Chapter 40
- Nora -
They give us three days to prepare, which apparently counts as remarkable haste by Brood standards.
Sris tells me, with the air of someone imparting a great secret, that royal weddings are usually planned across entire longcycles.
“But of course this wedding is not royal,” she finishes with a sour tone. “Not the way it should have been.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I say.
"It seems I'm the only one who wanted more for Krix'vorr, but I'll get over it," she informs me, fussing over a length of waxy, cream-colored fabric she's somehow acquired for me, softer and finer than anything I've worn since I went into space.
"The Queen wishes to see this before she rests.
Apparently she has been saying that a great deal, lately.
Resting. In any case, you will wear this.
It is the color of new chitin, which is traditional for a bonding.
And you will need to learn the words, though I understand your flower will help with that. "
“The Kast flower is very capable,” I agree. “It can even record messages.”
“A well-known feature,” the lobster says. “But not to Krix'vorr. He never spoke much with aliens before, so had no use for the Kast. Nora, I apologize for my behavior. I tried to torture you, and that was wrong.”
“There are better ways to make friends,” I agree.
She holds the fabric up to the light. “I'm glad Krix'vorr stopped me. I will never do anything like it again, and I will persuade others that there are, indeed, better ways. I can be quite persuasive.” She holds up one claw and snaps it shut with a hard snick.
The ceremony, when it comes, is held in the Royal Chamber itself.
It's the same platform, the same coiled immensity of the Queen resting above us, the same sour, ancient smell beneath everything.
But today the nutrient canals have been threaded with something that glows faintly gold rather than the usual sickly luminescence, and the huge crest behind the Queen's head has been polished until it catches the light.
Krix'vorr stands beside me in ceremonial plating I've never seen him wear, dark and gleaming, his antennae oiled and upright in a way that makes him look, for the first time since I've known him, faintly nervous.
"You look terrified," I whisper.
"I have fought Gzet warships with less dread than I feel right now," he murmurs back. "There are considerably more expectations attached to this."
The ritual itself is stranger and more beautiful than I expected.
A senior Harrower draws a thin blade across each of our palms, not deep enough to truly wound, just enough to bead a little blood, and presses our hands together so the blood mingles between them.
"Chitin to chitin," he intones, and the translation flower renders it strangely formal in my ear. "Blood to blood, though the blood runs differently. What joins may not match in kind, but let it match in purpose."
Then he takes a small, living cutting from the wall of the chamber itself. It's something soft and rooted, still faintly pulsing, and presses it into the joined grip of our bloodied hands, where it seems, impossibly, to take hold, tiny threads of root already reaching into the shared wound.
"The Nest itself now holds a claim on this bond," the Harrower says. "What is grown from this joining will be remembered by the Brood, in flesh, for as long as the Nest stands."
I don't know if this is going to leave a physical mark or if it's purely ceremonial, and I decide, watching the tiny green-gold thread pulse between our palms, that I don't actually want to ask right now.
The vows themselves are shorter than I expected, though Lucius tells me later that's deliberate, that Brood custom holds long vows to be a kind of arrogance, an assumption that words alone can promise what only years can prove.
Krix'vorr says his first, low and steady, something about protection and duty and choice, freely made, that I feel more than translate.
I say mine back. They are shorter, plainer, and human, and I mean every word of it more than I've meant anything in my life.
"Then let it be sealed," the Harrower says, "in the old way."
Krix'vorr looks down at me, and for a moment the whole vast, glowing, ancient chamber narrows down to nothing but his face.
"Wife," he says, testing the word like he's never quite trusted himself to use it before.
"Husband," I say back, and it comes out steadier than I expected, given how hard my heart is pounding.
He kisses me.
Then the world goes white.
Lightning and thunder fill the chamber. It's not a single arc this time but a full, blinding storm of it, crackling hard and forking wall to wall like something being written into the air in a language older than either of us.
I feel it as much as I see it, a current running through both of us at once, bright and clean and filled with sweet bliss where the pain should be.
For five full seconds the Royal Chamber of the Brood's most ancient Nest looks the way I imagine the inside of a star must look: completely lit, every shadow burned away at once, as if the universe has finally run out of places for us to hide from each other and is putting its foot down.
Then it's gone, and the echoes of the thunder fade. The chamber is dark again, and every courtier present is either flat against the wall or staring at us in open, undisguised shock.
Krix'vorr blinks down at me, slightly dazed. "That," he says, "has never happened before. Not like that."
Above us, on her platform, the Queen has gone very still.
For one heart-stopping moment I think something's actually wrong — that we've frightened her, offended her, or broken some rule neither of us understood.
Then the old, wet, rhythmic sound rolls through the chamber again, louder and longer than I've ever heard it, shaking servants loose from their footing along her flank.
She's laughing. Properly, helplessly laughing, in a way that seems to catch even her own attendants off guard.
"Oh," she manages finally, wiping at one clouded eye with something that might be a tear, if locusts cry.
"Oh, that settles it entirely. Marankz, in my own chamber, by my own throne.
" She shakes her great head slowly. "A Royal Mate who is bonded, with lightning, to an alien from beyond the minefield.
No. That was never, ever going to work. You did us all a favor, Chief Harrower, sabotaging yourself as thoroughly as you did. "
The Queen moves her enormous bulk, servants scrambling beneath her, and when she speaks again her tone has settled into something more formal, more deliberate. It's the sound of a ruler about to make a pronouncement rather than an old woman enjoying a joke.
"Before you leave my chamber," she says regally, "there is a matter of order to settle. I dislike loose ends, and you, Nora of Earth, are the loosest thread I have allowed into this Nest in all my longcycles."
I glance at Krix'vorr, who looks as uncertain as I feel.
"You stand married to one of my Chief Harrowers," the Queen goes on, "and yet you hold no place in my Brood at all.
No rank, no standing, no name that means anything to the order that governs everyone else in this chamber.
I find that I cannot leave it so. It offends the shape of things, and I find, even now, that I still care about the shape of things. "
She turns her head toward Morr'ak. "Bring the marks."
A servant scurries forward bearing a small, dark vessel, and Morr'ak approaches with obvious reluctance, though whether that's personal distaste or simple formality I can't tell.
"Captain Nora Ellis of Space Force and Earth," the Queen says, and hearing my full name and rank in that ancient, creaking voice sends an odd shiver through me.
"You fought a battle for your friend that any Harrower in this room would recognize as worthy.
You held your ground before me, twice, when creatures three times your size would have groveled.
And you gave my Chief Harrower a war he wasn't ordered to fight, and he came back from it better for having fought it.
I name you Junior Harrower of this Brood, with all the standing, if not yet all the seniority, that title carries. "
Morr'ak dips two fingers into the dark vessel and, with obvious care not to press too hard, marks a symbol against the back of my hand. It's cool, faintly stinging, and gone in a moment, but leaving behind a mark that doesn't wash away, dark and precise against my skin.
"Wear that where any of my Brood can see it," the Queen says, "and you will be given the deference due your rank, wherever you go in my Nest, or beyond."
I stare down at the mark, throat too tight to answer properly. "Thank you, Your Majesty," I finally manage.
"Don't thank me yet," she says, not unkindly. "There is one more matter."
Her gaze settles on me, and something in her voice changes toward formal proclamation, the same register she used to name my rank.
"The Beast's calf," she says, "was grown in secret, in defiance of custom, by a Chief Harrower who has apparently made a habit of defying custom whenever it suited him.
It does not belong to the Brood. It does not belong to the Beast, not any longer, however much love passes between mother and calf.
And it certainly doesn't belong to me." Her clouded eye holds on my face.
"It belongs, I think, to the one who piloted it through open space and brought it safely home again.
A ship should belong to the one it chose to carry, Nora of Earth. "
I think of the calf back in its stall beside the Beast, trembling with that same restless, eager energy, waiting for someone to come find it, and my throat goes tight before I can stop it.
"I accept," I manage. "Thank you, Your Majesty. Truly."
"Yes, yes." The Queen waves a vast, weary limb, some of her earlier delight already fading back into the tired formality she seems to carry constantly now.
"Go and be married properly, away from this chamber and all its smells and its ancient, tiresome creatures.
I find I've enjoyed you both more than I expected to, and I am old enough now to know how rarely that happens.
Go and see your ship, and your new one, and let an old Queen rest."
We bow, and turn to go, and I'm almost to the chamber's threshold when her voice stops us both.
"In fact, one thing more."
I turn back. Something in her tone has changed and cooled, hardened, the warmth of the last hour folding away like a door closing.
"Don't mistake my fondness for policy," the Queen says.
"I have given you a rank, and a ship, and my blessing on a marriage no one asked my leave for in the first place.
I have given you nothing at all regarding your world.
Earth remains exactly what it has always been to this Brood — a rumor, unconfirmed, unlocated, and undecided.
That will remain true only as long as it remains useful to me, or to whoever sits where I sit once I am gone.
I would not have you leave this chamber believing otherwise. "
The warmth drains out of the room all at once.
"I understand, Your Majesty," I say softly.
"Good." She settles back into her cushions, already turning her attention elsewhere, already, it seems, half done with us.
"Go. Be happy, while you can. I find I've grown fond of watching that, in my old age.
But don't ask me to promise you it will last, because I am old, Nora of Earth, and I have never once found that promises do. "