Princeps’ Fury

creature as easily as through a rotten apple, and continued on to the flesh beneath, cracking bone with moist snapping sounds, hurling its target from her feet and to the ground.

Amara gritted her teeth at how badly wrong the plan had gone, but there was no help for that now. Brencis had gone running off to fetch a tub, and had been nowhere in sight, and Lady Aquitaine-no, Invidia, Amara thought viciously, for she was no Aleran Citizen anymore-would have circumvented Amara’s veil in seconds. So before Invidia’s feet had hit the ground following the impact of her shoulders, Amara had turned and leapt skyward, calling Cirrus to bear her aloft.

Amara’s feet were perhaps seven feet from the ground when she felt hands like stone wrap around the ankles of her soft boots. Desperately, she called upon Cirrus to bear her up with even more force, even as she drew her steel dagger from her belt and twisted to thrust it down at her attacker with the instant, blindingly swift violence of trained instinct.

Yet as fast as she was, the Vord queen was faster.

She released one of Amara’s legs to spread the fingers of one pale hand wide. Amara had time to realize that the queen’s hand was still wet with Rook’s lifeblood, as the tip of her dagger pierced the queen at the center of her palm.

There was no more reaction than if Amara had thrust her knife into the ground. Without any expression beyond one of steady concentration, the Vord queen twisted her wrist, the knife still trapped in her flesh, and tore it from Amara’s grasp. Amara kicked one leg, trying to get loose of the queen’s remaining grip as they continued to rise from the courtyard, albeit slowly, but the Vord’s grasp was inhumanly strong. Her alien eyes glittering more brightly, the Vord queen swarmed up the length of Amara’s body, hand over hand, and Amara felt the tip of her own dagger thrust twice into her flesh in hot bursts of tingling pain.

Then an iron bar pressed against her throat, and her vision darkened.

Amara struggled wildly, but it was useless, everything spinning down to a tunnel. She saw the walls of Ceres rushing at her, and in a last burst of defiance called Cirrus with every remaining ounce of her strength to rush them both toward the obdurate stone.

Then nothing.

CHAPTER 37

Amara awoke with a gasp as water trickled into her nose. She coughed and tried to lift her arms to her face, but couldn’t move them. Her body ached in every joint and muscle, and she was ravenously hungry. She flung her head back and forth, and realized that she was almost entirely submerged in something liquid and warm.

Her eyes flew open in a panic, images of sleeping bodies wrapped in glowing green croach filling her thoughts, her body contracting and convulsing to pull her free. Her arms flexed but refused to move from her sides, and her legs stayed firmly clasped together. Pain burned through her biceps, her thighs, and the warm liquid covered her face entirely as she slipped lower into it.

“-her head out of the water befo-” shouted a woman’s voice.

It was cut off completely. Then a fist seized her by the hair and hauled her up, out of the warm liquid.

“-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