Major Pieces, page 37
“Will you help me…”
The Mother sighed. “Turn around.”
Fitted with the scarves, the Queen cautiously turned her head, then shook it, trying to dislodge them. As she glanced over her shoulder at their gleaming edges, the Mother said, “There was one tale about a female who lost her scarf, and a male caught it for her. A parable. About how the sexes are supposed to treat one another.”
With courtesy? As helpmeets to one another? As fellow fliers? The Queen thought of the Ambassador, who would possibly say ‘with chivalry,’ though that concept was so alien she still found it difficult to hold in her head. She could palpate its edges without seeing the whole of it. So strange, and so wondrous, her other beloved and the world he’d brought into her tower with his words and his translated ballads and his so serious eyes, like pieces of the night sky.
“Dark blue,” she said suddenly. “Can I have a second set, like the evening? Please?”
The Mother studied her, pulled the scarf in front of her right shoulder, petted it. Smiled at her. “I am sorry if I fret at you. But… a Breath after all these years! And I have seen it!”
The Queen clasped the other female’s lower hands. “You will continue to, I promise.”
“I know. But it is so hard to believe in hope, even when you are seeing its promise fulfilled.” The Mother stepped away. “Go, Mistress. Fly!”
That time she checked the computer before she went to sleep, and watched the viseos of herself twirling, red silk rippling around her body against the darkening purple horizon.
“Tonight,” the Emperor told her, when she was preparing for bed. “He is inbound.”
The Queen halted abruptly, turning to face him. She had wondered why he’d made no move to join her; even when he stayed up late to work, he often joined her in bed to talk a while before she drowsed off. Instead he had poured himself a cup of brandy and disposed himself at the small table by the balcony… and a striking silhouette he made there, his horns starkly cut against the clear dark blue of the night sky. It was jeweled with stars both real and artificial, in the form of satellites and orbital stations and planes going by in the far distance—she had learned from the Knife that the airspace around the palace was forbidden to almost any craft.
Abandoning the bedchamber, she joined him. “When? Tell me it is soon!”
“A few hours after midnight,” the Emperor said. “Shall I wake you when I have word?”
Tempting to stay up, but the time would pass so slowly. And yet how could she sleep, knowing he was at hand? She sighed and the Emperor smiled and touched the tip of her nose, let his fingers trail off it. “Me too, pet.”
She slid to her knees alongside his chair and rested her head on his thigh, and he stroked her hair, idle. To his wordless offer of the cup she shook her head; alcohol would muddle her. This… this was all she needed. To feel the cool air on her face, feel the gentle fingers in her mane. To look out on the darkness and know that it held love, and that love was coming home to stay.
Time passed… she thought she slept, a little. But at last she heard the Emperor’s tablet buzz. His voice had that after-midnight quality, small in a vast and somnolent world. “Yes?”
“We have the Ambassador, Exalted.”
“Send him up.”
“Yes, Exalted.”
How long would it take for him to ascend the stairs? So many, too long! Her spine had grown tense, and the fingers still petting her, too. In every way the Emperor remained relaxed in seeming, and yet, she could taste his anticipation as if she were in her Eldritch skin.
The sound of the door. The murmur of the guards at it. Then boot heels… how often she had derived comfort from the sound of Sediryl’s boots, because they had reminded her of his? And then he was there, framed in the layered gray and blue shadows of the back of the room.
Which of them rose first? The Queen didn’t know. Only that neither of them could have waited for him to approach, any more than he could have paused to allow them. They met in the middle of the room, and then—oh! The smell of him, so familiar now, no longer alien but welcome, sweet and musky and speaking to the Pattern under her skin that he himself had gifted her. The Ambassador pressed his jaw against the top of her head, and ducked so that the Emperor could rub his cheek against his, and as they turned to look up at him the Queen shifted shape, and then the Emperor, and then there were kisses bled across a confusion of mouths, hot and silk-soft and wet. Through her Eldritch skin, the Queen tasted the Emperor’s happiness, the Ambassador’s fierce joy, and knew her rapture shared.
“My beloveds,” Lisinthir said, voice husky against their faces. “I am home.”
This shape could weep, and did.
It was later—much later—that they thought to talk. When they had sated themselves with the tangibility of their bodies, and the presence implied by them. The Queen had been dragon, and Eldritch, and dragon, and was Eldritch again, the better to hear both the pleasure of her lover’s heart and its merely physical beating under her ear. The Emperor had not only been dragon and Eldritch, but human as well, and was again a dragon, sifting the Ambassador’s hair as he had done so often in those first days, admiring its texture. They reposed in the bed, with the clear night air entering from the balcony, and the stars a cool light to contrast the low, warm lamp the Emperor had lit.
“I am home,” the Ambassador said again. “And glad of it.”
A bittersweetness there, and the Queen caught a few measures of music through his skin, and a fleeting image that she could not clearly see, and did not have to. She recognized her gentle counselor even through the lens of the Ambassador’s perception. “Your kin?” she asked.
“Need time,” he said, tracing her jaw with a fingertip. “They have work to do, and titles to grow accustomed to. But we will have an invitation within the year to visit, I think. My cousins’ wedding, and Sediryl’s investiture as the heir.”
“Did you accomplish all you intended with your negotiations?” the Emperor asked, twirling a strand of white hair around his finger.
“Mmm. Don’t tug unless you plan to make good on the tease, Exalted.” Lisinthir grinned lazily. “But… yes. I have reclaimed my sire’s House and made it my own, and begun a new family in it: I left you Lisinthir Nase Galare and am now, if it please you, Lisinthir Lauvet Imthereli.” The Queen lifted her head, startled, and he touched her nose. “Yes, exactly.”
“Love. A good name, if a difficult idealization to have chosen to live up to,” the Emperor said with a low chuckle. “Did you have them fix the dragon on your sigil?”
“It is now winged, as it must be. In the books at least. They must make the new jewels, and I refused to wait.”
“Good.” The Emperor licked the Ambassador’s cheekbone. “What else? They should have given you a planet for a fiefdom, for the labors you did them.”
“What do I need a planet for, when I have an empire?” was the reply, and the Queen felt the surge of hot amusement in the Emperor, and the answering rush in the Ambassador, and thought for a moment they would tussle. But what had once been lethal earnest was now… a game to them. Another language they used to affirm their commitments to one another, and to the aggression and power they still needed to rule that empire.
“Insolent Perfection,” the Emperor said against Lisinthir’s ear, his smile in his voice.
“As you yourself once told me, if there is Insolence,” the Ambassador answered, “then it must have a Perfect form. Yes?”
The Emperor tapped the Eldritch’s chin with a talon. “Yes. But tell me what they gave you, if they did not give you a planet.”
The Queen felt the Ambassador’s sobriety wash through his skin like cool water. “For sooth, beloved. I did not want so many ties leashing me there. They have re-established my family on its ancestral lands and made me its lord. My Queen adjures me to send my heirs to be fostered by my cousins, where they might learn their father’s customs, and suggests we foster my cousins’ children in turn.”
“Your cousins’ children,” the Emperor murmured. “Those would be… the sons and daughters of the Eldritch Queen’s heir.”
“Correct.”
“My sister Sediryl’s children,” the Queen murmured. “By the Gentle Guide, who showed me the tree.”
“My cousin Jahir, yes, whom I love,” the Ambassador answered, caressing her face. “And Sediryl… whom you call sister, still?”
“What else?” the Queen said, leaning into his touch. “She and I… we share many things. And she understood me.”
He bent to kiss her between the eyes, as he might have her draconic form, and in this one she felt his breath intimately on more sensitive skin, how it ruffled against her brows and into the hollows on either side of her small and narrow nose. “I am glad,” he murmured. “That the two of you are close. It is for the best, I think. Not least because I wonder…”
The taste under his skin then… the Queen misliked it. She frowned up at him.
“You wonder,” the Emperor said, “if Second has chosen to settle himself closer to the Eldritch than to our Pelted allies. Is that correct?”
“You know the map as well as I do,” the Ambassador said. “Second cannot stay too near the Empire, or we will find him. And the Pelted are expanding in most of the other directions, and the Pelted… they are angry. They want blood payment. The safest place to run is into the dark… on my cousins’ side.”
The Emperor mmed, letting his hand come to rest on the Ambassador’s throat. “And yet, they are a distance from us. Your people.”
“The Eldritch will only be my people for a while,” the Ambassador answered, quiet. “When my heirs return to my homeworld, Beloved, they will be dragons. And then it will no longer be my people and your people, but our people.”
“When?” the Queen asked, and they both looked at her, confused. She almost wanted to laugh at how involved they could become in abstractions. “When shall we begin the mingling? Shall I have your children first, my Emperor? Or shall I have yours, Ambassador?” When they didn’t immediately answer, she said, “Of course, the Emperor has at least a dozen heirs already, so there is little urgency there. I would like to give the Empire children of my body, but that can wait perhaps until we secure the succession for the Ambassador? It is more important among his people. They always pass property and money through their blood. If we would like there to be more Lauvet Imtherelis, there must be children of his body to inherit the name. The… dynasty.” She tasted the word, liked it. “The dynasty.”
“God and Lady and Living Air,” the Ambassador whispered. “You cannot mean it, so soon.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“I am not ready!”
She sniffed. “I will be the one doing most of the work. And you already have the property and titles and funds, and we have dozens of nursemaids available. Why wait?”
“She has a point,” the Emperor said, amused.
“We could arrive to this investiture with your heir,” she said. “I could show him or her to your Queen, to be formally recognized. That would be good, would it not?”
“To have my heir before you bear your Emperor’s…!”
His incredulity did not quite mask his nervousness, and the fact that she could make a man of the Ambassador’s confidence and courage nervous charmed and amused her. She hadn’t thought the Ambassador could feel nervous. Tapping her soft, Eldritch lip with a finger, the Queen murmured, “Oh, that is true. We should formalize our status as consorts first. Such a thing hasn’t been done in ages, though, not since there was a Queen Ransomed. And I do not believe there is a ceremony for a male consort or even concubine….”
Now the Ambassador was laughing. “You are teasing me, Beauty. Don’t think I don’t feel it through your skin.”
“Maybe a little,” she admitted, unable to help her mirth. But she sobered. “This… was a choice I never thought to have. To be able to bear young. I would like to. I would like to know what it is, to be a mother, after so long assuming I would have no future, or that my future would remain fixed and unchangeable.”
That silenced them both. And then the Emperor, who was also Kauvauc Ueneuvin, leaned over the Ambassador’s body and by the time he kissed her lips he was an Eldritch, long white hair pooling on the Ambassador’s waist. “My Treasure,” he said, his yellow eyes grave, “Whatever you wish most, we will give to you, and without reservation.”
“Then,” she said, “I wish you to be my mate, and I wish the Ambassador to be our consort, and I would like to be a mother.” Feeling the flutter of emotion, she finished, “But if it will distress your sense of propriety, Ambassador, I will have our Emperor’s first. And then yours.”
“I must assume that even in the Empire, there are mores that must be observed,” the Ambassador said, and the huskiness of his voice betrayed the emotions crowding against her skin. “Particularly since we are attempting to win to us those who yet hold those mores close.”
“Let us begin now, then,” the Queen said. “I am already the Emperor’s consort, so it would be entirely proper. And we will take you to mate as soon as we find a rite we can adapt.”
The Emperor was already chuckling against her jaw. “I like my more assertive Beauty.”
“If I have had sufficient agency to rescue myself—”
“—and your Emperor, if you will recall,” her Emperor said.
“—and the Pelted who would have fallen to the system lords had not the fleet augmented by your Twelveworld levies come to their rescue,” the Ambassador added, quiet.
“—then surely I can arrange to be bound to the males of my choice,” she finished, torn between blushing and laughing, and perhaps that was pride, and humility, and wonder that she might have become a heroine on such a rarified level.
“Like the women of the stories I told you long ago,” the Ambassador said softly. “You have Changed worlds.”
“I have not finished yet,” she said, and was astonished to discover that she meant it. That she intended it. Looking up at them both, she said, “There is so much to do yet, and so much of it so very consequential.”
“We know.” The Emperor brushed the back of his finger against her cheekbone, and shared through the touch his unease. The problems they’d surmounted had left them with problems even less tractable, and yet they could not be averted. “But we will win through, or spend ourselves in the attempt.”
She slipped her hands up his sides. She loved him in all his shapes, but this Eldritch one, so long and so delicate, she felt an especial fondness for, because it did not overpower her. Even the human shape had more weight.
“Like this?” he asked, sensing it.
“Can you do so?” the Ambassador asked, voice low. “In this shape?”
“In this shape and every shape,” the Queen answered, “We are Chatcaava.” Looking up into the Emperor’s Eldritch face, she finished in a whisper, “And yes. I would like it to be in this shape. Together.”
Conception was nothing like what she’d learned from overseeing the harem in her tenure as the Slave Queen. She had awarded the Mother’s jewels to more than one female, and listened to the talk those jewels inevitably prompted. Later, having become the Queen Ransomed, she asked the Mother about her personal experiences: why she liked children, and whether she liked being a mother or if those two interests were separate. Not one of those females had ever spoken of the conception of children as an active event. A matter of choice. Not just because females in those days did not have choices—they served the pleasure of males, or they were discarded—but because the body decided on its own. One of the mysteries, the Mother had divulged, for she could now speak of the religion she’d hidden for so long. “We do not choose. The Living Air chooses, and we are its medium.”
But bent over her mate, the Queen knew otherwise, because she felt the potential in his offering, and her body’s willingness, and she… she did not mistake that potential as passivity. Her body was waiting for her to decide: to choose. To discard the seed, or weave it into herself and make something new. She could taste in her mouth the complexities of the Emperor’s genetic pattern: like wine, and blood, and something peppery. Or coppery. Or like oranges—a little of all those things? And so many others? The smell of cinnamon, a rust-bitterness. The wind was in it, and the ocean, and the dueling circle: so was the sweetness of his extra shapes, like the rising descant of a children’s choir.
All of it was hers, if she wanted it. If she wanted to use it. And inevitably, because they were in their Eldritch shapes first, he felt her epiphany through the hands he had clasped on her hips, steadying her over him.
What did it feel like? The revelation? Like lightning, sudden and shocking? Or something slower and more welcome, like the uncurling smoke of an incense stick?
“One child,” she gasped out.
“As many as you wish, in whatever order,” the Emperor said.
Despite all they’d been through, still some part of her feared to ask. “Female. And winged.”
But all he said was, “What else?”
They both felt the rush of her relief. Smiling up at her from the Emperor’s side, the Ambassador said, “Did you expect anything else?”
“No,” she admitted, and bent to them. “More.”
She did not tell them, later, that the Ambassador’s pattern was hers to use too, and that she could knit strands of it into the Emperor’s and use them both at the same time. If they realized it later… well. Until then, a precious secret of her own to cradle, with the new life she had decreed and now harbored under her skin.
Could she have described the process? She didn’t think so. It certainly wasn’t as quantifiable as selecting the Emperor’s assertiveness and his curiosity and melding it with her patience and her endurance. Nothing was labeled; there were no convenient explanations. She chose because one taste worked well with another, and a third repelled her, or a fourth only worked in combination with another two, minor and subtle, that she recognized only after she’d coaxed her lovers into tumbling her another few times. And in different shapes, for the Emperor: it fascinated her that his pattern never changed when he did, but different aspects of it became easier to see. It was…
