be as extravagant as you please and all it will earn you is my gratitude.”

“Expressed no doubt in kisses.”

“Expressed in kisses, when not expressed in teeth and knives.”

Jahir stopped in the act of reaching for the menu, an anachronism in flawless parchment on the plate. Perusing his own, Lisinthir did not look up as he said, “And what has caused you to freeze so deliciously, then? Was it the teeth or the knives?”

When he was sure of his voice, Jahir said, “I would not want to do all your work for you, cousin.”

Lisinthir did look up then, and laughed.

There were no prices on the menu. There were no choices either. The restaurant offered a single meal in four courses, designed by the chef to take advantage of the best of the ingredients purchased that day and adjusted to the diner’s species. There was a suggested wine pairing for each course. There was a suggested aperitif as well. And a suggested dessert wine, and cognac.

“You want me drunk,” Jahir observed.

“It might help.”

That had been so unexpectedly serious that he looked up again. Lisinthir waited until their eyes met to smile, whimsically, a little lopsided curve of the mouth.

Jahir’s heart squeezed. “I don’t need this much. My tolerance is low.”

“Then I’ll have your serving with mine, because my tolerance remains high.”

“And will it help you?”

Lisinthir said, “I’m not sure. But I want to be careful of you, cousin.” He chuckled. “Also, I like alcohol, I’m afraid.”

“So long as you’re not inclined to become an addict again.”

“No. I have too much to do. You understand.”

He did. Jahir set the menu down. “Let us summon the waiter, then. I have a meal to buy us.”

It was a sublime dinner and, God and Lady be thanked, a light one. Though Jahir half-expected his cousin to demand to feed him, or some other outrageous intimacy, Lisinthir remained on his side of the table, all his courtier’s manners brought to play. To converse with him was enough exhilaration without adding anything more salacious, with their discussion flowing seamlessly from Universal to their own tongue, from flirtation to politics, covering ground only they would have understood: twin noble heirs to the royal house of a dying world, ejected from it into a broader universe. The wine, the privacy, the sense of floating so far above and apart from the tumult, all of it was heady. If Lisinthir had intended dinner to divorce him from his anxieties, he’d succeeded. Jahir could even find humor in it when they returned to the suite, enough to say, “And now the kissing and the fondling, I imagine?”

“Are you so eager for it, then? I seem to recall you dreading it.” Mischief, yes. But provocation as well.

“You’ll own that you are intimidating, now and then.”

“Now and then!” Lisinthir drew off his coat and tossed it on one of the chairs before advancing on him. Such slow steps, to flow so. Jahir wondered if this was some effect of the succession of alcohols he’d consumed, to see it coming and be unequal to moving away.

“Now and then,” he repeated, and accepted the hand that caught his chin and held him in place for his cousin’s scrutiny.

“You really don’t hold your wine at all, do you,” Lisinthir said, his gentle amusement an effervescence between their skins.

“I may not be entirely in possession of myself,” Jahir agreed. “Particularly as I have said I would be ceding that possession to you.”

“Did you!”

“My arrival should be taken as an explicit grant, I would imagine.”

Lisinthir chuckled, voice gone husky. He dragged a finger over Jahir’s lips. “I would not want you to regret in the morning.”

“Ah, but you said… no deflowering tonight, yes?”

“You are correct. And this is another good reason why I shan’t.”

“And if I asked you to?”

Lisinthir chuckled, his nose trailing along Jahir’s jaw. “You already have. Or have you forgotten already?”

Half-dizzied with inebriation and desire did not seem the best state to test his very small understanding of Chatcaavan... or perhaps it was the very best state, as he found himself indifferent at the thought of error. So he tried it, the sharp syllables muddied in a mouth that wanted very much to gasp at the unexpected nip at his collarbone. “Don’t make me wait.”

Lisinthir froze, eyes flicking up to his with such predatory intensity that he stopped breathing. The release when his cousin relaxed was almost orgasmic. Almost. “I see you have been spending our time apart profitably.”

“You sometimes speak it, when you aren’t thinking,” Jahir offered in Universal. “I am hoping to greet you properly in that state.”

That won him a chuckle. Lisinthir framed his face with his hands and pressed a smiling kiss on his mouth. “Your accent is execrable and your grammar bereft. I will obviously have to educate you properly.”

He tried again, because it was likely to evoke either mirth or want and he was well with either. “Yes, please?”

That quiver—that was not laughter. Lisinthir bit Jahir’s lower lip, silencing him utterly, and said, “Enough for now. Come.”

He allowed himself to be guided by the wrist, as it was all the contact he could bear while recovering from the throbbing memory of teeth on his mouth. That pinprick edge, nearly slicing....

Jahir’s bedroom on Veta was a small, cozy room, with a bed large enough for one person set close to Vasiht’h’s nest, and the entirety of it designed for minimal stimulation. By mutual decision neither he nor Vasiht’h brought their work into it, entertained guests there, requested false windows... it was a refuge as secure as an old blanket. It was nothing like this palatial chamber with its vaulted ceiling and an entire wall of clear flexglass overlooking the base’s starry-night-like interior. The bed sat on a raised dais, as if to draw all attention to itself. There was something threatening about the implied exposure, and the sight of it would ordinarily have sent him backpedaling. But he was, he thought, lubricated. And more importantly, Lisinthir had immediately halted and was studying him.

Then he said to the suite, “Blank the window,” and the view vanished. With the room enclosed, some of the vertigo vanished. Jahir sagged, eyes closing.

That fingertip touch on his jaw… all that tender concern, wedded to the crispness of the analysis. Rarely had he felt quite so seen. “Better?”

“Thank you,” Jahir whispered.

A smile. He was being backed toward the wall again, which suited him… he wanted to lean on it. Now that the room felt friendlier, he was again cognizant of the alcohol’s languor, and willing to let it make free with him.

“So then, back to the matter of possession, mm?”

“Deflowering,” Jahir said, to tease him.

“Later for that,” Lisinthir promised. “We have time. Tonight I want only to enjoy the warmth of another body in my arms.”

It was hard to talk with his cousin’s fingers tracing his lips. “And is that all I am, then? A warm body?”

“Hoping for compliments,” Lisinthir chided, smiling again. He moved his fingers aside just enough to kiss Jahir’s mouth, then said, “Of course not. I am a man of discriminating tastes. Few are the warm bodies I permit in my bed.”

Jahir found a chuckle. “A queen and an emperor? I suppose I am in rarified company.”

“The most, yes.” Lisinthir drew back and tugged at his tunic. “Strip for me while I bring us something to drink.”

Oddly the first thing he thought of was the cold. “Completely?”

“Waist up will do for now.”

“Ah,” Jahir said. “I understand. As for a physical exam.”

“You continue to draw the most appalling comparisons, cousin.”

“I suppose that sounded….”

“Awful,” Lisinthir said with a laugh. “I forgive you. But strip now.” And he vanished into the dark leading toward the central chamber, leaving Jahir with his fuzzy-headed ambivalence and the lingering sense that it was good to be seen. He would very much like to continue being seen. So he pulled the tunic off and the shirt beneath it, and the undershirt he used as a matter of course against the chill the Pelted seemed impervious to. By the time Lisinthir returned with a tray, he had found himself listing back against the wall again, his skin stippled with gooseflesh.

“You don’t feel the cold?”

Lisinthir set the tray on a bureau—the two discarded glasses of port with the bottle, plus a pitcher of water and tumblers—and turned toward him. “I admit, not as much as I…” He stopped, and his gratified appraisal put a flush on Jahir’s cheeks. “I know you don’t duel, nor do you fight.” Lisinthir approached, set a hand on Jahir’s chest near the collarbone. “Your build does not evoke that sort of exercise, even if I hadn’t known you didn’t practice. So what has given you this enchanting physique, ah, cousin?”

“I swim,” Jahir murmured, looking away from the fingers gliding over his shoulder, down his arm, finding the division between defined muscles. “I like swimming.”

A surge of levity, sunlight-bright. “Of course you do.” When Jahir looked up, Lisinthir said, “Because water is a completely foreign environment, and learning to navigate it safely is a challenge and a strain, and yet you find beauty there, and in the striving. What else?”

Jahir inhaled sharply, wanting to hide his fluster and knowing his skin betrayed him. “I’m not you, cousin.”

“Manifestly not. But that does not make you incapable of enjoying a challenge.” Lisinthir slid his hand down to Jahir’s wrist, pulling it up against the wall above their heads. Light pressure first, and then his cousin rolled his palm open and flattened it in a gesture obscenely sexual for a motion so innocent in other contexts. “You might be an individual. But we were shaped by our environment. Inescapably.”

The kiss that followed this was shattering. A breath on dry lips first, and then a chafing that left him quivering, one that increased until he needed the pressure trapping him to the wall to stay upright. When Lisinthir let him breathe, his other wrist was beneath the first, and both aching from how hard they’d been trembling.

“Breathe,” Lisinthir whispered, brushing his nose against Jahir’s.

“So that you might steal my breath again?”

A smile he felt against his cheek. “Later for that. For now, I want you more present.”

“I thought the goal was…” Jahir trailed off. What was the goal? It was hard to think with Lisinthir leaning into him. His cousin remained clothed, and the contrast of fabric against skin was too intense. With his arms trapped, he felt far too exposed, and something about it grated against his desire to trust. “Was for me to be less present.”

“No,” Lisinthir said. “Not tonight. Tonight I need you lucid enough to respond to me so that, for instance, I can tell you are uncomfortable. Is it the trammeling?”

“I think it’s the clothes,” Jahir admitted. “I don’t know why.”

“You don’t have to. I do.” Lisinthir leaned back and pulled his shirt off, shaking his hair back over his shoulders, and then he was back, hand on Jahir’s wrists and skin against skin, and that made everything explode, fade into white haze. The proximity of his cousin’s mind—his desire, his sword-like intellect, the hyper-focus, the sensual interest, and over all of it, a tenderness like wet honey….

“Better?” Lisinthir asked against his mouth, smiling.

“Better!” he breathed, shocky.

“And then this no longer troubles you,” Lisinthir said, pushing on his wrists.

Did it? He tried flexing them. Swimming through his own confusion, his needs… he could barely do it. “I think… so long as it isn’t literal rope.” He thought, anyway? Or was rope acceptable? But his cousin was speaking.

“You need the illusion of escape.”

That focused him again, the playfulness of it, needful contrast against the violence of his response. “Illusion?”

Lisinthir grinned. “Swimming has made you beautiful, cousin, but there is more to breaking free of someone than strength. One must want to be free.”

Teasing. He remembered how to do this. Almost. He tried for Chatcaavan, couldn’t make the words arrange themselves in his mind, settled for Universal. “And if I wanted to prove that I needed to be won before I surrendered my virtue?”

His cousin laughed, delighted. “Do you want to fight? I’d win.”

“Are you sure?”

His cousin was leaning in for another of those kisses, and Jahir wanted it, but it was so much, too much too soon and yet not enough. The bantering, the playfulness slowed his thoughts, made it possible for him to wait when he wanted so desperately to be on the other side of this. When their lips were about to touch, he yanked his hands down. Lisinthir’s grip was light enough that he should have snapped his hands away with ease.

But he couldn’t move them.

Jahir’s panic spiked his own heartrate so hard Lisinthir found himself sweating. He cupped his cousin’s chin with a thumb and forefinger and made him meet his eyes. “What?”

“I can’t move,” Jahir whispered. “My arms.”

Puzzled, Lisinthir looked up at them. “I’m barely holding them down.”

“But I can’t move them…!”

His first instinct was to reply, “Of course not. I don’t want you to.” And that… made him freeze. He looked again at the sight of his cousin’s hands pinioned beneath his and deliberately thought that he should be free.

Jahir jerked his hands to his throat and began shaking so hard Lisinthir could hear his teeth chattering. He snatched the blanket from the bed, pulled it up and around his cousin’s shoulders, and guided him to the bed’s edge. “Sit.” And hastily, more to himself than to Jahir, “Please.”

Fortunately his cousin was too far gone in his own reaction to notice his. Jahir’s knees gave, dropping him onto the edge of the bed, and when this did not seem to quell the panic, Lisinthir sat behind him, wrapped his arms around him, and pulled him down onto the bed. That this inspired a new paroxysm did not escape him. His cousin might not have realized the particulars of what had just happened, but Lisinthir wouldn’t gamble on it.

Because he had done it, hadn’t he. He’d wished Jahir trapped, and he’d made it happen with his thoughts.

“Lisinthir,” Jahir whispered.

The shaking was getting worse, not better. Lisinthir turned Jahir onto his back and touched his chin. “Stop. Stop and look at me.” He allowed his cousin to look away because he needed to prove to them both that he wasn’t somehow compelling him. When Jahir met his eyes, Lisinthir said, “If it can be done, it can be fought.”

“I… I don’t know… I don’t know if I….”

“Stop!” Lisinthir growled, shaking him a little by the jaw. “You are panicking. What do you tell a patient gripped thus?”

Even presented with a scenario that should have jarred him into thinking again, Jahir remained tremulous, and the only reply he managed was, “Breathe.”

“Then breathe,” Lisinthir said, sitting on his own reaction: impatience, fear, nameless things he didn’t recognize in himself. It was no good; he knew Jahir could sense them through their skins. But he mastered his bodily expression of them, and if the respite he earned them was brittle, it was better than what they’d had a few minutes ago.

More slowly, Jahir said, “You say it can be fought. But I don’t know if I am capable.”

“You have had a mindline with an alien for nearly a decade now. You have been in the Alliance all that time, honing your talents on its members. You have been practicing the use of this talent actively for years. If not you, then who? So. I will try to duplicate what I have just done. And you will try to notice me doing it, and then we will see how it might be thrown off, and we will do this together. Do you know why?”

“Why?” Jahir whispered, trembling.

“Because we both need to know how to defend against it. Because the Eldritch go to war, Galare, and we cannot go with a weakness this extreme.”

“The dragons cannot wield these powers…”

“The dragons can take our shape, and when they do, I assure you, cousin, they are not afraid to try anything that might secure them an advantage.” Lisinthir held him fast, waited for him to start thinking and stop panicking. It was working… he needed something else. What to say? What to do? Ah—“And more than that, I need your help.”

A husky answer then, but beneath the tremor there was a willingness to listen. “My help.”

“Your help,” Lisinthir said, and let his own horror drip through their touch. “Because I am afraid.”

In the long pause that followed, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. But then Jahir whispered, “You are not a monster, cousin.”

“Then help me,” Lisinthir said. “Please.”

Jahir swallowed, deepened his breath. “All right. What… how shall we?”

Hands seemed less fraught than some of the other choices. “Set your hand there, on your chest. You will try to keep it there. I will try to make you move it.”

“That… I… we can do that.” Jahir cleared his throat. “Let us.”

Lisinthir settled alongside him, on his side, and stared at his cousin’s hand, and as he watched it rose from Jahir’s skin. He stopped concentrating, and Jahir pulled it back again.

God and Living Air.

“Again,” Lisinthir said. “I will try more slowly.”

“Not slowly. More intently. Perhaps if you push harder, I will notice.”

“Very well.”

The next few experiments were agonizing. Again and again, Lisinthir wrested control of his cousin’s body from him and left him helpless—did it easily, as if this was something he’d always been capable of. Had this power always been germinating in him? And for how long? Had he been using it here and there without realizing it, and without knowing it existed to be harnessed? He wondered if he’d been wrong about becoming a monster. Had there not been stories so? The evil of powerful Eldritch whose talents had run unhindered until they’d been defeated by armies. To fight an enemy and win by right of sword and claw and muscle was one matter. To defeat him before he could lift a hand by stealing his will from him…

It would make everything safer. But what would it turn him into?

Again. Again. He rested his head against his fist on the pillow alongside Jahir and didn’t even look, didn’t need to look; he could sense his cousin’s limbs, his body, his breathing, as something he could cup in a palm and crush. All initiative, all volition, gone. It was delicious. It was horrifying.

Jahir’s voice was almost clinical. Had they not been touching skin to skin at the shoulder-tip, the tone would have fooled Lisinthir into thinking he’d come to consider this an intellectual exercise. “I can sense you doing it now. I can even sense it about to happen. But I can’t stop you.”

The revulsion that flooded him was almost physically incapacitating, but when had he ever had the luxury of being overwhelmed? Lisinthir pushed himself upright. “You’re thirsty, and so I am.”

Again, that unnatural calm. “Water would be welcome.”

Water be damned, Lisinthir thought, sliding from the bed and going to the tray. He reached for the bottle of port and another wave of nausea swamped him, so intense he groped for the edge of the bureau until it passed. Alcohol would be a terrible idea. Except that he hadn’t thought it a terrible idea—it was an amazingly good idea—and again he moved toward the bottle. When his stomach cramped he wondered if he was relapsing, though the chances of it were frankly astronomical given the extent of the repairs the surgery team had enacted on his failing body. Staring at his quaking hand, Lisinthir fought to swallow: even his throat tried to close against the idea.

When had he ever been revolted by alcohol? He had been habituated by his circumstances to associate it with safety, not with disgust. His body was reacting paradoxically. It should have been carrying through with his first impulse, which had been to leave bed in search of something strong enough to take the edge off both their terrors.

Slowly he looked over his shoulder and said, “You. You are doing this to me.”

His cousin had chosen the only thing that could have penetrated the disassociation that had accompanied his shock at the sight of his own body obeying someone else’s commands. Jahir looked up sharply. “I… I beg your pardon?”

“You are making me not want to drink.” Lisinthir leaned on the bureau, folding his arms over his chest. “You’re doing it now. I am near to wanting to vomit over the idea of pouring that port.”

“Surely…” He grasped for his scattered thoughts. “Surely you are… you are responding to the discovery we have made.”

Lisinthir’s eyes narrowed. “That would be another thing. I am far more distressed about this than I should be. On my own, I’d be considering the pragmatic uses of this discovery first and its moral applications later. And a discovery of this magnitude, revealed on the eve of a war for our survival? I should be receptive to the potential of such a novel weapon, one I have no reason to believe my enemy would predict. Instead I find myself distracted by the possibility of becoming a villain out of a nursery tale, in a cascade of images that prophesy my certain ethical and physical demise. This sounds far more like your thought process than mine, cousin. And I am gambling that the only reason I’m noticing it now is that my accusation is distracting you from projecting your emotional state.”

“What?” Jahir asked, stunned. “I am doing… what?”

Lisinthir did pour the port now, and brought a single glass back to the bed. “It would make sense, wouldn’t it. I have always exercised my aggression physically, whether it was on a dueling ground or in the Empire. My talent appears to have developed in that direction: I can force bodies. You, however, work more subtly. Every day you contemplate psychologies. You never resort to violence when you can distract or suggest a different course. So your talent has made you into someone who can force minds.”

Before Jahir could react to this statement, Lisinthir pressed the glass’s knife-thin brim to his lips. “Drink.” Dark eyes met his. “I am not forcing you. I am telling you to do so. Choose to obey me, if you would.”

Startled, Jahir did.

“More, do. That sip wouldn’t affect a stripling boy.”

The fears he was ignoring were pushing up his throat. To stop them, he drank again, and accepted the third suggestion as well. His head dropped against Lisinthir’s shoulder; he felt his cousin swallow, the long movement of throat, and then the stretch of muscle over ribs as his cousin placed the glass on the table. Then there were two arms around him, and he needed them both. He needed them both, but they were not enough. The drink wasn’t enough either: three swallows or thirty.

Someone who can force minds.

No. He couldn’t live in the same space as the words. As the thoughts. As the realization that his cousin was right.

Someone who can force minds.

“You want,” Jahir whispered, “very much to kiss me.”

That won him a kiss on his hair. “I want very much to do many things to you, cousin, but this is most certainly not the time.” Wry humor then, tingling on his skin like cinnamon oil. “It might not become the time until after I must leave. But I will not, absolutely not, touch you until you’re sure that you’re not being compelled.”

His heart stumbled.

“You can’t—you can’t go without doing this to me,” Jahir whispered, tasting it in his mouth like bile and terror. Memories of the Pattern glimpsed so fleetingly on the captured Chatcaavan ship clogged his thoughts, whipped his heart to a desperate rhythm. “Cousin… you must. Or they will do it to me first.”

Lisinthir stilled. “You can’t be sure.”

“I know,” Jahir said, sweating. God and Goddess, but would this unwanted increase in talent develop the nascent gift of prophecy with it? A gift he wanted not at all? If he could sense the thoughts of strangers, their emotions, without touching them… what would that do to him? Would he even be capable of supporting it? He remembered the disorientation and faints that had afflicted him on Selnor when too many people had crowded him, magnified it by a populace the size of Veta’s. Bad enough to have all that pressing on him, but if he could force his own thoughts and feelings on others… what would that do to his patients? Could he work again? Would he ever be sure if he was reshaping people to meet his standards of normal behavior?

There was not enough liquor in the worlds to stamp this panic down. He could see his life collapsing around him. Mind-mage, something in him hissed. You will become a mind-mage, fit for nothing but imprisonment. You will have to leave it all behind. And the dragons will warp you first—

“Oh, God, cousin, my-better, please,” Jahir moaned, pulling out the Chatcaavan words through Lisinthir’s skin and cutting himself with them until he bled, mouth and mind and heart, and all the future was opening the wounds. He heard the hiss, knew he’d opened his cousin’s scars and didn’t care. “Please!”

“I don’t—I won’t, not like this, not forcing you—”

“You aren’t! You won’t!” Jahir fisted his hand on Lisinthir’s chest to keep it from shaking. The words were a jumble now, Universal, their tongue, Chatcaavan. “I want it, I want it now, before they get to me. I want it to be you. I want…”

Lisinthir tipped up his chin with a curled finger, his gaze unrelenting.

“Make me stop thinking, please…!” Jahir whispered. And then, louder, as his thoughts grew fangs and claws. “Please, now, cousin, NOW—” Lips crushed against his, and he scrabbled for purchase as his back hit the bed. Yes, this, this now, but don’t look at me—sliding onto his stomach, with a hand clenched in his hair at the nape. Biting kisses that drove everything from him when they were on him, but the thoughts returned when they lifted, and he squirmed to get under more of them. Love there, and a savagery he craved like water. More—but it would hurt—make it hurt, “Please, do it, I can take it—” And running like a line of fire beneath the words: I want it I want it that way

A long sigh over his shoulder: capitulation that felt like being conquered. He bowed his head, arched his neck, begged through skin... lost time. And then there was enough pain even for him, and a rapture that emptied his head, stopped his thoughts from their crazed downward whirl, and he wept into the pillow with relief and then ecstasy.

And then there was nothing.

For a long time, nothing. A good, sated, cored-out nothing that left him adrift, when he so badly needed it.

He became aware of sweat next, trapped against his ribcage beneath an arm that was holding him. Two arms holding him. He was in someone’s arms. Someone who cared for him so much it seemed incredible that he might also be so concerned. Jahir pressed his cheek against skin, felt a breath blow out over the bridge of his nose, perfumed with port.

“With me?” Lisinthir asked, husky.

Was he? Could he speak? He could hardly remember how. His throat was dry—ah, here was a glass. Alcohol, but that was all right, now.

“You don’t have to answer. Just nod.”

But his cousin was owed an answer. Choose a language... Universal, easy, familiar. “Here,” he murmured. And with a smile, winsome, whimsical…happy. “Barely.”

Lisinthir’s gaze was grave, far too grave. But the kiss pressed to his brow... that was forgiveness. “Not how I planned to do this.”

So much under the words. He had used Lisinthir ill. “I know. I’m—”

Lisinthir rested a finger on his lips, so Jahir left the apology unsaid. They both knew this was how he’d needed it, or Lisinithir wouldn’t have relented. Instead, he tucked himself closer, spread his hand on his cousin’s chest. And said, very quietly, “We are mind-mages.”

A pause in the metronymic breathing. Then, “So it seems.”

“Terrifying,” Jahir murmured. “And improbable.”

Gentle fingers separated sweat-matted hair from his temple, tucked it behind his ear. “It is only another weapon. A weapon is blameless. It can be a tool of oppression in the hand of a tyrant and a liberating force in the hand of a paladin.”

The thought of knives ran a shiver of longing up his side. Now, at least, he knew why pain was so good. It took so much, so very much, to make him stop thinking and just… let go. “A weapon. But I am not a knight.”

“Make no mistake, Galare,” Lisinthir said, soft. “We are both our Queen’s swords. Whether we fight with words or blades.” That gentle hand traveled down, found his chin and lifted it up. Surprised, Jahir met his cousin’s eyes.

“And you fight very well with words,” Lisinthir said. His voice chilled down to the menace of a blade. “’My-better.’ Never call me that again.”

“No!” Jahir promised.

His cousin smiled a little, letting the anger dissipate, and that... that was needful. Because he hadn’t seen Lisinthir’s wrath since their first meetings, and yet, suffering it now... he’d still been able to breathe, to move his chin enough to swallow. His cousin could have fettered him, and hadn’t.

Jahir let out a breath with a shudder. “Mayhap your third language is too fraught for pillow talk.”

That surprised a blurt of laughter from Lisinthir. “You learned Chatcaavan to use it for that?”

“What else?” Jahir said, flushing. “You resort to it in your passion. I thought—” He dropped his head back onto Lisinthir’s chest and sighed. “Obviously I should have thought more.”

“No, no! If you learned it for this purpose we must use it so. You are right—I do think of it as a love language. Among other things.” Lisinthir kissed the top of his head gently. “It is those other things you must not trespass upon, for they were ugly and I would not have you demean yourself. I will teach you the proper way. If you still trust me?”

What a question. It teased a lopsided smile out of him. “Should I not?”

“You have been roughly used. I would not blame you if you decided not to repeat the experience.”

“Cousin, no.” Jahir cleared his throat. “You gave me what I needed. Very much. And I wanted it, just as you gave it to me. I will want it again, if… you are willing.”

“So long as you trust me,” Lisinthir said, quiet. “To force you, but not to coerce you.”

“Will you trust me, not to infect you?” Jahir asked, and was gratified by the pause, and didn’t know why. An acknowledgement of power, perhaps. Was it important that he still have it? Wasn’t it, though? He thought of dragons, and the war he saw spinning out of the Pattern.

Lisinthir rested a finger on his lower lip. “I do trust you, yes. But we should explore the parameters of our unexpected abilities, ere we leave.”

“So long as we have time for… this.”

“I promise,” Lisinthir replied, and kissed him gently. The gentleness was good also… reminded him that the cruelty he’d begged for had been given to him by a loving hand that had, he realized, ridden him to the edge of what he could bear and not over. How had he known?

“Skin,” Lisinthir whispered against the corner of his mouth. “Skin doesn’t lie. And yours, cousin…” Flash of red want. “…yours sings.”

In some other world, perhaps he would have had a witty riposte, something that would have bled away the intimacy of the confession. But here, still diffuse and contented, he could only say, “I’m glad I pleased you.”

“More than I could express,” Lisinthir said, and pulled him close. “Now, put your spine to me, where I might ward it, and rest. You need it badly.”

“Do I?” Perhaps he was tired. He let his cousin draw him down, settled on his side. Felt the pressure of Lisinthir’s nose against his shoulder.

“You do. Sleep, dear cousin.” A hand settled over his heart. “Beautiful cousin.”

Jahir sighed out, and eased into that pool of spreading awareness, felt it wick him thinner and thinner until at last the world faded into stars.

Lisinthir knew the moment Jahir slept by the way the anxiety dropped from him with the abruptness of a doused lamp. He exhaled against his cousin’s hair and smiled a little, grim. Had anyone asked him if the projection of emotions would make a useful weapon he would have found the notion risible. He did not find it quite so amusing anymore. And it was obvious his cousin had no conscious control over an ability of significant power, one he’d used to nearly force Lisinthir into the love-making he had originally decided would have to wait.

It had been a very near thing. Even now, he wasn’t sure what would have happened had he not sensed the flash of the Pattern through his cousin’s skin, the one that had proven Jahir’s words. Cousin… you must. Or they will do it to me first.

Perhaps this was something the Unicorn bestowed on its house, because Lisinthir had always operated on an instinctive understanding of patterns. That intuition had guided him safely through the Empire’s politics, though he’d barely kept one breath ahead of the hunters who’d wanted him dead. He’d never thought to question its provenance until he’d touched it, throbbing like a desperate heartbeat under Jahir’s skin. And unlike his cousin, he’d had the context to interpret some of the desperate flashes of insight that had cluttered the spiraling chains of events he’d sensed.

Lisinthir pressed his nose against the back of Jahir’s neck. Absent his cousin’s fears, he was free to consider the application of his talent’s unexpected expansion and find the potential compelling. There had been stories from his youth about mind-mages holding off armies; he’d dismissed them as fantasies, so he no longer remembered the details, but perhaps his cousin would. If he could, indeed, hold off an army—or better yet, kill one—with his mind alone….

A sobering thought. But then, shooting one of the Alliance’s entropy packets at the enemy would kill them just as dead. Did the method matter so much if the end was the same?

Difficult questions. Even thornier to answer, when set against an urgent fight for survival against an Empire almost three times their size. But then, if he had these powers, perhaps the Queen and the Emperor did as well in their shape-shifted forms. He could hope so, for it would be immensely helpful to their cause if so. But that he could not depend on, and could not plan for. What he was certain of was that he and Jahir could not leave their new abilities unexercised. He was due to leave in less than two weeks… he couldn’t imagine that being enough time, unless they spent all of it at their experiments, and that would never work. While Lisinthir had no trouble conceiving of himself as a legendary mind-mage who could crush his enemies into submission, Jahir was another matter. If he pushed his cousin too far, too quickly….

Lisinthir sighed and kissed skin still tacky with sweat. No, he did not want to be responsible for breaking Jahir Seni Galare, healer and heir and Unicorn’s get. And this revelation had the power to do so in a way mere bedplay could never.

He could ask the Night Admiral for an extension. But he wasn’t sure what the extra time would accomplish. Exploring the limits of these new abilities would want months of trial and experimentation, not weeks. And it was questionable whether he was the person to deal with it at all. Vasiht’h might be better positioned to aid his partner with this particular transition, which would leave Lisinthir with his original mission, to introduce his cousin to more practical pleasures. And if those broken, blood-streaked visions had reflected true, then there was a future where everything he could teach Jahir about his body, he would need... and a few other things besides, which Lisinthir planned to arrange for him ere they parted. Some of it, Jahir would object to, so he would have to be sure his cousin didn’t notice his machinations. But to give him the tools he needed to protect himself in the event of that particular future unfolding, Lisinthir would gladly dissemble... or more probably, distract with a great deal of carnal activity.

Which was fine with him. It was clear sex gentled his cousin. It certainly focused Lisinthir’s mind. The great cats who’d had his training would have been proud: the act had been far harder than anything he’d ever done with either of his previous lovers. The Slave Queen wanted all his gentleness; the Emperor, all his ferocity. The weirdling combination of cruelty and tenderness that Jahir required had needed all his self-control to administer, and when he’d been free finally to find his release it had come with an overwhelming relief, that he hadn’t failed.

And truthfully, it had been rather too long for him. Jahir was a challenge, and he found challenges... inspiring.

If that was a taste of what they’d be doing for the next week and a half, he’d certainly need the rest. Lisinthir flattened his palm against his cousin’s heart and allowed himself to sleep.

The Knife found her perched not on the windowsill, as was her wont, but beside it, on the bench where she usually arranged flowers. She had, in fact, displaced the vase that had been on it, and was petting one of its lilies while sorting her thoughts. It said a great deal for him, she thought, that he immediately perceived this difference and thought it significant enough for comment. “My Queen? Have you been distressed?”

The subtext there: And what shall I do to mitigate your distress? How astonishing that he should exist, her Knife, and be so willing to engage with her when so few Chatcaavan males had. Or females either. She thought again of the Mother, and looked away. “No, Knife. I have not been distressed. My own thoughts disquiet me, however.”

He padded further into the room, his wings lowered and folded. Until him, she’d never been the recipient of that particular courtesy: in a normal Chatcaavan universe, no male held his wings in a submissive posture to a mere female, no matter the exaltation of her debasement. But she no longer lived in a normal Chatcaavan universe, and was that not enough cause for discomfort?

“May I ask, then?”

She ran a finger along one of the lily petals. “Do you go about in the court, Knife?”

His head canted back. “Mistress? My duty is here. I would have no reason to repair to the court. That is a place for high-ranked males and their guards, if guards they choose to have.”

“So you could not tell me what it is like now, in the Emperor’s absence.”

“No….” He drew the word out, brows lowering. “I trust the new Second is capable of communicating the Emperor’s authority, however.”

She thought of her discussions with the Emperor before his departure. “Second. Who was once Command East. Did I say that right?”

“Yes, my Queen. The Empire is a sphere—roughly—divided into quadrants, and each quadrant has a Command, who sees to the fight there, and a Logistics, who makes sure Command has something to fight with. Command East was charged with the Eastern quadrant, which is the most developed. He will have had significant experience with managing fractious and complex political and military relationships.”

The Queen frowned, straightening one of the flower’s lanceolate leaves, creased from too long in the vase. “You do not think it likely that he might lose control of the court, then.”

“I would be surprised if so,” the Knife said. “The Emperor would not choose an impotent male to serve him in the role of Second. Second must be the Emperor’s… well, second. In all matters.”

“Have you met him?” she wondered.

“Second?” The Knife was startled. “No, my Queen. I served in the Eastern quadrant, but few are the males who would have known or worked directly with one of the Commands. I was nowhere near so important.”

She smiled at him. “Important enough to end up here.”

“No,” he said. “Do not confuse yourself on this, my Queen. I am here because I am competent in my chosen role, not because I am important. Important males become Second and Third, and Command and Logistics. But the Empire rises on the wings of millions of males like me, all of us named, not titled.”

“And this… this protects you,” she said. At his puzzled head-tilt, she said, “Because you are useful, because the Empire needs you, then you are safe.”

“No one is safe in the Empire,” the Knife said, quiet. “But one can pass beneath notice. Even if one is curious. The faceless ranks of males necessary to maintain the Empire cannot be individually assessed. Not consistently. If one is careful, one might live a long and fruitful life, no matter how backwards one’s attitudes.” When she glanced sharply at him, he said, rueful, “Not all one’s superiors are as keen-eyed as the Emperor.”

She leaned back, considering. Passing beneath notice... that was the issue, wasn’t it? If she began changing the females and the children here, would the other males overlook it, because females and children had been chattel for so long no one would expect otherwise? Or would it been seen as a dangerous precedent?

This contemplation raised an anxiety in her that made her skin seem uneasy on her flesh, as if she was straining toward a Change she couldn’t complete. “Tell me, Knife... if I were to ask you to do something seemingly nonsensical, would you?”

“My Queen,” the male said. “The Emperor gave me a title and the imperative to obey you. I will not fail you.”

“You would take commands from a mere female.”

“You are no mere female,” the Knife said.

Surprised, she jerked her head from the flower and looked at him.

“I have been watching you,” he continued, standing at seeming ease before her, with his hands at his sides and his wings politely couched. “The Emperor values you, and that alone makes you intriguing. Everyone knows this Emperor is not long fascinated by trivialities. You hold his interest, and I wondered why. And now that I have been in this tower, I have been listening. There are stories about how you aided the Ambassador. How you saved some of the members of the harem from the depredations of Third and his Hand. That you left the tower entirely to see the Emperor in the Surgeon’s offices. And when I look at your eyes...” He trailed off, studying her, and she returned his scrutiny, even knowing that proper females would never. But she was not a proper female, was she? Not anymore. She was the Queen Ransomed.

“When I look at your eyes, you look back,” he finished. “And I see things there that I don’t understand, not because you are female, and weak, and consigned to the vagaries of the flesh that females alone suffer. But because there is a mind there, thinking thoughts I am not privy to, and they are complex enough to leave streamers, the way a fighter darting through clouds leaves contrails.” He cocked his head. “I obey you, my Queen, for the same reason the Change fascinates me. Because I do not understand what I see, and seeking knowledge leads to greatness.”

She couldn’t help it: she laughed, low and quiet, but in genuine delight. “You are perverse, Knife. How did you survive so long among other males!”

“One learns best by remaining silent,” he remarked.

“Oh, yes! We both know that wisdom, don’t we.” She considered him, nodded slowly the way the Ambassador would have, noted the avidity of his interest as she did. “Then I tell you, Knife... I would like you to help me find a way to smuggle the children and the females from the tower. In the event of a coup.”

His eyes widened and he hissed in a breath.

“You think I am histrionic,” she guessed.

“I would never call such precautions histrionic,” he said. “I cannot evaluate their appropriateness, however. I have heard stories about the atmosphere at court, Mistress. Everyone has. That everything here is broken horns and poison. I’d thought those stories exaggerations, but even on the periphery I sense that, if anything, such stories may have understated the matter.” He looked away, muscles tightening along the edge of his mouth. When he looked at her again, his strange dark eyes were steady. “It is not what I would have hoped for the highest court of the Chatcaava.”

To this extraordinary statement she said nothing, to see if he would elaborate. Instead, he allowed the silence to lie between them, and that in itself was elaboration enough.

“I don’t know that there is a coup in the making,” he said at last, wings mantling. But slowly, as if even dismayed, he was conscious of his body. “But I can’t tell that there isn’t, either. There is too much innuendo here. Too many masks. I have secured this tower by subjecting it to military protocols, my Queen, and many have told me I am showing coarseness of manner unbecoming to a male in my position. But I am not confident in my ability to read the intentions of the courtiers here.”

She stared at him, nonplussed. That he would confess to his own flaws...

He seemed to understand, too, for he smiled, a faint show of teeth along the rim of his blue-gray mouth. “I know it is perilous to admit to incompetence, but it is your safety at stake. If you know better how to judge the mood of the court, I will be guided by your superior understanding. Do you fear a coup? Do you think someone will fight Second in order to depose him, or the Emperor?”

“I don’t know,” she said, still startled. “But I worry, Knife. And because I worry, I would like...” She trailed off.

“A contingency plan?” he offered. His smile then was almost winsome, and on the face of a male Chatcaavan it was unbelievable. She wished the Ambassador had been there to see it, to comment on how quickly things change once they began. “It is a very military term, I know, but I am a very military sort of male.”

“It suits,” she said. “Yes. I would like a contingency plan. My plan involves the evacuation of the Emperor’s children and females—and myself, and you—off this world in the event of catastrophe. It may seem unbelievable to you, but I have reason to suspect the Emperor would want us at liberty. To answer to whatever plans he might have for us, or to deny us to the enemy.”

“He plans to make you something worth denying?” the Knife asked, interested.

And because he’d made the suggestion, a suggestion outrageous in its implication, she said, “I plan to make them something worth denying.” And lifted her chin, daring him to ridicule her.

But the Knife only frowned. “With Third dead and not yet replaced, the palace’s port has returned to the Navy’s control. But there is no saying that the port would remain in our control in the event of a coup. And I am very definitely concerned about how we would manage from there. Security in the solar system and the surrounding areas has been upgraded recently, and no one has said why. To smuggle… how many females and children are we discussing?”

“Some thirty-odd children,” she said, because she’d taken a rough count while in the nursery. “The females in the harem? I cannot say. Perhaps around the same number in each of the harems? We could guess at some hundred individuals.”

He winced. “That would require a large conveyance. Or several smaller ones. There may be a way to get them to the port… I will investigate. But from there? That is a more difficult matter, my Queen.”

Thinking of Laniis, the Slave Queen said, “That part, I may know how to handle. If you tell me it is safe to use my console to make calls outside the palace.”

“Outside the palace?”

“To the Alliance.”

He considered her, head tilted. “These aliens. The ones you befriended while they were here. They remain your allies.”

She inclined her head.

“Astounding,” he murmured, awed.

“They may not be in a position to help me. But I will never know unless I ask. So…”

“I will consult my security expert immediately and tell you when you can make your call.” He trained curious eyes on her. “The children will go where they are sent. The females… will all of them consent to your plan? If they are incapable of volition after so many years of powerlessness, they may become liabilities.”

The Slave Queen set her lily in her lap. It had not occurred to her that the females would be disobedient. What would they think of her explanations, that they might have a future if they embraced it? Would they even want it, when it had taken the Ambassador so much love and time to convince her of the merits of a life filled with freedom’s responsibilities? She couldn’t imagine changing their minds in the time she had allotted. Should she kidnap them, then, in order to give herself that time? Because if something did happen in the palace, they would be trapped here…

“In the event of a coup, what would happen? To the females.”

The Knife shrugged a hand, though she noticed his shoulders twitch, as if he’d begun to copy her hybrid gesture. “They may be left here to serve the next Emperor. Or they might be given away. Or killed outright.”

No help there, then. If their deaths had been certain, the choice would have been easy. As it was… she knew for every female who fled, obedient, at the Knife’s command, some number of them would become too flustered, would demur, would delay them.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know how many of them will want to leave.”

“The male who deposes the Emperor, if he succeeds... may very well be worse for them,” the Knife murmured.

Because the comment surprised her, she said, “Or he may be better, depending on their personalities.” And sighed. “So I suppose it will be up to me to discover which of them belong with us.”

“Not a very Chatcaavan reply,” the Knife observed, considering her.

“I have been infected by the ideas of aliens.” The Slave Queen slipped the lily back into the water and rose, setting the vase back in place. “That is the danger of the Touch and the Change, Knife. You do not return from it the same.”

“If the Living Air had wanted us to remain the same, it would not have given us those abilities,” the Knife answered. Before she could decide how to respond, he bowed to her. “I must go and see to the arrangements.”

“The sooner, the better,” she agreed, staring at him.

After he’d left, she looked at the lily, white on its narrow green stem, the one leaf still creased despite her efforts. Laniis, she wondered. Where are you? And will you be able to help us? Because… she reached out and traced the fracture, I think we will need it, and sooner than I hope.