CHAPTER 12

They left Lisinthir not only with Triona, but with Cory and Sharil, whom he'd been coaching on the bridge earlier in the morning... because they'd all asked if they could come along, and an all-too-amused Lisinthir had waved one of those gaunt hands of his and said 'why not.' When the door slid shut on them he already had his head in the Tam-illee's lap and Goddess alone knew what was going to happen once they'd been gone long enough. Vasiht'h didn't put it past the Eldritch to decide what they all needed was a nude cuddle. Or more. He had a terrifying magnetism even now, looking like a wasted wraith. Once a proper clinic took care of the rest of his health problems, he could probably have a different person in his bed every night for all ten centuries he had left.

And, Vasiht'h thought with a sigh, he wouldn't want any of them. Because he was in love with his dragons... and with Jahir, too, if Vasiht'h was any judge. And by now he thought he was fairly good at figuring those things out.

The idea should bother him more. He wanted it to bother him more. A world where he could be jealous of Lisinthir was a world where all three of them lived somewhere safe and Vasiht'h would have time to worry about fighting for his share of Jahir's hours. It would have meant Lisinthir wasn't the center of some empire-breaking romance that required a war for consummation, and Jahir wasn't acting as if he had to plan for his own involvement in that conflict.

Goddess, give him a lover's quarrel about relationship primacy any day over that kind of drama!

The scene in the gym hadn't helped at all. He'd backed down from a promise he'd made Jahir and would probably have broken it completely had Lisinthir not forced him into keeping it. And instead of coming out of that lesson feeling more confident about his ability to follow through on his vow, he felt less so. Worst of all, he still wasn't sure Jahir would be able to forgive him for his most secret thoughts... thoughts Vasiht'h knew would inevitably be revealed at some point. Knowing how things tended to go, probably at the worst possible time.

The most heart-rending, ridiculous, painful part of all this was that he couldn't regret their coming. Not after seeing Jahir start to... to unfurl, like some night-blooming flower. The pieces weren't all in place yet, but there was a vitality to him that had been locked away somewhere, and it was in him now, a quickening. Vasiht'h could feel its echo in his own body, a spring to the step, an awareness of the taste and texture and smell of things, a breathless wonder, not at the miracles of the Alliance that Jahir had once found so astonishing, but at the shock of living in a body. It was painfully affecting to know that his partner was capable of revivifying that awe when Vasiht'h had thought its loss an inevitability as the Eldritch became accustomed to his new home. And yet here his partner was, pacing him down the corridor with his face tilted up for all the worlds as if he could feel the sun on his face... and the tint in his cheeks was a flush of pleasure and interest, not some borrowed glow from the emergency lighting.

More than anything, Vasiht'h wanted his partner to see that transformation to its end and claim that long-denied sensuality. Especially if it meant he'd be able to see Jahir's children before he died.

That he could want the fruits of this entire horrible episode while still hating what it was doing to him....

He guessed that was love. The shadow side, anyway, that he had rarely faced.

As before, he let Jahir lead in the sessions that awaited them; his partner had the energy and the focus that he didn't. By now, Borden gave them names and trusted them to find their way to the right cabins. The doors opened for them as registered medical personnel, and they went to their patients, slipped into their dreaming minds, and smoothed their anxieties. Tonight there were fewer though: what awaited them instead was the nervousness of anticipation, the sort of agitation that made it difficult to sleep productively. They saw to three people before they found themselves at the last door.

"The Captain," Jahir said. "Are you ready?"

What could he say? That the thought of exposing his own cowardice to the man charged with fighting this ship was petrifying? He gave the only answer that remained true in every situation. "I'm with you."

Jahir smiled and went in, and Vasiht'h followed.

Raynor surprised them by waking in response to their entrance; seeing them, though, he waved vaguely in their direction, turned over, and went back to sleep with the seasoned practice of a veteran soldier. Jahir's amusement tickled the mindline: /At least he has no concerns./

/About us, anyway,/ Vasiht'h muttered. Perhaps he would learn something from Raynor; maybe the dreams of a ship's captain, charged with the safety and wellbeing of all its crew, and distantly the Alliance, would teach him how to care about abstractions deeply enough to understand Jahir's passions. Vasiht'h had to imagine Raynor's burdens were manifold: that being a human among the Pelted must be alienating, that he might have some insight about the anxieties of a man on the cusp of battle. Vasiht'h followed Jahir into the Captain's mind, nurturing the hope that he might be comforted himself in the act of reassuring another.

But Raynor's mind was not poisoned by doubt or fear. Raynor trembled like—visceral feeling now, and one alien to Vasiht'h's memories—an arrow nocked on a string pulled impossibly taut, awaiting launch. He was eager for the release of action because he was a man of action, and the partial peace and unreliable détentes engineered by the Pelted drove him to distraction. Rather than repositories for angst or fear, Raynor's dreams were fantasies of agency: of being free at last to respond to the threats and provocations that troubled the borders and terrorized its denizens. He had transferred into the Alliance Fleet from the Terran Navy specifically to be one of those voices for action over appeasement, only to be held back time and time again.

Appeasement solves nothing, the dreams hissed as they ran with the blood of histories older than the engineering of the first fox child who would become the blueprint for a civilization among the stars. Appeasement gives license to rapists and thieves and murderers.

We are the gun that answers them.

They backed out of Raynor's dreams not long after they'd entered them because Raynor didn't need them.

They paused outside the room to shake off the last scraps of those vivid impressions, of wounds and claxons wailing in corridors choked with the hiss of broken vents. For once it was Vasiht'h who felt colder than the thin-skinned Eldritch who'd companioned him for over a decade. He kept his feelings locked away from the mindline, crushing them into his stomach, his heart, anywhere he could hide them from Jahir. He had gone into Raynor's mind hoping for wisdom and left it feeling completely alone. Was he the only sane person on this ship? Oh, Goddess, but he didn't belong here! He could understand the need for people like Raynor and Lisinthir. He could even make peace with a seed of that aggression existing in Jahir. In his more honest moments, he could admit that there was some link between that aggression and the sensual awareness that was animating his partner, the one Vasiht'h himself wanted so much to see bloom.

But he could never be like that. And he was afraid that his reflexive rejection of that aggression would find a mirror in his partner... in reaction to Vasiht'h's shying from it.

Hadn't Lisinthir called it cowardice? Was he a coward? Was it craven to wish other people would do the fighting so he could stay home, be safe?

He honestly couldn't answer the question... and for once, he was afraid to ask. The one person he usually turned to for answers was the one person he dare not ask.

Jahir glanced at him more than once on their way back to their room, but Vasiht'h shook his head and said, "I'm just anxious." And let some truth leak into the mindline, hating himself for manipulating the conversation: /I'm afraid./

/So am I,/ Jahir answered, the words soft as an embrace. /But it will be over one way or the other soon./

That was exactly what he was afraid of.

The women were still in their rooms, though by now they kept a quieter vigil: Triona leaning against the door looking in on the sleeping Ambassador, her data tablet in hand, and the other two playing cards at the coffee table. Their entrance caused all three to glance toward them: three sets of earnest eyes, affable, competent. The best the Alliance had to offer, Vasiht'h thought. Why wasn't it enough? No, that wasn't the right question. If they were the best the Alliance had to offer, what did that make him?

"Any trouble?" Jahir was asking the Seersa.

"None. He smoked one of those drugs of his, played cards with us, and then went to sleep about an hour ago."

"So late?" Jahir murmured.

"He says he's used to being up all night," Triona said. A smile was working on the edges of her mouth. "The impression he gave us was of wild parties. I had no idea the Eldritch had them."

"I am entirely sure that the parties the Ambassador's been invited to are of a caliber far beyond anything to which we might aspire," Jahir said, which was as fine a piece of truth wrapped in misdirection as anything Lisinthir could have said himself. It bothered Vasiht'h, and that distressed him: he'd lived with Jahir long enough to know that those subtle misdirections were the way he dealt with questions he couldn't answer, whether because of the Veil or, in this case, because of the confidentiality expected by clients.

"All right, ladies," Triona said. "Looks like we're for the sack."

Cory yawned. "Sounds good to me. Good night, aletsen."

"Good night," Jahir said for them both. So cheerful the three women... had they really spent the time playing cards? Had Lisinthir charmed them as effortlessly as he did everyone else—when he wasn't terrifying them with the hint of that violence that passed beneath the surface, like Leviathan?

Once they were alone, Jahir studied the room, the door, the pack of cards now tidied and left on the corner of the table. Then he said, low, "You are out of sorts, arii."

"Extremely," Vasiht'h said. "I probably need to sleep." Saying it, he wanted it desperately: not just because he was tired, though he was, and not just because the ration bars weren't really enough to energize him, which they weren't... but because if he slept, he could close his eyes on this whole situation and be free for a little while. In his dreams he could make tea and soup and cookies. He wouldn't be afraid there that the person he was praying Jahir would evolve into wouldn't respect him anymore.

Jahir was still regarding him with those too observant eyes of his. Tensing, Vasiht'h said, "All right. I'm miserable. I hate being here. I'm trying to hold it together, but... I'm not doing a great job."

"I think you're doing a fine job." A very soft touch on his shoulder, and brief... the sorts of touches that had been typical of their life before Lisinthir's influence, and for some reason that comforted Vasiht'h more than a far more demonstrative embrace would have. There was still some of his Jahir left in there, somewhere. And if that remained, maybe the love would too, a love that wouldn't be poisoned by contempt or condescension.

"Thanks," he managed to reply. "I'm trying."

"So are we all. But we'd tell our own clients that there's no shame in breaking down."

"We would, wouldn't we." Vasiht'h managed a smile. "Why is it so easy to advise and so hard to believe?"

"Because we advise from the comfort of our confidence and safety," Jahir said. "And we are asked to believe in our moments of doubt and anguish. But that... that is a pattern, too. An oscillation of the psyche. We move from strength to weakness and come around again to strength, and that movement is a sign of life. Were we always strong, were we always weak, did we never trade roles, we would be souls impervious to the world around us. And then how would we change? How would we grow?"

"It doesn't feel very good," Vasiht'h observed.

"It never does." Jahir smiled, and some of his exhaustion leaked through their link. "We should both rest. But you can have the bathroom first."

Vasiht'h nodded, and managed a smile. "Thank you."

"Always." Heartfelt. "Anytime."

Why did it break Vasiht'h's heart to think that Jahir meant it?

This was a kind memory, because the Slave Queen's mane was soft in his hands, and the trust that had led her to permit him to untangle it... that was sweeter than wine, and headier. It had become their ritual to tend to one another when the Emperor took his flights, for neither of them could follow him. In truth, Lisinthir was grateful for the respite. Their lover made everything too intense, nearly unbearable: time smeared in his presence, lost cohesion, until most days Lisinthir couldn't remember more than flashes of what had passed before, glints like stars shrouded by clouds. With the Queen he could slow down. Breathe the scent of her beneath the base of one horn... twine fingers with hers and marvel at her dainty, alien hand: such thin, short fingers to have such talons.

He was brushing through her mane with fingers made supple by the cream he'd just smoothed into her hide, a process he drew out for fascination with the texture, so stiff at their spines to grow so thin over their bellies, their throats. Was it a Chatcaavan thing to wonder if nature had intended to make their necks easy to rip open? Why had the Living Air left them so vulnerable? And yet he was not sorry for it, for the ability to make her gasp and shiver when he breathed on the tender skin just beneath her jaw.

How she distracted him. He lost himself in the feel of her hair, coarser than his but so much more interesting in hue: silvers that seemed to glimmer like metal amid gray strands that concealed them like a veil over treasure. That was what she was: the Emperor's Treasure.

"You do not ornament it," he said suddenly. He felt her attention in the tension of her neck, saw her glancing at him over that narrow shoulder. "Your hair. Do I remember right that you had beads in it when I was first presented at court? My memory is not what it was."

"We decorate our horns," the Queen said. "Our fingers, our arms, our ankles. The wings...." A shiver of distaste, and he kissed her shoulder in apology for having made her feel it. "But no. We do not put things in our hair. You used to, didn't you?"

"It is customary," Lisinthir said, remembering the comb on his lap. He used it to smooth her hair now that he had freed it of the tangles their love-making had put in it. "A sign of wealth and power, to wear long chains of gemstones thus. For males and females both, though the females of our species bind their hair in braids."

"Strange to think that the symbols of wealth and power are worn by both males and females." She sounded perplexed. "Among us, a male decorates his females to demonstrate his power and wealth, but he does not decorate himself."

"Of course he does," Lisinthir replied. At her glance, he reached up and tugged gently at her horn. "These are the male equivalent."

"It's not the same," she said.

"Isn't it? The only difference is that males grow their own jewelry. Everything else is the same: if you have few, then you are weak. If you have many, than you are strong. And if you allow others to take them from you, then you are craven, unfit for your titles."

She remained silent for several strokes of the comb. "I had not thought of it that way."

How he loved this about her: her willingness to broach alien shores, to consider her own culture from a remove. Her Emperor had it too, but she had given herself to that communion first, and that... that was an act of indescribable courage. "I see why you do not adorn yourself, though. Jewelry is a symbol of someone else's power over you. I wouldn't wear it either, given that. Save that you have these...." He ran a gentle finger up her wing arm to the thumb-claw with its jeweled sheath. "Symbolic again, I am guessing."

"They came with the wings," she whispered.

He set aside the comb to turn her and pull her into his arms. Against her brow, he said, "Oh, Beauty. I did not mean to remind you."

She flinched, a Chatcaavan negation muffled against his body. "I know."

But the pain remained in her, sharp as a fresh cut: was it because now she had to watch another Chatcaavan fly so often? In her tower it was customary for visitors to walk up the stairs; to approach through the windows was the height of impropriety, and could be construed as a challenge to the male who owned the harem. For years—revolutions, they called them—she had been protected from the sight. Now she stood with Lisinthir, watching their lover spring from the balcony... silent, always silent.

She, who had never admitted to longing for freedom, still yearned for the sky. And he, who would never fly, who had never expected to be able to, could not imagine her need, and found it unbearable. To distract, he said, gentle, "Do you know how I admire you?"

"W-what?" Confusion, the words slow, as if he dragged her from some internal dream. Always, she found these conversations unbelievable when he broached them. It is why he did so repeatedly, to shore up that confidence, word by word. "Admire me? Why?"

"For your strength." He kissed her between the eyes, smiled to see her try to focus on him as he did so and fail: such enormous orange eyes, such small pupils. How he loved their gemlike clarity.

"I? I am not strong!"

"On the contrary." Lisinthir replied, brushing her hair back over her shoulders and then clasping them. "I think you may be the strongest Chatcaavan I have ever met. Male or female."

She drew her head back on her long neck, eyes narrowing, and he endured her skeptical scrutiny. "Now I know you jest, Ambassador."

"Why?" he asked. "Do you think I would name the Emperor? He was born with a weapon perfectly suited to his needs, Beauty. Armed with ambition, he cut his way to power. But he never suffered the durances you have, and survived them. Imprisonment is a test I don't think he would have weathered with your grace."

"Imprisonment," she murmured, tasting the word.

"Shall we call it aught else? It would be a lie."

She glanced up at him, her head perfectly still. "You would call my apathy strength. Because..." She drew in a breath, inflating her narrow ribcage: how delicate she was! "Because that's what it was, Ambassador. It was apathy. They defiled me and demeaned me and debased me... and they won. I gave up."

"Did you?"

"What else?" she asked, pained. "You saw me. You knew."

"I saw someone who reached to me when she could have pushed me away. Who pledged herself to the aid of strangers and aliens. Who saw the similarities in them past the unimportant externals." He cupped her face in long hands. "I saw you, yes. But someone weak, someone completely defeated, could not have helped me free the Heir, Laniis, the slaves. They called you passive, my lady, but they mistook endurance for passivity. Even you did. But your apathy was only the exhaustion of a soul that had been persevering so long it forgot the name of its own toil."

"How can you say these things!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed. "You call my choicelessness a choice?"

"I don't, because you did have a choice," he said. "You could have thrown yourself from the window." He traced the pierced and useless wings, grieving at the shiver that made their lacquered edges rattle. "But you didn't, did you."

"It was cowardice," she whispered.

"Not to end it?" Lisinthir said. "When ending would have brought surcease from suffering, and living would have condemned you to a life with no hope of freedom or change or happiness? What then the harder course?"

She laughed, covered the tip of her mouth with her fingers, ducking her head. "Oh, my lord," she said at last. "You always bring such crazed thoughts, unthinkable thoughts. You make of my life the deed of a male... but it is not so glorious."

"Courage often goes unrecognized in those who show no obvious fear. But I say, lady, and listen closely now: it is an act of bravery not to die in the circumstances in which you have been living. Your very patience was the face of resistance! And what you resisted was the desire of those around you to negate you! Well, you have not been negated. From almost nothing, you have nevertheless derived the strength to go on... and that strength has seen you here, to a place where you have been fulfilled. Where you have known happiness." He hesitated. "At least, I think I perceive happiness in you. Tell me I'm right?"

Her laugh then was easier, and she slid her arms around him, cuddling. "Oh my lord. You would worry about such things." A licking kiss along his chest, near the collarbone. "Yes. Yes, I am happy."

He exhaled, gathered her close, careful of the wings. "I am glad to hear you say so."

"And maybe," she added, thoughtful, "I am interested in this story of a Slave Queen who could have courage."

"Not a story." He nipped her at the edge of her brow where it shadowed one of those great orange eyes. "Truth."

"Maybe," she said, but he could tell the idea was working on her.

Smiling, he said, "And how will you write the ending of this Slave Queen's story?"

Her shudder caught him off guard, as did the talons she dug into his back. "Oh, my lord," she whispered, "I will not write one because I don't want it to end...!"

He kissed her, let her ride him down until he was on his back, and he forgot the bloody scratches as she bowed over him and begged him with body and hands and mouth to make it last. And for a few moments, it lasted forever.

Lisinthir woke to find his cousin stepping over Vasiht'h's body on the way to his narrow nest of pillows on the floor, and something in Jahir's movements woke instincts in him that refused to be silenced. The corner of the wall showed the time—very late—far too late for his cousin to be up. He waited until the other had come near enough and said, "Cousin?"

Jahir paused. "You're awake," he whispered.

"Headache," Lisinthir said, opting for truth. "And dreams. And the noise you made, coming in. You have been up all this time."

"Your latest test results perplex me."

"You mean 'concern me.'"

Jahir paused, then sighed and sat on the edge of the bed, resting his elbows on his knees. He had changed, but no hair had fallen out of the braid yet... so he had probably just made ready for bed. And this subtle posture made his dejection far too obvious. "Yes. I suppose I do. But I can't tell what any of it means. This is work for healer-specialists. I am just a therapist with a degree in pharmacology."

"Just that," Lisinthir said, amused. Then, more gently, "Now tell me the real reason you have been unable to sleep."

Jahir didn't try to deny it. "I worry about Vasiht'h."

"He'll do well enough when the fight starts. It's having too much time to think about it that cripples him."

His cousin made a brief throwing-away motion, a little twitch of wrist and fingers. "Not that. We will do what we must. It's what comes after that troubles him."

"What comes after," Lisinthir repeated, watching his cousin.

"Because I doubt this is over. You said yourself the war is only beginning. And if I have some part to play in it... where does that leave Vasiht'h, who doesn't want anything to do with it?" Jahir rubbed his temple. "It's not fair to him. But I go where the Queen sends me. She sent me here, to you, and that was surely for a purpose. When we make it home, then what? Will she send me out again? You will remain in play... that may mean I will too. I don't know what purpose I could possibly serve in the conflict, but I may be one of the only Eldritch positioned to do so. How many of our kind even understand the world outside the homeworld? Much less the immensity of the conflict poised to affect us? I live in the Alliance, Lisinthir. Even if she does not send me to battle, the battle will come to me all the same. I have a responsibility to guard our interests. I may be one of the few people to even see how they are being threatened in time to ensure their defense." Jahir drew in a shuddering breath, head bowed. "I hate fighting. But to protect us, I'll go as I am directed. But my partner... he pledged himself to me, and my world, and my family. But he didn't anticipate a war. And he doesn't want to die for us." Scrubbing his face: "I don't want him to either. But I go where I'm sent!"

Lisinthir waited to see if all the words had spilled or if more were forthcoming. When the silence lengthened, he studied his cousin, saw the wire-taut tension through his shoulders, down his spine. He sat up, pushed himself off the bed. "Come."

"I... beg your pardon?" Confusion, grief, worry. Far too easy to read.

"I said 'come,'" Lisinthir said, pulling on the robe at the foot of the bed. "You are too agitated to sleep. If you lie down you will twitch and flinch and hunch your body more and more tightly until you pull a muscle. So come with me."

Jahir rose. "Where are we going?"

"To bleed some of that energy from your flesh and see if it drains some of the energy from your worries." Lisinthir grinned. "Isn't that how it works, Healer?"

"Sometimes," Jahir replied, wary now. Lisinthir was glad to hear it; he preferred it to the desolation and fear.

"Come," Lisinthir said a third time, and his cousin followed.

The gym was deserted, unsurprisingly. The crew slept in shifts, but they still observed a "day," and even under emergency power constraints they dimmed and re-colored the lighting based on that schedule. The dim red glow and darkened walls reminded Lisinthir of blood-colored moons, which was not an inappropriate image for his frame of mind. He thought of the smell of the Slave Queen's skin near the horn, the way her gasps had felt warm and damp against his ear when she bent to him. So much truth and poetry in flesh, and all of it denied his people.

"I hope you haven't asked me here to resume our weapons practice," Jahir said, subdued.

"You didn't dance."

Curiosity now, despite the fatigue. A little asperity, as well. It whetted Lisinthir's appetite, that spark of rebellion. "You didn't seriously bring me here to dance. In the middle of the night!"

"You need to lose some nervous energy," Lisinthir said, calculating the tone: a little casual, a little mischievous. It won him a smile and a frown in quick succession, and he tried not to laugh. "You said yourself that you do."

"All of us dance."

"Some are better at it than others," Lisinthir said. "And I think you are one of them."

Jahir folded his arms, unimpressed. "And you have derived that knowledge how?"

"You were tapping your heel when your partner was dancing. And your fingers, too, but it was syncopated. Very nicely done, that rhythm." Ah, he had Jahir's attention now. He began circling him, as he had done with Vasiht'h earlier.

"I had music lessons in childhood."

"Of course you did. So did I. But those lessons didn't take in me the way they did in you," Lisinthir said. He paused behind Jahir and leaned toward him, voice softening, "You sing when you heal, in the mind."

Jahir paused, surprise tightening his arms and neck. "I... do. I do?"

That was a good place to leave him, Lisinthir judged. Let him work through his own memories and wonder at them, be loosened by them. It was the truth: Lisinthir had heard it while Jahir had been building the nerve block, the hint of Eldritch lullabies, sung not just in a single voice but embroidered with harmonies that the originals didn't have. While his cousin considered it, Lisinthir padded to the wall, woke it, asked it to put together an evolution. For its genesis, something baroque and mannered... for its endpoint, something wilder and more sensuous. He let the computer build the journey from one end to the other: marvelous toys these Alliance algorithms. Then he rejoined Jahir and bowed with a flourish. "Shall we?"

"Dance," Jahir repeated, bemused. And hearing the music softly rising, "As if we were at the summer court."

"We both learned the forms, yes?"

"One dances them with the opposite sex!"

Lisinthir laughed. He would never have thought these bloodless battles would be so exhilarating, but it was fun—fun—to draw Jahir out of himself. He loved the unpredictability of an Eldritch prince's upbringing reinvented through the lens of an Alliance citizenship, an Alliance beloved. "The steps are not so difficult. I'll even take the women's part if it will make things easier for you." He mimed a curtsey with invisible skirts, the Chatcaavan robe luffing at his knees. "May I have this dance, Seni's Heir?"

"You are incorrigible," Jahir said, exasperated, but he bowed, reached forward... stopped.

There. That was the moment Lisinthir had been waiting for. Because the Eldritch dance required props, tools to stand in for the touch they denied themselves. A man should have touched a dagger's hilt to a woman's fan or wand, and instinctively Jahir had raised his hand before realizing he had neither.

Lisinthir met his cousin's hand with his instead, slid his fingers in the curve of Jahir's, let the fingertips trail along the insides of Jahir's fingers to the palm. That shudder, that was delicious. "This is what we have refused ourselves," he said, the caress light, learning. His cousin's palms were wider, but not by much. "Doesn't it strike you as ridiculous?"

"Yes—no—no, not when your touching me like that clouds my reason." Jahir laughed at himself, rueful.

Lisinthir clasped the hand fully, taking his cousin's uncertainties and pleasures and wants and fears into himself. He breathed in, settling them, and said, "And now... I step to the right, and you to the left—" He began, and Jahir fell into the form, constrained as everything Eldritch was, leeched of any connection to the senses. Lisinthir obeyed the forms but only for how they stressed the contrast of skin on skin. He felt the heat of Jahir's palm against his, knew the moment his cousin decided to curl his fingers closer by the graze of their tips against his knuckles, over Imthereli's ring.

"You think to demonstrate something."

"Do I?" Lisinthir watched Jahir's face, enjoying the sight of the other man making connections, racing from one thought to the next.

"You must, because you feel to me as if you're positioning yourself for another battle."

"And if what I want is to distract your mind from its fretting?"

"You are doing an admirable job, but only by puzzling me." Jahir let his fingers go to bow and back away, then turn to keep Lisinthir in view: it was for the woman to parade around the man, so Lisinthir did so... though he couldn't help subverting the form by prowling rather than promenading. The flush it brought to his cousin's cheeks was pleasing.

They resumed touching and stepping. Lisinthir let his cousin pace him and said, quiet, "Our error was in too much distance. Do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because the moment of danger is always here... where we are now. In the moments before intimacy." The music was accelerating, showing signs of infection with something wilder. Lisinthir let it carry him closer, so that each step took him nearer, near enough to sense his cousin's body heat in the chill of the room. "Our kin were wrong, cousin. They thought that intimacy was the moment of greatest peril, but it is in fact when we are vulnerable together that we are safest."

Jahir had stopped moving. Lisinthir kept his hand and kissed its knuckles, tasted the sweat in the hollows between them, pulled his cousin closer by it. "We have sex," he said. "And just before we push into another's body... that is danger. We eat, and the moment when the food is rising to our mouths... that is danger. We may be rejected. The meal may be dashed away. Anything can happen between that moment and the moment of consummation." Another kiss, this time at Jahir's shoulder. "But then we push in. Then we bite, we swallow. We are one. The communion exists, and we are safe." A last kiss, at his cousin's ear, and the shiver there was something he could feed on. "And then we pull out, then we are empty again, and in danger. When we hold ourselves apart to keep from being hurt, we accomplish nothing but the denial of nourishment. And when we draw into the midfield, wanting to hold that distance but acknowledging a need, we do nothing but destroy ourselves. This—" Cupping Jahir's face. "This is safety." That kiss he drew out, long and slow and knowing. When he paused, his cousin was shaking.

"When you are so close," Jahir said at last, their faces near enough that Lisinthir could feel the shivery breaths they rode, "you are also close enough to be hurt."

"Hurting requires you to draw back enough to separate yourself." Lisinthir brushed his lips against Jahir's. "When you are deep in one another, there is no separation."

"Cousin," Jahir said, his pain acute. "I love him, and I'm afraid that we'll be torn apart."

"He knows the only truth that saves." Lisinthir touched a finger to Jahir's mouth. "If he is with you, truly with you, in you, the way he is... then that is safety. No matter where you are or what happens. Now... dance. In and out of range, in and out of danger. Like battle, like sex, like everything vital." Lisinthir gave him a gentle push, caught his hand.

How sweet it was that Jahir obliged him... and his cousin danced like a poem, the grace of wind in trees, a thing of Air and a musician's perfect attunement. It salved something in Lisinthir to watch the changing pattern of the music loosen some of the chains that fettered his cousin so tightly. And this worked until Jahir seemed to notice the song. He started laughing, stopped, holding his midriff. "Did you ask the computer to pastiche NeoBaroque with Slink? The computer?"

"I thought maybe it would encourage you to make acquaintance with your hips," Lisinthir said, amused.

Jahir pressed a hand to his brow, mouth twitching.

"And now you will say not all dancing moves from the hips, and I will observe that in you music works its way in through your extremities and ripples inward…." Lisinthir set a hand on his cousin's chest and walked him in a circle as if in pas de deux. "And it is lovely. But you won't move me that way."

"No," Jahir agreed, catching his hand. "You are all predation, cousin. And I am drained and so are you."

"Are we?"

"We are—" Jahir paused. "You are about to kiss me."

Lisinthir grinned. Even the end of the fight was still pleasure. "Ah, then I shall not. It wouldn't do to be predictable."

In some time before the endlessness of this voyage, Jahir might have laughed and withdrawn to sit at the edge of the room and catch his breath. But now he wanted to know his own power, and if he had it. Too many new concepts, or old ones given new breath. If he was right… if he stilled himself here before the hunter and let his hope well into his eyes… if he let his shoulders loosen and his attention narrow….

Lisinthir stopped abruptly, touched fingertips to Jahir's lips, which is how Jahir found they were parted. Just a little. Just enough for Lisinthir to brush at the division. Jahir kissed them and had just enough time to smile at the frustrated noise he evoked before he received the kiss he'd decided he wanted after all. He even leaned into it on purpose this time, experimented with the sensation of not being passive, but of being willing.

"Yes," Lisinthir answered against his mouth. "Invite the stranger into the temple. And the world—" Another chafing kiss, soft and dry and electric, "—is the stranger."

So Jahir cupped his cousin's face and asked for more, tacit, and received, and took a different instruction in how to be pleasing that way. Who was the Jahir who could speak with the body as well as the word? What did he want? Was it worthy of shame?

"Enough," Lisinthir murmured, touching a finger to his mouth. "Or I will forget my fine vows and have you on this mat." His laugh was husky. "You learn quickly, cousin."

"I have an exemplary teacher," Jahir answered, and kissed the finger.

"Ah!" Lisinthir snatched it back and laughed again. "No! None of that. If you want to rest, sit. We'll both sit."

Strange how desire could be urgent and restful. How did that work? Jahir retreated to the wall and sat with his back to it, and his cousin joined him, shoulder to shoulder.

"Shame," Jahir said. "It is contextual."

Lisinthir's attention grew focused. "Go on."

"Cultural. A tool shaped to encourage social and biological necessities." Jahir touched his own lips, now hypersensitive. Would they always be that way, or would he get used to kissing? Or would that take as much kissing as Lisinthir had become accustomed to? Not likely to happen to him, certes. "And our particular culture's notions of shame are bound up in the limitations of our technology, limitations we are aware of, because we did not always have them."

"That was long ago. Dare I say it."

"Even Eldritch have a long ago," Jahir said. Such a curious sensation, this calm. How could it feel so companionable to sit alongside someone so? Someone who made his blood sing? He thought lust would make him desperate; instead, it seemed to gentle him. Maybe it was the relief of not having to fight it? Would it ever make sense to him?

"You are trying to work this out with logic," Lisinthir observed. "It is not a thing of logic. There is only one useful question."

"That being?"

"Would you love and cherish Sediryl, and would she you, and would your children be healthy were they born?"

Jahir ignored the dart of yearning that stung him, spreading fire through his body. "That is three questions."

"They are branches from the same root. The root is whether the two of you together would work within the context of the society in which you plan to live. So then. Would you?"

"I… I don't know," Jahir said. "I don't know where we would live. Or when. She has a lover, I have a partner. Short-lived both. I wouldn't draw her away from the life she has now… and I am not ready to go home…."

"Who says you must go home? Now, or even in three hundred years? You will live a good fifteen hundred, cousin, perhaps longer. Barring misfortune, you have the time. Stay in the Alliance. Go back to the homeworld. Maintain two residences! Marry your woman, and let her spend fifty years on some project and then come back to her. What is your rush? She will pace you through the years."

Jahir considered that for long moments. Then, quiet, "If I ask her. If she says 'yes.'"

"If you ask her, cousin," Lisinthir said, brushing the back of a curled finger against Jahir's cheek. "She will say yes, because you are absolutely irresistible."

Jahir accepted that because Lisinthir's belief in it was in his fingertips, in that caress. "And you? Will you go home one day? Revitalize Imthereli? The Queen will give you anything, you know."

"Will she?"

"If the Alliance is saved from the Chatcaava it will be because of you." Jahir paused, then said, "Because of the safety you and the Emperor made in one another. You left yourself in him, and he in you."

"And both of us in the Slave Queen… and she in us. Yes. You understand." Lisinthir sighed a little. "I don't know, cousin. To go home. And do what? Have children with some Eldritch woman?" His laugh was curt. "Can you imagine if I had wed as my father had required? I might even now be your stepfather."

Jahir covered his eyes with a hand.

Lisinthir slid an arm around his shoulders and tugged him closer. "Yes. Rather too incestuous even for me, and I like our little cousin-play." He kissed Jahir's brow, breath warm. "It is hard for me to think that far ahead. I want—need—to see my lovers again and know that they're safe. I need to live with them, to have that life with them, however long that life might be. I can't think past that to the time when they've dissipated into the Living Air."

"I understand," Jahir said softly.

"I know." And then a smile in his cousin's voice, wry. "Though if the Queen cares to endow me with my family's lands again, perhaps that wouldn't be so bad. Given how many fights my parents had over Imthereli's losses to both Galare and Asaniefa, and my mother accusing my father of contemplating divorcing her to hitch his fortunes to the latter and maybe win back that land."

"You could be Lisinthir Imthereli," Jahir murmured.

"Keldi Imthereli," Lisinthir agreed. "It would feel strange. But I carry my father's swords, not my mother's. And I am more the drake than the unicorn, though there is a little unicorn in me also."

"And you do not hate her," Jahir said, feeling through the nest of conflicting regrets he sensed through their touch.

"Hate… the Queen?" Surprise colored Lisinthir's voice. "Should I?"

"She sent you into the Empire, unprepared—"

Scoffing. "Nothing could have prepared me for the Empire. Nothing ever prepared anyone for it, leastaways in the Alliance." A tender kiss brushed against Jahir's brow, almost absent, as if his cousin needed touch to clarify his thoughts. "I dreamed of her while I was in the Empire. She was my warning that I was changing, that I was straying too far from true." A faint smile. "She was my symbol of all things Eldritch. But she herself is very little like most of the Eldritch she rules. Maybe that should have been a sign to me. She sent me to evolve into an Eldritch who could survive a world outside our cloistered home. Just as she sent you. Yes?"

Had she? Jahir thought of the letters, the money, his mother's comments, now and then, about Liolesa's having observed his progress through the Alliance. Thought of his few appearances at court, and how the Queen had not drawn him into any of its divertissements though as the head of their House she could have insisted. "Yes," he said, surprised at how long it had taken him to realize it. "Yes, she must have."

"And you thought it was your idea," Lisinthir said, his smile gentle. "We were too young then to outthink a Queen."

"Are we that much older now?"

"Oh, I think we are. Being off the homeworld ages us. We have experiences our brethren cannot imagine." Lisinthir tipped his chin up and kissed him, and Jahir sank into it, letting it bleed the world gold at the corners, crumbling inward like flakes of metal leaf. He felt, very distant, the touch of Lisinthir's fingers moving up from chin to the jaw... made a noise when they paused there, hoping for what—for pain to sharpen the pleasure? To give it edges fine enough to cut him to the quick? Please, he thought, dimly astonished that he was willing to ask, and was he saying it aloud, and in what language: Please.

Lisinthir caressed the joint and then dug his thumb into it, and it shattered his senses, lightning branching from the nerve, erasing everything until his cousin brought him back with the dim, wet heat of his lips.

Lisinthir was speaking.  "...sin, cousin." Another kiss, pulling at his lip, until he couldn't tell where sensation started and the world ended: was he in this body or in Lisinthir's mouth or diffused out of everything, spreading, soft....

More clearly now, husky: "Cousin."

Jahir managed to focus because that had been command. His face was cradled between both of Lisinthir's hands—when had that happened? He felt entirely safe there.

"Promise me," Lisinthir said, low. "Promise me you'll come to me when this is over." A very gentle kiss on his sore mouth. "Let me make you whole as I was made whole. Let me do that for you."

"What if..." He had to find words, but he was having trouble. Were they Universal? What had Lisinthir spoken to him in? Their native tongue. He fumbled for it, aware of his cousin's patient regard. "What if I do. And I find that... this is all I am?" He answered the uncertainty he felt through the palms on his jaw. "What if I am ruined for what I long for?"

To recreate the happiness his parents had. To love children—God and Lady, how he had never admitted until now how much he craved them. And not just any children, but hers, the doomed ones all his society had told him would be impossible. In his heart he'd been unable to believe they would die in the womb. He wanted that life, the sweet domesticity of it... was that ridiculous? Pedestrian?

"Beautiful," Lisinthir corrected, gentle. "And nourishing. Why would you not want it?"

"What if... I can't?" He thought back to his cavalier comment to Vasiht'h. "What if the time comes and... it can't be fixed?"

"What you mean to say," Lisinthir said softly, "Is 'what if I can't be fixed.'"

The frisson that traveled him was cold, made his skin draw taut, nauseated him. "What if I'm broken?" Jahir whispered. The horror made completely manifest: "What if I broke myself?"

Lisinthir considered him, thumbs stroking lightly beneath Jahir's eyes. Then, quiet, "Do you trust me with an invasion as intimate as the one you inflicted on me when you found me folded over that table?"

"I—I must," Jahir stammered, surprised. "But what is this about—" And gasped in when Lisinthir took him down with him, out of the gym, away from the cold and the low red light and the plangent silence... deep into memories, and from them Lisinthir plucked the image of Sediryl, gave her life and breath, and Jahir saw again the flash of her eyes, the proud lift of her chin, the arch of her brows.

Forgive me, Lisinthir whispered, and then stripped her and put her in his arms in a fantasy more lurid than anything Jahir could have imagined... because it was informed by his cousin's intimate knowledge of another woman's Eldritch body. Jahir found fingers on flesh, lips on his, felt breasts pressed against his ribs as she stretched up to kiss him....

With all his heart he rushed for her open mouth, poured himself into her, gathered her up and crushed her to him, and no part of him was cold to it.

When Lisinthir broke him from that, he was panting, cheeks so flushed that his cousin's fingers against them felt cold.

Gently, so gently, his cousin smiled and kissed the tip of his nose. "No worries on that count."

"God...!"

"And very much Lady," Lisinthir agreed with a touch of mischief, and at last Jahir managed a laugh.

"But if that, then... what is this?" he asked. "Between us?"

"Complicated?" Another amused look. "You're the therapist, cousin. Tell me what you'd say."

"I'd say 'please enjoy a cup of warm tea while I write this referral to one of our sex therapists.'" He faltered and said, "But I could never have done any of this, or admitted to any of it, or even explained it to such a person. Save that he was also Eldritch. And not just Eldritch, but a Galare, and a peer."

"No, I imagine not. And in truth, I'm not sure how much I could have admitted to someone, save that he was not also Eldritch, and a man, and another heir." Lisinthir half-smiled. "The Queen had her wisdom at the last." A gentle caress, the backs of his fingers to Jahir's cheek. "So will you come to me?"

Would he? Not to learn who this Jahir was who had such needs, because he was beginning to understand that for himself, finally. But to allow his cousin to convince him that he could be cherished not just despite what it suggested about him, but because of it? And to take into him that soul-deep conviction that his needs were neither ugly nor perverse to someone of his own upbringing, but merely a facet of the same need to trust and be safe and be loved that everyone possessed?

In wonder, he said, "I must... mustn't I?"

"You don't have to," Lisinthir said. "But it would be a great healing if you did. And you would do me great honor allowing me to administer it."

"I'll come," Jahir said. "Only tell me when."

"A few weeks." Lisinthir kissed his brow, lingering, lips against skin. Then sighed, warm. "A few weeks. Enough time for the physicians to finish with me, and for me to find some affable Harat-Shar willing to undertake my education."

"Your education!" Jahir laughed. "Now there is an image! You would have the great cats teach you how to make love after all the practice you've had?"

Lisinthir smiled and tucked an errant hair back behind one of Jahir's ears. "No... I would have the great cats teach me how to hurt you safely and in a way you'll enjoy."

He heard the words before he understood them. When he did, the shudder that gripped him closed his throat around his reply.

"Yes," Lisinthir whispered, dragging the word out, tasting it. Another kiss, on swollen lips this time. "And then you will heal something in me."

That gave him enough focus to swim back into his body, gather the broken pieces of his concentration. "Oh?"

His cousin nodded. "To use on you the things that nearly destroyed my sanity, and reclaim them from cruel memories... to know they can bring someone to some more sublime place... I think that would grant me peace."

Could they do that? Heal one another? Such a beautiful thought. Jahir rested his brow against Lisinthir's. "I'll come," he said, soft.

"Good," Lisinthir said, and nipped his lip. "And maybe we'll go dancing, yes? The Pelted have dance clubs. You can be less appalled by the music when it's being improvised live rather than extrapolated poorly by an algorithm."

That shocked a laugh out of Jahir. "You want to go dancing? The two of us! In a crowd?"

"It sounds a properly sensual experience," Lisinthir said with a grin. "Yes. I want it. So take a few lessons in modern dance while I'm having my internal organs replaced under a halo-arch."

"Crazy. Incorrigible. Impossible." Jahir laughed, low. "You are insane, cousin."

"Such an imprecise diagnosis. My healer must finally be tired to be so indistinct, so it is time for him to sleep."

"And you also." Jahir let Lisinthir help him up. "How are you not as exhausted as I am?"

"I am. I've more practice at ignoring it, is all."

Stepping outside the gym, Jahir paused and looked up at the corridor, at the narrow strips of light running the ceiling's edges, felt anew the chill in the air and the strange silence of the deck beneath his feet. Quietly, he said, "We are walking alongside our deaths, aren't we."

"Death always walks alongside us, no matter how we might blind ourselves to him," Lisinthir said. "It's only when he is obviously stalking us that we can no longer deny it." He narrowed his eyes, lips peeling back from his teeth. Brief, so brief that expression, to be so lethal. "He is stalking us now. But I am a hunter myself, and he will find no easy quarry here."

How many times had Lisinthir fought that fight in the past year? All those battles were written in his body, and his eyes. Jahir considered him, then touched his cousin's arm, bringing him back from that place. Not yet, he thought, letting it seep through their skins. Not yet, but soon.

Lisinthir nodded once, and led the way to their quarters. Beside him, and one pace behind, Jahir followed, hands clasped behind his back, and thought it was a very comfortable place to walk.