Princeps' fury (53 page)

“—ld have warned me she was about to wake!” said a petulant male voice. The hand grasping her hair kept hauling, and she suddenly fell over a slippery barrier of some kind and onto hard, cold stone.

Amara coughed the water—for it
was
water—clear of her nose and lungs and lay panting for a moment, dizzy and drained with the aftereffects of a watercrafted healing. She looked down at herself and found her arms bound to her sides, her legs trussed together at thigh and ankle. She was still clothed, though her outfit was soaked entirely through.

“Welcome back, Countess,” came Invidia’s voice. “We feared for you for a time.”

The voice of the Vord queen buzzed weirdly against Amara’s senses. “I did not.”

Amara shook her head, blinked the water from her eyes, and looked up at them. If she didn’t show them defiance quickly, the cold air of the deep night would suck the warmth from the water soaking her clothes and leave her shuddering and freezing. She thought the defiance might be less convincing if she waited for that.

Invidia sat in a chair that had been brought out from one of the nearby buildings. She looked hideous. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was a deep, sallow shade of saffron. The Vord creature upon her chest was gone. Holes like little gaping mouths in the pale flesh beneath where it had been leaked dark fluid that only faintly resembled blood.

“Invidia,” Amara said. “Finally, the outside matches the inside. Treacherous, cowardly, petty.”

Invidia sat in her chair and slowly withdrew a hand from the waters of the healing tub. She tilted her head at an angle that made Amara acutely aware of the fact that she currently lay bound at Invidia’s feet. Other than that one motion, she did not move, until she turned her head to the Vord queen. “Well? She lives.”

“Yes,” the Vord queen said. She walked past Amara’s view, pale ankles and delicate feet tipped with green-black toenails walking with deliberate grace across the stones and stepping over Amara’s bound form. She stopped behind Invidia’s chair.

Invidia shifted her body, settling her back upright against the chair’s straight back and gripping the arms with weak fingers. “Countess,” she said. “As ever, swift to judge.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Amara said. “You must have an excellent reason to explain why you are toadying for the enemies of the Realm and murdering and enslaving her citizens. Any reasonable person should be able to forgive and forget. Surely.”

Invidia narrowed her eyes. “Does it look like I would be here if I had a choice, Countess?”

“I don’t see a collar on you,
Invidia
,” Amara said.

For the first time, the other woman seemed to notice the way Amara had entirely omitted her title. Her expression flickered with surprise, then offended anger, then—for just an instant—with what might have been a flutter of regret.

“The people here, the ones you’ve had broken and enslaved,
they
didn’t have a choice. You took that from them.”

The Vord queen settled her fingers lightly upon Invidia’s neck. The tips of her green-black talons dimpled the delicate skin of the former High Lady’s throat. She shivered and
rippled
hideously, as if some other creature entirely had writhed in its sleep beneath her skin. Her fingers tightened, and tiny trickles of blood coursed over Invidia’s pale white skin.

“After your mentor betrayed me,” Invidia said, her mouth spreading into a rictus, “and left me bleeding on the ground with garic oil poisoning my wounds, I fled and was found by my new liege.” She tilted her head slightly back toward the Vord queen. “She made me an offer. My life for my loyalty.”

“You make it sound like barter,” the queen murmured, her faceted eyes half-lidded. “It is not so much an exchange as an ongoing arrangement.” Then she closed her eyes, and shivered again, something undeniably alien in the motion, and Invidia fell silent.

Amara shuddered and stared, revulsion and fascination competing for her thoughts.

The Vord queen smiled slightly, let out a little sigh, and parted her dark, soft lips. Impossibly long, spidery legs slowly began to emerge from between them. As they appeared, they grew like the branches of a tree, but with horrible rapidity. Once they reached better than a foot in length, they began to stir, slowly, waving about like weeds growing in the sea near the shore.

The queen opened her mouth wider, and a bulbous body emerged from it, shaping itself as it came, until it settled into the form of the creature Amara had seen on Invidia before, albeit a bit smaller.

The Vord queen lifted her hand to her mouth and took up the creature in it, as gently as any mother handling her newborn. She reached slowly around Invidia’s body and held the creature against the Aleran woman’s chest. The creature spread its legs, fluttering them lightly over Invidia’s torso, and, in an abrupt motion, struck with every leg at once, nearly a dozen limbs lashing out in separate serpentine motions. The creature clutched hard to Invidia, then slammed its head forward, long mandibles burying themselves in the Aleran woman’s flesh.

Invidia closed her eyes for a moment, shuddering, but not moving or struggling against the creature. It seemed to adjust itself for a moment, then settled, its legs each sinking a talon into her flesh, drawing more dark fluid from her.

Within seconds, her color had begun to improve, and Invidia let out a shuddering sigh. She blinked her eyes open a moment later. “Ah. My thanks.”

The Vord queen simply stared at Invidia for a moment. Then she shifted her attention to Amara.

“Now,” Invidia said. “Where were we, Countess?”

“Fidelias,” Amara said. She struggled to keep her voice calm, but she couldn’t do it. The cold had settled into her soaked clothes, and she began shivering. Her voice shook with her.

“Yes,” Invidia said, her voice growing steadier by the word. “Dear Fidelias. I don’t suppose you know where he is?”

“To the best of my knowledge he was in your company,” Amara said. “Or dead.”

“Really?” Invidia asked. “That hardly seems likely. You were close to him, after all. He was your
patriserus
.”

Amara clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. “He was a traitor.”

“Doubly,” Invidia mused. “I had thought your type had a name for that sort of thing, but perhaps I was mistaken.” She glanced down at the creature on her chest and shifted her shoulders gently. Its legs flexed slightly, and she winced. “Mmmfh. He could hardly have struck at a better moment. I was incognito. Had he succeeded, I would have been buried as a nameless camp follower, an unfortunate casualty of war—and one of Gaius’s most capable foes would simply have vanished. A High Lady of the Realm, gone without a trace.”

“I can’t see where he failed,” Amara replied. “I see no High Lady here.”

Invidia stared at her in deadly silence for a long moment.

Amara bared her teeth at her in a humorless smile. “You may have lived through the attack, but High Lady Aquitaine didn’t survive it.”

“Enough of her survived to settle accounts, Countess,” Invidia said in a quiet voice. “More than enough to deal with you. And your husband.”

Amara felt a little chill of fear go through her.

Invidia smiled. “Ah. I thought as much. Where is dear Count Calderon? I can’t imagine him to be the sort to let you accept a mission such as this alone.”

“He’s dead,” Amara said, keeping her tone as flat as she could.

“Liar,” replied Invidia, without an instant’s hesitation. “Oh, you could deceive me about many things, child. But not about him. He’s too close to your heart.” She rose slowly, eyes again on the creature upon her breast. This time, it didn’t stir as she moved. “This needn’t be any more unpleasant than it already has been, Countess.”

Amara faced her in silence, except for the rattling of her belt buckle against the stones of the courtyard as she shivered in the cold.

“I told you,” Invidia said, her smile widening.

“Some of your people adequately understand the situation,” the Vord queen said, stepping forward to stare down at Amara. “But so many of the others refuse us. Even given the chance to survive, they ignore their own best interests in favor of . . . intangibles. There is no gain in it, no sense, no reason.”

Amara had felt the touch of a Vord queen’s mind before, though she had not known it at the time. It was a subtle thing, a fluttering of thought and emotion as tenuous and delicate as a strand of spiderweb stretched across a wooded path.

“Where is Bernard?” Invidia prompted in a gentle voice.

Amara ground her teeth and focused upon her surroundings, upon how cold she was, separating herself from her thoughts and emotions—just as she would when attempting to deceive a skilled watercrafter. And then she drew up every memory of Bernard that she could summon—his steady silence in the field, his gentle humor telling a story of his day over dinner, the granite strength of his body as it pressed against hers in their bed, his laughter, his eyes, the scratch of his short beard against her throat when he kissed her neck—and a hundred memories more, running through every one of them, everything he was.

The Vord queen exhaled slowly, and said, “Her mind is disciplined. She hides him from me.” The pale, strange-eyed being turned away, and Amara felt the touch of its thoughts vanish. “Interesting.”

“Give me an hour,” Invidia said. “She’ll be less able to concentrate once we’ve spent some time with her.”

“We have work to do, and no time to waste on such pursuits,” the queen replied. She looked over her shoulder and stared at Amara, dark eyes glittering. “Come.”

Invidia rose, but looked at Amara with narrowed eyes. “That could cost us her mind, along with its contents.”

The Vord queen hadn’t slowed down. “The order of probability that she will know anything more useful than that we have already gained is very low. The risk is acceptable.”

“I understand,” Invidia said. She stared at Amara for another moment, then shook her head. “Farewell, Countess. When next we meet, I suppose it will be on friendlier terms.”

Amara’s heart pounded harder as the fear grew. “What do you mean?”

The shriek of the Vord queen echoed across the courtyard, and seconds later the air was filled with the thunder of Vord taking to the night sky on green-black wings.

“Brencis did an excellent job on my ribs, my lung, and my stomach,” Invidia said. “So don’t fear, Countess. I leave you in capable hands.”

Brencis stood over Rook’s motionless corpse, his face empty of anything but an odd, fey heat. He looked from the corpse to Amara, very slowly, his eyes unfocused.

“Brencis,” Invidia said, as the collared Alerans began to gather around her before she took to the sky. “Collar her.”

Amara’s scream of protest and horror was lost in the howl of a dozen windstreams lifting Invidia and her escort away from fallen Ceres.

CHAPTER 38

Isana could count on her fingers the number of times she had worn trousers. It wasn’t because it would have been terribly outrageous. Plenty of women could and did wear them on steadholts, especially those involved in gathering herbs in the forest, working around animals, or laboring in the fields. She’d simply preferred her gowns and dresses.

The flying leathers felt decidedly odd, especially the trousers, but they were quite warm. That was a necessity, Araris had cautioned her, when wearing metal armor in such cold weather. The metal itself would be cold enough to freeze to her skin if it had the help of a droplet of sweat or spittle. Or tears.

Or blood.

She shivered and adjusted the sword belt that held her long, armored coat closed. She checked the weapon again, sliding the
gladius
a bit out of the sheath and back in. The cold could freeze the weapon into its sheath if one wasn’t careful.

Aria, standing beside her, said, “There they are. Finally.”

Isana glanced up at the dark grey sky. “He was hoping for the weather to worsen,” she said. “A blizzard would make a public duel problematic.”

Aria sighed. “Probably.”

Isana didn’t turn around to face the Shieldwall. Once again, they stood on the meeting ground where they had spoken with the Icemen. The snow all around it was stirred into odd hummocks and bare spots, where the massive watercrafting she had wrought had disrupted the usual pattern of smooth drifts.