Princess of the Void

2.12. Breedmate

Home again.

Grant lies in bed. Sykora curls on his chest like a cat. He’s still in his suit, though he had to fold his jacket in front of his crotch the whole way from the shuttle to the cabin. These pants are going to need some heavy-duty laundering. The Princess is wearing her choker, her stockings, and a smug grin, and that’s it.

“A construction worker,” he says. “Or a veterinarian. Or a… there was a Maekyonite word we used for spacefarers.” He remembers. “An astronaut.”

She giggles. “Rather indecisive of you.”

“Well, I grew up and worked on the oil sands, and went to space, and married a weird alien gremlin with a tail. In a way, I’ve done it all.”

“A gremlin.” Sykora’s heel gives his shin a play-fight kick. “I’m royalty, boy.”

“What about you?” he asks. “What did you want to be, if you hadn’t been a Void Princess?”

“Ballerina,” she says. “Ballerina or cybersurgeon. Something requiring precision. Oh!” She snaps her fingers. “Or pilot. So I suppose I’ve managed a piece of my list, too. But that was always idle fancy. They began work on the Pike as soon as they discovered I’d been born, you know. They took me from Inadama and gave me the finest instructors in the Empire. By the time I was two hectocycles old, it was finished and waiting for me. We were always destined for each other.”

“Would you tell me if I asked?”

“You want to know why,” she says. “Why I was born and why I ended up here.”

He nods. “I was an accident, y’know. I’m not ashamed of it.”

“There’s no way to have an accidental Taiikari. My siblings and I were an indiscretion. A secret my stupid, arrogant mother thought she could hide from the Empire. But there’s no hiding from the Empire.”

The steely contempt in her voice puts a shiver in Grant’s spine. “So she had you and Narika at the same time?”

“Uh-huh. We have litters. I’m one of three. Three too many. Marquess Palatine Inadama begged the Empress to spare me, and the Empress, in her wisdom, showed mercy. My brother Tymar took the cloth. My sister and I were made Void Princesses.” Sykora wriggles closer. “And here I am. And you shivered, dove.”

“What we’re doing, Batty,” he says. “We’re hiding from the Empire.”

“Not for long,” she says. “I told you, dearheart. We just need to time it right, and the Empress will free you.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

Sykora shakes her head. “She will, Grant. I know she will. I’m not just boy-crazy. You’re a man of quality. You deserve your freedom for so many reasons beyond that little abstinence competition we had. I’ll make sure she sees that.”

He’s still not sure how to talk to her about this. There’s this feeling in his gut. A bittersweetness he can’t identify.

He changes the subject. “What do you mean there’s no accidental Taiikari?”

“Have you ever wondered why I have these fangs, Grantyde?”

“To kill people who try to shoot me?”

She laughs and licks her lips. “Well, yes. But they don’t just kill. There’s something Taiikari do, when they’re ready. The breeding bite, it’s called. There’s a substance Taiikari women’s fangs can secrete. Something that helps their mates. To ensure they’re properly knocked up.”

Grant remembers what Drake told him. “The guys called it a neurotoxin. They thought maybe you sucked blood.”

“A neurotoxin.” She giggles. “So unromantic. I guess it is, if you want to be clinical. We don’t call it that.”

“What do you call it?”

She huddles her back against him. “Nectar.”

“And do you suck blood?”

“We do, but only during the breeding bite. And not for sustenance. It’s a very… Maekyonites have pair-bonds, yes? Marriage? That’s a familiar concept?”

“It is. It was a real shock, just showing up aboard and being told I was your husband out of nowhere. We have a lot more ceremony about it. A big party, rings and vows being exchanged… I think it’s a translator thing, probably. Husband and wife having different connotations.”

“Oh, Grantyde. I didn’t know that.” She strokes the hand he’s resting on her. “We can do all of that, if you’d like. It’s not orthodox, but so little about us is.”

“What’s the Taiikari equivalent?”

She displays her fangs. “The bite. Tradition says the first time, you make sure to let it scar. You should keep an eye on the necks of Taiikari couples, next time we’re around them. Some of them have the breedmate mark on them. Husbands mark wives, too, sometimes, or wives mark each other. Not that it does the same thing.”

“Breedmate, like…” He traces the line of her abdominals.

She quivers under his touch, and nods.

“You have kids by biting?”

She laughs. “We have kids the usual way, dummy. But the breeding bite is how you tell your body it’s time. The blood into you, the nectar into your breedmate. The blood quickens your womb. The nectar makes your mate, uh, enthusiastic. And energetic. You’re meant to set the night aside for it. And the whole day after, too, for recovery and… little things. Ceremonial things. To make it stick, and to rest. And to be together.”

“We’d do it the whole night?” Grant’s knees bump the back of Sykora’s legs. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“That’s what the nectar’s for,” she says. “It’s very visceral. Compulsion barely works in the nectar heat. Even on Taiikari. Of course, with you and I, there would be no conception, but it’s still, uh, sacred. Sacred and crucial. A breedmate goes beyond husbands and wives. If…” Her voice goes small and shaky. “If you’d like to try it with me. I’ve heard it’s quite transcendent.”

“Do you want to?”

Her legs lace into his. “I’ve dreamt of being your breedmate since I met you, Grantyde. Of seeing my mark on your neck every morning. Of mine bearing yours, even.” Her hand strays to her belly. “I’ve dreamt—”

She falls silent.

“I’d share this with you, if you’d let me,” she says. “The days are so packed, right now, and I can’t take one for myself. But when things are settled. We can’t have children, but we could have the night, at least.”

He’s about to tell her he doesn’t mind that. That he’s never even thought about kids. But he strokes the hand the Princess is holding over her tight little stomach, and he pauses.

The lump rises in his throat as he realizes the truth.

If he could, he would. He’d put as many babies in Sykora of the Black Pike as she wanted. He’d do every ceremonial thing she asked for. He’d shelter her in his arms every night as their family grew inside her. He’d love them with her. Their strong, safe kids, with her smile, he hopes, and her laugh. He’d be there every moment. He and Sykora could protect them from the fear and pain of the Empire, could help them become whatever they wanted to become. He knows they could, somehow. With a rock-solid certainty.

He’d be everything his father wasn’t. If he could. If it was possible.

But it isn’t.

What if it is? a voice in the back of his head whispers. You don’t know what kind of technology they have. Who knows what they could do?

Stop giving yourself this false hope, Grant. Even if there is some Taiikari medical miracle, it won’t be given to them. The Empress would never allow them to live. Lady Frelle told him that, and then commanded him to forget it. But he didn’t.

His eyes sting. He has a name for the nameless melancholy. He’s mourning, he realizes, for the kids they’ll never have.

“I’d like that,” he says. “We could have the night.” He folds her further into his arms and unhooks the choker from her throat. She makes a little satisfied humming noise as he strokes her newly freed neck.

“Are you religious?” he asks.

“How do you mean?”

“You said you prayed for me, and you talk about God and gods. On my world, we say stuff like that even if we don’t believe, a lot of us.”

“The Taiikari are the same way.”

“How about you, then?” He smooths the soft fur on the end of her tail. “Do you believe in them?

“I think I do.” Her foot nudges into the space between his knees. “I’m not observant, not much. The ship has a priory, but I’m hardly ever there, and my tithe is just some auto debit on a form somewhere. But when I’m with you, I feel it. I don’t know what to call it. God? I don’t know. But I sense a design at work.” Her tail drapes on his side. “Out of all the untold masses on all the infinite worlds in the firmament, we were brought together, Grantyde. You were given to me. And then I was given to you. It isn’t a coincidence. I can’t believe it is. It was too unlikely. And it means too much. When you’re inside me, it…” She searches for her words.

“It’s right.” He knows what she’s talking about. “It feels right.”

“Yes.” Her voice is thick with emotion. “Yes, exactly.” Her hips swivel as she burrows further into the sheets and up against him. “That can’t be how it always feels, can it?”

“Okay.” He props himself up on his arm. “You dodged it last time, Batty. But the way you keep talking. It’s okay either way, I swear it is. But were you a virgin when we met?”

“I—um.” She buries her reddening face into the crook of his elbow. “Yes."

His stomach drops. He's been throwing this little blue maiden around like a goddamn caveman.

Sykora glances up from her face's shelter in his arm. "It isn’t obvious, is it? I did a lot of studying.”

“No. God, no. You’re incredible.” He pulls her closer, and feels a surge of love tighten his body around hers. "I would have been so much gentler, if I'd known."

She snickers the tension out. "Then I'm glad I didn't tell you."

Tradition never really mattered to Grant on Maekyon. He never stressed about body counts or old-school courtship-type stuff. Never attached that sort of value to it. He lost his virginity in a Prius parked a block from a Raising Cane’s and never gave it a second thought.

But it adds another log to this weird possessive bonfire in him, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. He’s the Princess’s first. Her only, if he’s the kind of husband he hopes to be. He’s the only person to have held her like this. The only one who’s felt the bliss of her body. That night they both lost control was already the best and most important of his life, but it’s becoming something even graver to him now. He remembers the desperation she had, trying to give him something she’d never given anyone else.

You're my last, she told him.

“What kept you from it?” he asks.

“I’m a Void Princess,” she says. “There are many expectations and few opportunities. And I don’t know. Before I saw you, it never felt… essential.” She squeezes his arm. “I suppose I had a Maekyonite fetish, and I didn’t realize it till I saw one. It wasn’t your first time, was it?” She looks over her shoulder.

He shakes his head. “I’ve been with people. But it’s never felt like this. Never anything close, even.” He strokes the tuft of her tail. “Nothing prepared me for you, that’s for sure.”

“I think everything did.” She’s hushed and serious. “That’s what I’m trying to say. I think all we’ve done was leading us to each other. The imprisonments, the fighting, it all had a reason. I think this—” She tucks his palm under her head and lays across it. “I think it means something. I don’t know what, yet. But I do.”

“I think you might be right.” He rubs her ear with his thumb and listens to the feline sound it draws out of her. “Now, if I recall correctly, you owe me a bunch of yapping about interceptors.”

Her throaty purr cuts off. “Oooh. I certainly do.” She perks up and tugs her stockings off. “So: the sim you grew so familiar with is patterned off the ZX-6. That’s most of our fleet. I learned on a 4. The ZX-5, actually, most of the frontier skipped on, the Pike included. I hear it’s still used in the Imperial Core, but it had these ghastly inefficiencies in effective range that made it a bad fit for service on a ZKZ. It was the first model with a double-chamber manifold for its membrane, you see, and it’s actually so fascinating how they addressed it for the 6…”

Grant caresses the curve of his wife’s hip and listens to her cheerful chatter, and he lets her warm skin and her smoky voice send his thoughts of sinister nobles and exo conspiracies and their impossible children drifting away through the dark of the firmament.