Beyond the blade, in a blur, the open door, someone screams. A soldier rushes in, then another, and another—

Tenor presses harder, wrists shaking uncontrollably. He feels the skin parting, the bone nicked because the angle is off, but just the slightest rotation will slit the veins open, and his blood will spurt and they won’t be able to punish him—

“I always knew you were a coward.”

His eyes snap open.

Natale stands in the crowd, flanked by his men. Soldiers of every color are gathered like an audience or a row of hunting dogs, held back only by the fact that Tenor is about to kill himself.

This is unbearable. The last person Tenor wanted to see. Here to witness the unspeakable culmination of those spiteful predictions. Tenor feels helpless rage, rage at his brother, rage at himself, rage at this weak blood in his veins that tries to preserve its flawed flow to the very last.

An officer of the queen’s army says, “What is this?” as if he can’t comprehend the queen’s body in this fatal configuration.

Childrebrand mirrors the shock in the man’s voice. “He killed the queen.”

Natale says, “Who killed the queen?”

“I said…”

“Was it a xrafstar?”

“It was the boy. The darehander.”

“Maybe he was defending her.”

Childrebrand can’t believe what he’s hearing. “The darehander obviously did it.”

“We don’t know,” Natale says. “We have to find out.”

Childrebrand feels the cold drip of the situation getting out of hand. The ice water starts to boil. He takes a step toward the boy, emphasizing their height difference. “Why are you taking such an interest?”

“He’s my brother,” Natale says, as casually as if he’d found a dropped trinket.

“So this is a matter of blood.”

“Would you like it to be?” Natale says, a childish hint of teeth at the corner of his lips. A grove of pommels surrounds his honeyed head, swords with honeycombed hilts.

Childrebrand tucks a piece of dark hair behind his ear, suddenly aware of all the dancing strands that came loose during his little disagreement with the queen. “Someone take this brat home.”

Natale tilts his head and his eyes suddenly catch the light, flashing uncanny green. “Is that how you speak to the head of the Stigmadonna family?”

Childrebrand almost laughs at the arrogant tone. He could easily knock the boy over, tuck him under his arm, twist his neck off, feed him a candy.

But Natale is backed by his men, and they appear unharmed, as if they found somewhere to hide. They are outnumbered, but the soldiers of the other houses are tired, wounded, crammed in the opening of the door, most of them can’t even see the queen’s body. They are not unified. There is confusion. A doubt which would not exist if that boy hadn’t spoken. The arrogance of saying something and expecting others to believe it, just like that. That manipulative little brat—

Natale says, “Get up, Tenor.”

Tenor. Tenor Stigmadonna? The boy who left his inheritance to become a knight of INNOCENT. Childrebrand remembers now. When a noble joins the church, it means they’re either very pious or very twisted. A person of extraordinary conviction, or the shame of their family. He wonders which Tenor is.

The queen’s treasurer says, “Think carefully. The blood of your house need not be linked to this red issue.”

Natale says, “Even if he was found guilty. Surely it is customary to torture a regicide first.”

Tenor sweats.

Natale continues. “Do you intend to shortchange the queen’s justice?”

The treasurer says, “Of course not. It should be done according to her law. That is. Unless.” He is paralyzed by the contending emotions around him, a palpable heat from the crowd.

Childrebrand counts his soldiers, a scattering of red uniforms. “Then we will take him into custody.”

Tenor can barely interpret the sounds flying through the air. What is Natale doing? There’s no way out. He’s covered in the queen’s blood, and only his own can set him free. He sets his wrists back to the blade and steels himself.

Childrebrand gestures. “See? He admits his guilt.”

Tenor’s veins pulse against the sharp edge, held so close that only the drying blood of the queen keeps his wetness from springing forth, the thinnest patina of sanguinary crust crumbling under the pressure.

Natale lazily says, “If you die here, they’ll examine your body.”

Tenor looks at him, eyes wide to either side of the blade, the scraped wrists reflecting incarnadine.

“Come, Tenor.”

That placid, infuriating face. Childrebrand says, “Don’t do this, boy,” but his voice comes out stuffed, sinuses clogged with mucus.

The dark figure of Tenor stands up shaky as a doll and walks toward his brother.

Childrebrand wipes his nose with a hard, fast motion that leaves a glistening streak down his sleeve and raw skin on his nose. “Wait,” he says, with terrible clearness.

Tenor stops, terrified that this reprieve will shatter.

Childrebrand smiles, friendly as the day they met. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Tenor feels as if his death was once again opening below him. He stands still and holds his breath, unable to speak.

Childrebrand says, “Your sword.”

Tenor looks back at his blade, impaled in the Queen’s breast, the waterfall hissing behind it, evening glimmering red in the basins like a tableau of the hell that awaits him for regicide, condemned to drown in the gore of monarchs for all eternity. “My…my sword?”

Childrebrand’s tone is icy. “It is said a darehander of INNOCENT is sworn never to lose his weapon. Is it not?”

Tenor grabs the hilt of his sword and pulls it free, shuddering as the blade rips free with the wet sound of her innards. It drips loudly on the stone floor, blood bursting at his feet like liquid guilt. His eyes draw wide and he sheathes it quickly. He limps back toward his brother, stomach tensed against the puke threatening to double him over.

The Stigmadonna soldiers part to make a path for him, a narrow corridor of uniforms tensed against the crowd. It seems at any second violence will break out, soldiers of every other color whispering, trying to incite each other to make the first move. But then the brothers are gone.

Childrebrand sucks snot down the back of his throat, a sick, shocked expression on his face, two fingers curled into his palm, blood filling each nail.

Childrebrand swallows, the masticated wad of edict gulping down his throat.

A beat passes. In Tenor’s skintight suit, clinging even tighter from the blood soaking into his knees and the spatter across his chest, he seems naked before Childrebrand, a shadow back from the dead. Questioning eyes, a mouth about to speak.

Childrebrand’s jaw drops. “Tenor! What have you done?”

Tenor’s breathing gets faster, panicked.

Childrebrand descends the steps, picking a shred of parchment from his teeth. “This is terrible.”

“I don’t understand, I—”

Childrebrand puts a hand on the trembling dark shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Tenor.”

Tenor looks up questioningly.

Childrebrand’s eyes are kind, his lips sad. “I know you never meant to kill her.”

Shock freezes Tenor’s eyes. “What?”

Childrebrand comes closer. “You and I know what really happened.”

“What, what happened?”

“You were crazed by venom.”

The stings throbs in Tenor’s palm and he clutches it with a sound of pain.

“But those people out there. They don’t understand.”

“I don’t, I—”

“What would you think if you opened that door. That one right there. And saw this?”

Tenor looks at his hands covered in blood. His black sword impaled in her chest. “I’d think. God. Nnnhh.”

“And so soon after she announced the dissolution of your religious order. That made you angry, didn’t it?”

“Yes, but. I wouldn’t.”

“We know the venom did it. But people are simple. They want a simple story. Especially when they’re very, very angry.”

Tenor starts shaking and Childrebrand feels sick at the sight. The young man is really devastated. He’s beyond devastated. He’s ash. Heavy breathing ash. Is this all people become in the end, a spasm of respiratory tract and tear duct? A body wearing the queen’s clothes, deprived of voice and intellect, all its works brought to nothing?

It’s really very sad. There must be something to comfort him.

Childrebrand says, “You don’t have to think about it anymore. You’re dying.”

“I’m dying?”

“You were stung ten minutes ago.”

Tenor unwraps the bandages around his hand to reveal a festering hole. He bites his lip as if the very air burnt in that exposed flesh. “The attack, when was that?”

Childrebrand looks at the skylight. “At least forty minutes. But I don’t…”

“I was stung right after the attack started.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“We were running. I fell. Then she was there.” He grabs his hand as if to cover the wound, but can’t, the hole is too sensitive. “She stung me.”

“Easy to lose time in the chaos. A minute feels like an hour. An hour passes like nothing.”

Something glazes Tenor’s eyes. “Yes…”

“You were hallucinating. It would be impossible to tell what was real.”

The queen was smiling at him from a tree, claws hanging. Then he was following the queen with a sword, but it was a different queen, and a different sword. White, not black. Wasn’t it? Those are simple values of light, altered by the subtlest shift of clouds, sun, madness. There was pain, great pain, but it was just a nightmare, he sees that now, a hallucination, and of all people ever pierced with this venom, he was the most susceptible, this weakness of his blood, this girlish sensitivity. It’s just a few smeared images in his head, forgotten with each blink. But her body falling down the steps, that was real, the warmth of her blood across him.

Tenor stares at the black handle of the sword and Childrebrand watches him in turn, this dark hilt to a blond blade. He can’t understand why the young man isn’t dead. There must be something he doesn’t know. Some tiny, ordinary fact that confused everything. Maybe the wound is from something else. Maybe it’s a fluke of biology, coupled with the blood loss, and Tenor will die any second. But until that second, this elegant story is ruined.

He thought he was spending a dead man’s coin. But the coin is alive and weeping, perversely obverse.

A knock on the door. The coin tilts, fear in the face.

Childrebrand sighs with sadness. They’ll be furious. They’ll tear you to pieces. The only kindness that remains is save you from being ripped apart by the hounds.

“Tenor.” The young man’s eyes focus on him. “I was bitten by them. It’s not the same. A dilution, just one chemical of the many that go into venom. But I know what it does to you. I could feel my brain cooking. You never asked for that nightmare, did you? You were just trying to do the right thing.”

“Yes”, Tenor whispers, seeming like he’s going to faint.

Childrebrand rubs his back. “You and I know. It wasn’t your fault.”

Another knock and Tenor looks up at the steel door, distraught. “But she’s the queen. This is…” He can’t take in the enormity. The nightmare is breaking his brain. “I wish the venom had killed me.”

Childrebrand says, gently, “It will.”

“It’s not. It’s not killing me. I just want to—”

“Die?”

What a delicate face the young man has when he’s crying, unusually soft when you can see the mucus membranes turn themselves out.

Childrebrand says, “Do you know the punishment for regicide?”

“I…I can’t think.”

“You’re buried alive. After a week of torture.”

Tenor bends over, one hand praying in quick contractions, begging pleading breathlessly incoherently.

“Do you have a family?” Childrebrand isn’t sure if that was a nod or just the rocking motion of crying, but he continues. “Your family. Everyone at INNOCENT. They would be dragged through a very public trial.”

“No, they can’t—”

Rapid knocking jolts Tenor like a whip. Silence. Then again, louder.

“Soon, rage will spill through that door. What can sate that rage?”

Tenor lifts his head, face pale, eyes lost. “Will, will you help me?”

“Help you what?”

A choked whisper. “Help me. End this.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Childrebrand says, “Something comes to mind.” He points to the sword impaled in the queen’s chest. “A cut across the wrists. Seems the fastest way.”

“God.”

“Save your honor. And the honor of everyone connected to you.”

His family, the bloodline he betrayed. The living, shamed, and the dead, stained. Amnesty, his patient teacher, years of experience and trust wasted.

I’ve betrayed my blood and God. I’ve lost everything.

He collapses, face pressed into the hard stone, shaking. “My family…”

“I’ll take care of them.”

“You will?”

“I’ll tell them the truth. Tell them it wasn’t you at the end. Just that cruel venom.”

Crying.

“I’ll take care of them. Shield them from this.”

Tenor manages to speak through the sobbing. “Thank you, I, thank you so much.”

Childrebrand blinks rapidly, then his face goes calm. “I’m so sorry this happened to you, Tenor. You never deserved this.”

Something bangs on the door, the lock rattling.

Tenor puts his wrists out, a broken prayer, veins facing either side of the bloody blade. He breathes quickly through his nose, jaw set, eyelids flickering.

Childrebrand steps back into the light pouring from the ceiling, that rich warm just before evening. “That’s it. A quick, clean cut. And this pain will end.”

Tenor’s wrists brighten with blood and he gasps at the sting of metal. When he cut himself as a child, even a small cut had been mortally fearful and startling, and he had stopped as soon as that pain equaled the pain in his brain. But the pain inside him now is a bottomless black pit of water that drowns endlessly, the pain of betraying not only everyone he loves, but his entire life, without even knowing why, pointlessly, in fear and confusion. So there is nothing to stop his wrists from sliding down the blade.

The door opens.

The queen stares at the shattered dome of the palace, still as death. Her court is frozen around her, not daring to disturb her grief, and even the moths of the garden seem to avoid her, impenetrable as a painting.

She says, “Is the palace secured yet?”

An officer clears his throat, taken by surprise. “We’re filling in the tunnel, but…”

Everyone uses the we, royal or not. No one wants to be singled out. There are only groups, functioning in the blur of chaos.

“…we’re searching top to bottom, making sure they didn’t hide an assassin.”

The queen rolls her edicts up and tucks them under her arm like fireworks. “We will wait in the cooking chamber.”

Down the garden path as the broken orchestra twangs and trills through the trees, fading with the sound of rushing water. In the shadow of the palace, there is a grotto chiseled from the black granite of the ancient foundation, the ornations of tyranny scraped to smooth stone.

As they near the grotto, a dark form crashes through the foliage, sharpness flashing. A soldier raises his spear to fling and Childrebrand grabs the shaft. “Wait. I know him.”

He steps off the path, from smoothed earth to wild weeds. “Tenor, right?”

The darehander looks at him with bloodshot eyes.

Childrebrand puts out his hand. “Remember me? We rode together.”

“Ch…”

“That’s exactly right.”

Tenor falls forward and Childrebrand finds himself with an armful of dead weight, blond hair dirty with leaves. “That’s it. There we go.”

The grotto is bigger inside than he expected, water crashing from the ceiling, air damp and echoing. Outside, soldiers form a perfect perimeter, escort nobles to the garden, tend to the wounded, and haul rocks to fill in tunnels. But the noise of a thousand soldiers can barely penetrate the waterfall, which spills through black granite basins floating with white pods. From a distance they look like eggs waiting to be boiled.

Silkworm cocoons.

“Have a seat. Yes. You can put the sword down. It’s safe now.”

Tenor stares dumbly at the brightest thing in the room, the skylight like a toy sun, raining the solar ghost of the waterfall, a cascade of light illuminating the spray like sparks. “It’s really over?”

“I promise you. It’s over.”

Tenor collapses against a basin and the sword slides from his lap. Childrebrand studies him. The darehander looks feverish, but he doesn’t see any wounds. Some people go into shock the first time they face an insect with a human face, or have a reaction to the hormonal disruptions, or the high-frequency wings disturb their inner ear balance.

Childrebrand sniffs. The black material conceals something. Copper stink soaks the suit clinging to the young man’s body. His gaze follows the pain in Tenor’s limbs, the glove avoiding contact with the ground. In the dark of that palm, a moist, glistening pit.

A soldier brings bandages. Childrebrand tries to peel the guiltweave from the hand, but realizes the material is a single piece covering the entire body. He carefully wraps the bandage around the sting.

Tenor slurs something and Childrebrand pats the bandaged hand. “There you go. You can shut your eyes now. Just rest.”

The queen unbinds her hair, allowing the sandy blond to spill free. “Is he alright?”

Childrebrand quietly says, “He encountered a xrafstar.”

The chamber is filling with officers and retainers, anxious to be of service. The queen rubs her scalp, irritated. “Go. All of you.”

A lieutenant gestures at Tenor. “What about him?”

The queen looks at the collapsed darehander with pity. “Let him be.”

Childrebrand is walking away when a voice echoes from the granite. “Childrebrand. Stay.” The rest of her court drains from the grotto, taking the nervous silence of their servitude, leaving the markgraf and the queen, their rarefied quiet sharp as glass.

The door grinds shut, rusted by moisture. Childrebrand stands at attention. Sweat has dried like a crust of salt under his tight dress clothes. The crimson clover in his lapel is destroyed, the petals scattered like sharp red shavings across his jacket breast.

The queen sets her scrolls down on a granite step, anchored against the damp breeze by the glass circle of her diadem.

The two edicts.
One to abolish INNOCENT.
The other to begin the xrafstar war.

The waterfall is a high white noise that seems to filter thought itself into polished stone, too smooth to be expressed, but her voice cuts above it. “That was brave, Childrebrand. Your guidance on the pavilion.”

“It was nothing.”

“You took command when others were found lacking.”

He rubs the back of his neck, smiling nervously.

“The xrafstar…” She trails off.

“Yes,” he says, almost breathlessly. Do you see now? What they are? In your tired eyes, your hesitation, do you understand?

The queen picks up her glass diadem with the tips of her fingers and places it on her head. The scrolls unfurl slightly, wobbling, but staying shut. When she looks at Childrebrand, she is complete as a newly sculpted statue, her loose hair and eroded foundation no longer frazzled, but fiercely noble, a warlike flush through the powder. “Childrebrand.”

“My queen?”

“I am elevating your position.”

“I. I don’t know what to say. Thank you—”

“You will spearhead the attack on their territory. Where you will find my son.”

He grips the cold stone rim of a basin. “There, there must be someone more qualified.”

“The tip of my tongue is populated with their graves.”

“I’m honored. But I drill men in a sleepy border town. I maintain fortifications. I’m hardly…”

“Your reputation does not lie. And today it was confirmed.”

“That was years ago, I, I’m afraid I don’t deserve such a, massive honor—”

“I watched you at the morning hunt. How comfortable you make your prey before you strike. The fluidity of your motion. Your focus. You lose all awareness of yourself. It’s entirely different from the clown you are elsewhere.”

“That’s very kind.”

“I don’t need another soldier. I need a hunter.”

His lashes flutter against the waterfall spray. “Hunting is a game. This is war.”

The opal licks rainbows in her diadem. “Perhaps you do not understand the materials I will grant you. My army, the battalion of every house, and the church.”

“The church?”

“I will not abolish INNOCENT.” She gestures to the bandaged shadow down the stairs. “The darehander survived a xrafstar. That insect which is the most pure distillation of violence on earth. If half of INNOCENT has half his steel, nothing can stand before us. Together you will burn their hive to ash.”

Childrebrand’s eyes fill with the earthen maws of those tunnels, vision boring into memory. “The tunnels of the hive make for long and generous tombs.”

“You have a concern?”

“I can’t help but see, an intractable war fought for inches of dirt.”

“Come close.”

He comes near enough to hear her breathing over the waterfall, the fragrance of scented powder spiced with queenly sweat. She says, “There is a weapon.”

“A weapon?”

“Have you heard of the Xrafstar Killer?”

“Xrafstar…Killer. Can’t say it rings the old bell.”

“Their death lays within their own territory, unknown to them. In the steeple of the old capital.”

She is tall enough that her head need only tilt up slightly to confide in him, the silk of her chest soft against his arm. In his ear she whispers the secret of their demise, the path and the key, and the forms they take, which are known only to the firstborn of her family, and now to him.

He tries to subdue the twitch in his throat. “I understand.”

“As if every bolt of lightning fallen from the sky since God created us, had been condensed into a single vessel.”

“That does seem like quite a lot.”

“Blue as your eyes. Ultraviolet to them. And when the storm is in your hands, we will wipe this land clean.”

His heart beats fast with a gruesome hope.

“Now that my redhaired protector is dead, you and I are the only ones in all creation who know of this weapon. But soon all will know of the death of the xrafstar, and the man who did it.”

Childrebrand runs his tongue along his teeth, looking sick around the eyes. “If I had full authority to reform the army, to teach them tunnel tactics…”

“You have it. Take this darehander, take my army, take everything. Slaughter their drones. Execute their princesses. And kill the queen.”

He bows his head, the sweat of his face hidden. He walks down the stone steps, thundering water diminishing to trickles, until he passes the basin where Tenor’s body leans. Childrebrand’s arms twist at his sides, head still hanging, shoulder blades working through his taut jacket.

“Childrebrand?”

He doesn’t turn, voice carried tonelessly as if only his echo dared speak. “Your son is already dead.”

“What?”

“Or worse. Likely worse.”

The queen descends a step, as if to thrust her words with momentum. “That is not your place to decide.”

Childrebrand points at the blond head slumped into the dark lap. “He’s dead too.”

“That is for God to decide.”

“The venom spares no one.”

“Yet you live.”

“That was a bite. Burning spit, paralysis. Because they capture us alive. And do you know why?”

The queen is silent.

“Because a slave must live. And in the venom of their sting, there is nothing but death.”

“There must be exceptions.”

“How many men do you think we tried to save? Bloodletting until they were nearly dry. Cutting off the limb. It doesn’t matter. They all die. The venom goes to your heart. Your brain. It burns in. No surgeon can cut it out. This poor boy, he bled just enough to die in your presence.”

The queen’s face shifts with sadness and anger like shallow water disturbed which, once calmed, will only show the rock beneath. “He is one sword. You will have thousands.”

Childrebrand swallows. “Your son. I’m sorry. But your son is one person. And Melissa…your knight. She was one person. Is this, this why we fought? Why we went to those tunnels?”

“Of course not,” the queen says sharply. “Our fight is for the very condition of humanity itself—”

“A single person isn’t worth burning the world down for.”

An infuriated silence builds and Childrebrand wishes he could force the words back down his throat. But when she speaks, it is with complete control. “Your military experience lends itself to cynicism. It is part of what makes you effective.” The echo of her voice seems undiluted, a second flash of iron. “But I am your queen. And you will bring my son back.”

He bows his head lower than ever, speaking quickly. “Yes, my queen.”

“It will be a war for body and soul. So that our children may live without fear.”

Childrebrand gets chills. Softly he says, “It sounds beautiful, when you put it like that.”

He turns back to the door, that dark metal made to match the granite. The sounds beyond are distorted by the waterfall, teasing the worst from his thoughts, every murmur a distant scream. He takes another step, and his limbs feel rusted as that door. He sucks in a deep breath, chest burning, and puts his hand out. “Your sword, please.”

Tenor’s head nods as if trying to wake up. The young man feels for his sword and lifts it clumsily. Childrebrand takes it just before Tenor slides to the floor, motionless.

The elegant but deadly blade, forged by secret art, etched with prayers, consecrated as an instrument of God on earth. He always wanted one of these on his wall, as if by owning them he secured some kind of protection. If he could, he would mount every hazard just so, down to the last sprig of mistletoe.

The door seems less fearful now. He takes another step toward it, reaching the last basin. He stares into the dark bowl full of spun white, worms sleeping inside. He dips his finger in the water, brushing the raw silk of the cocoons. “How many of these pass through your farm every year? Millions? Billions?”

The queen comes down to the step just above him, at the edge of the skylight, and their heights line up. “I have the precise number written down somewhere.”

“I always admired your family’s craft, my queen. The moths lay their eggs. The eggs hatch into worms. The worms eat the mulberry leaves. All the leaves they could possibly want. And when they are full, these children spin themselves in beautiful silk. They need a safe, warm place to grow. But when it comes time to hatch, and become a moth again. You boil them. So they won’t eat through the precious silk.”

The wet breeze catches a ribbon from her dress and it flutters between them.

He touches the lustrous length. “I understand. It’s so beautiful. So precious and perfect.” The silk ripples through his palm, traced in the air. “If only the worm would stop trying to eat through it.”

His fingers are so mesmerizing that it takes a few seconds before she notices the narrow blade hovering in the air, at the end of Childrebrand’s long reach.

“Childrebrand?”

“You won’t send me back.” His lips are peeled back to the canines.

“Childre—”

His voice shreds. “I will never go back to those tunnels.”

“Put it down,” she says, as if to her cat.

He bites back a hysterical laugh. “You asked for a dead queen.”

She remains still, but the skin under her foundation has become the same color as the surface. “So you intend to kill me, then.”

He looks sick. “I know the punishment for regicide. I could never kill you, my queen.”

She touches the blade with a conciliatory expression, and opens her mouth to speak.

Childrebrand looks at Tenor’s body. “But he can.”

Her mouth hangs open, the ribbon of her dress wrapped around his fist like a bandage, taut and jerking, his black hair quivering with the shuddering of her heart through the sword.

“You won’t feed me to your pit of hearts.”

She seizes the blade with both hands, blood running down her pale arms like red veins. “Childre. Childrebrand.”

Spit hisses through his teeth as he forces the sword deeper, dragging the silk of her gloves like shed snakeskin. “In the name of peace.”

Her clear diadem slips from her head, a halo of sunlight suspended, caustics strobing the granite. It shatters and glass glitters on the floor, splintered curves rolling to stillness, light arcing through their jagged edges.

Her pale chest heaves, blood soaking down the front of her white dress. The nerves of her hands are ruined, sliding down the blade. “No, you can’t, not now.”

Childrebrand’s heart pumps against the teeth of his scar, venom drooling into his arteries. “You were picking at me like a snack. At the feast. You were curious whether I penetrated women.” He wiggles the blade and she cries out. “Does this answer your question?”

She pants with terrible effort, teeth chattering with fury. “You’ve forfeited. Your life.”

He guides her with the blade, back on her heels, unstable in her arched shoes, tottering until her legs are trembling next to Tenor’s limp form. His eyes dilate with the evening glare through the skylight, his pupils swallowed by blazing blue. “On the contrary, my queen. I intend to live a long, happy life.”

He whips the blade out and the queen’s heart screams across Tenor’s body, spraying it with a hot jet of royal blood. She sways, then topples down the steps. As she falls past him, the ribbon jerks on his fist, drawn tight around it. She hangs in the air, his boot slipping in the water, pulling him with her. His other hand clangs uselessly with the sword, red drops falling into a basin, staining the cocoons. As he falls toward the hard stone, he spins and the ribbon unravels from his hand and he reels back onto the step, his other boot skidding behind him.

The queen hits the floor with a crack.

The venom clears from Childrebrand’s eyes and he sees the body below him. The dirty blond hair spilled around her pale face, individual strands stuck to her lips, her forehead, the wet around her eyes. The arms flung back, painted red from her sliced-open hands. The opal from her diadem, prismatic colors drowned to a single ugly crimson.

He goes to her, careful to avoid the blood pooling from her saturated dress. He fits the sword back to its wound, sliding it inside her chest until the tip hits granite. He stands up and checks his hand. Clean.

Something rustles and his head jerks back. At the top of the steps, her scrolls flap in the gusting damp, no crown to anchor them. He climbs up and grabs the edict of war, then squats down. Under each basin is a large burner. He twists a handle and waits, tapping his foot. He hovers his hand above the metal until he feels warmth, then holds the parchment to it. It browns faintly, but does not char. The mechanism is insulated, the heat trapped under the stone underbelly of the basin.

He glances at the door, the queen’s body arranged before it. The waterfall crackles in his ears, boots and shouts seeming to coalesce through the noise. He tears the edict with his teeth and crams it in his mouth, chewing and swallowing bite after bite.

Breathing comes from the bottom of the steps. At first he thinks it’s his imagination, but it persists, alive and agonized. He looks over, cheeks bulging. At her side, kneeling in the red pool, those dark limbs, eyes wide through blond strands, the queen’s blood dripping from Tenor’s hair.

It’s really a very beautiful study the queen has, overlooking the garden. On her lacquered desk, between an iron gall inkwell and cochineal red sealing wax, are two parchment scrolls. The edicts announced earlier.

The queen and her bodyguard stand at the balcony, watching for something. Soldiers are stationed throughout the house, the nobles crowded into the study. Their sweat makes Childrebrand nervous. Everything makes him nervous. The top and bottom floor are secured as best they can, but there’s too much decorative glasswork, windows easily broken.

The queen gasps and his head snaps in her direction. A red flag has been raised on the palace, long and streaming. The queen leans over the railing in relief. “They made it. The palace is sealed.”

Childrebrand scratches his ear. The windows begin to sing like wine glasses. Someone starts to cry, and the queen comes back inside.

“My armor,” the redhaired bodyguard says. A soldier helps him into it, this armor made with INNOCENT craft. White with mothwing eyes, ceramic over asbestos silk. Perfectly sealed, the helm even strains out pollen. Childrebrand envies that impregnable shell.

While everyone else is distracted, he sees a dirty hand reach through the balcony railing. He didn’t think that wall was climbable, but the drone is bleeding all over. A human body can do a lot if it doesn’t care how usable it is in ten seconds. Muscles can fray, bones can break, skin can be agonized, just to apply friction to a harsh surface.

The drone climbs onto the balcony and enters the room, quiet as a barefoot, naked, emaciated body can be. Childrebrand croaks, throat parched, and the bodyguard turns just as the drone breaks into a run, sidestepping into its path and breaking its momentum with solid armor. Dirty nails break on the ceramic and the bodyguard punches it to the floor.

“My sword,” he says.

A soldier tosses him the opal blade and the bodyguard stabs downward as the drone leaps up again. A spasm, then stillness, whispering stillness, we’re coming for you, then a final exhalation fills the room, a halitosis of putrid honey ham rubbed in dirt.

*

The world buzzes in and out, as if assembled from bees. Blood drips from Tenor’s hand, but he forces himself not to cover it. Even as his lifeblood drains, he knows it contains the venom attacking his brain.

Another surge of hallucinations washes the corridor in ruin and grandeur, cracks rippling and disappearing, coats of paint gleaming fresh and wet as his blood, then flaking as if under a great heat, scattering into particles of lead, sweet on his tongue. The walls seem made of the most delicately limned honeycomb, ethereal as snail mucus.

At the end of the corridor, pink grass. The light subtly shifts and the grass turns green, the queen’s garden. He sees a beautiful house above a yellow pool caked with pollen. In the balcony he sees the pale of the queen, if he can trust his eyes.

He tries to get his thoughts in order, not wanting to come off as a drone, an enemy.
He feels exposed, ripped apart, but the black of his suit hides the stain. He hasn’t bled between the legs for a long time. The cramps make it hard to move, hard to think. He clutches the cruce around his neck to confirm his reality, and the thick cross of rose quartz comforts him.

*

Soldiers toss the corpse over the balcony and the bodyguard goes to the hall door. He listens, then unlocks it. “I’ll check on the downstairs.”

The hall is empty, sun shining through a glass wall. He moves forward, his breathing loud in the helm. He reaches the stairs and speaks. Silence, then something crashes downstairs.

He backs up slowly as if to keep the floorboards from creaking. Childrebrand holds his breath, watching from the threshold of the office, the queen behind him.

The glass shatters across the bodyguard, shards tinkling down the ceramic. A princess lands in the hall on all fours, wings flicking fragments from her back. The slenderness of her waist is nauseating, her limbs long and clawed. Rags of whatever she was hang from her ribs.

The bodyguard swings his sword and she evades instantly, but the enclosed space of the hall limits her movement. The two-hander splits her leg and it dangles by a strand, pink blood spraying the floor. Her wings beat fast and the humming itches under Childrebrand’s skin. Finish her, he thinks.

The bodyguard pulls his sword back for another blow, and the princess leaps on him, claws screeching across the ceramic. She’s inside his range so he slaps her across the face, beating her with the tips of his armor. Her wings stop beating but the humming continues. Childrebrand pulls the queen back into the room and tries to slam the door. She grabs it and says, “Wait!”

When he looks back, princesses swarm the bodyguard, crammed into the hall, clinging to him from every angle. He twists his sword, cutting one, and stomps the claw of another, but their wings thrum and he rises into the air, held tight between their flushed bodies, their hair and stomachs and thighs sticking to his armor.

The humming synchronizes and a hot draft beats down the hall into Childrebrand’s face, drying his eyeballs. Their wings are moving at the exact same frequency.

The bodyguard kicks, nearly dropping through the mass of them, but their limbs pull him back. A glass shatters somewhere. He screams as his armor heats, sweat trickling through the tiny holes of his helm, steaming on the hot plate of his ceramic chest.

The white sword drops to the floor, their dark bodies crawling in reflection like a board peeled from the floor to reveal a swarming nest.

Childrebrand shuts and bolts the door.

*

Buzzing rakes the sky above Tenor. He feels his urethra contract, but nothing happens. He realizes he must have pissed himself already, in that feverish blackout. He hides inside a cocoon topiary, pushing into the tiny springy branches, fighting for space.

The sound of broken glass. The buzzing becomes an evil chorus. He peeks through the bush just in time to see the princesses emerge. Their wings are invisible from this distance, so all he sees is a ball of flesh with an armored form trapped inside.

Mother’s bees were the same. She told him about it. The cuddle death. When the queen is weak and must be replaced, the other bees cluster her and vibrate their wings, cooking her to death. They do this to intruders as well.

The cooked armor falls from the swarming ball and lands in the pond with a hiss of steam.

*

The princesses claw against the door.

Childrebrand sinks into the corner. Everyone else is still watching the door.

The balcony. He’s tall, he can make a two-story jump, especially if he falls in the pond, but the splash will be loud and he’ll be soaked in dress clothes, helpless for crucial seconds as he wades onto land. He has to fall into some plants, a bush or bed of flowers. Then what? The palace is sealed. The garden is crawling with drones.

Screaming from the other side of the door, heavy sounds of impact, then silence.

A knock on the door. “Sir?”

Childrebrand unlocks the door to see the red uniform of his house, his captain standing at attention. A dead princess hangs through the broken glass of the hall, impaled by a spear through the base of her spine.

“Good to see you, Transom. Very well done.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Down the hall, his red soldiers. Which means they know how to fight xrafstar. For years he sought out veterans of the xrafwar and gave conditional citizenship to experienced foreigners. Sometimes it meant picking the soldiers other houses didn’t want, the ones invariably scarred by a single engagement with the hive, erratic and prone to drinking. For fresh recruits, he selected from those with grudges, which wasn’t hard to find in a border town. And he armed them with spears and arrow, for fighting exactly such winged creatures as bled and burnt in the hall.

*

Tenor stumbles through the garden without direction, plants growing and dying around him, the mechanized orchestra strange in the distance. He’s lost in a jungle, water trickling all around, cello growling and fading like an exotic beast.

He lifts a handful of water from a raging river, only to realize the muddy bank is the dirt-encrusted rim of a fountain. He sips the cold tannin-brewed water from his sweaty glove, then runs his stung hand through the water, coagulated blood breaking apart and clouding the fountain.

He checks the handle of his sword. Still black.

*

Childrebrand grips the balcony railing, arms shaking. Corpses litter the garden, uniforms like colorful petals amid the dirty naked bodies, as if they died fighting the earth.

“We won,” someone says.

Childrebrand looks back. “Fill in the tunnels. And check on the wounded.”

“Yes, sir.”

They’re all doing what he says, just like at the pavilion. They’re afraid and looking for instruction. He wonders how many officers died.

The room goes silent. A soldier stands at the door, breathless from running. “My queen, they. Your son. He.”

The queen waits, pale as death.

“We found the soldiers he was with.”

“What did they say?”

“They’re all dead.”

“And my son?”

“We couldn’t find him.”

The queen is silent. Then she says, “Where?”

“The lunar atrium. The skylight was shattered.”

So close, Childrebrand thinks. The perils of decorative glasswork.

Tenor sits up. The sky is clear and blue, although something is going on at the queen’s pavilion. He tries to move but flounders in fabric, his legs tangled in a burgundy dress. “What happened,” he cries out in a high voice, then covers his mouth. His chest feels heavy, his throat feels wrong.

Childrebrand’s dark hair is slicked back, slender armor bound in tight red plates like a centipede. He drops an axe on the grass, black edge rimmed with pink ichor.

Childrebrand says, “The xrafstar tried to attack. But they were caught and killed. That’s the last of them. The last in the entire world.”

You might as well try catching all the flies in the air.

“How?”

Childrebrand says, “The Xrafstar Killer. You remember, don’t you?”

The more Tenor thinks about it, the more she seems to remember. She nods and smooths her skirts, then feels the pain in her hand.

Childrebrand notices. “What’s wrong, dear?”

“It hurts.”

“Let’s take a look at it.”

The girlish hand splays, shaking under Childrebrand’s fingers. “A nasty one. Bee sting?”

Tenor tries to see but her hand is covered by Childrebrand’s majestic dorsal bones. Then Childrebrand drops it and holds up two fingers, a delicate gesture, one slightly curled. Both are flushed red, blistering at the tips. “I think I’m allergic.”

Tenor reaches into her collar and fishes a cruce out, tiny and silver, so thin she can barely feel it. “Cross your heart, if you be true.”

“What?”

“Cross your heart.”

Childrebrand sweeps his fingers across his chest. They turn black. A smell of meat decaying in honey afflicts Tenor’s nostrils. She gags.

Childrebrand looks concerned. “My dear lady. Are you sure you’re alright?”

Tenor stares at the fingers, then pulls her hand back.

“We should really get that looked at,” Childrebrand says, looking worried.

Tenor opens her hand and stares at the burning black mark. She struggles to control it, each finger shaking fearfully.

“You’ll only hurt yourself,” Childrebrand says urgently.

Tell the bee: you’ll only hurt yourself.

Her finger twitches. “I wanted. Didn’t I want something?”

“Anything you want, darling. You’ll have it.”

Tenor shakes her head, and the weight of her hair is heavy and oppressive.

Childrebrand says, “You told me once, a terrible feeling would come across you, where reality was difficult to discern. And your mother was the same. Is this anything like that?”

Tenor struggles to curl two fingers back, mascara dripping onto her wrist, hot and wet and black across the white of her strained tendons.

“I need to pray.”

“We should have that hand looked at first, shouldn’t we?”

Tenor bends her head as she strains to clench her hand, blond hair falling around her face. Inside the hair her features seem soft as clay, except where the sun glances through and hardens them. “Didn’t I have a sword?”

Childrebrand considers, brow furrowed. “I don’t seem to recall a sword, per se.”

Tenor tries to make a grip like she’s holding something, fingers curling until it touches the wound in her palm. With a sudden fear she says, “In the name of God.”

Childrebrand is a dark blur. “God?”

“In the name of God,” with a scream, falling into the earth.

*

Tenor follows the queen, sword heavy in his hand. He feels thickness between his legs as well, disorienting but somehow natural. Why wouldn’t it be?

The sword is heavier than he thought, forcing him to use both hands. In the reflection of the blade, white silk armor flows up to a gorget of silk wrapped around metal, a stiffness around his throat. Locks of blond hair fall from either side of a white peaked cap with a cockade of mothspot ribbon.

The queen’s bodyguard. The white silk of innocence, lower-case. You cut a fine figure.

What was cut?

Tenor looks down from the wall. An officer lays on the grass, shattered as if dropped from a great height, his black hair speckled with red, sanguine dew on the dark grass of hell.

Something hums in the distance and his palm itches briefly. The two-handed long sword with the pearly pommel seems suddenly clumsy in his hands.

“Was this my sword?”

The queen is talking to someone and doesn’t seem to hear him. He closes his eyes and sees a dark sword etched with prayers, perfumed with the sweat of his fear. Slender, sharp, obstinately his.

He opens his eyes and the sword is white again. The queen’s voice intrudes, silk-forked fingers placing her favor on his shoulder. “What is it, my protector?”

“I must have been dreaming.”

“Let us end our nightmare before we speak of dreams.”

The winged ones flit across the palace grounds, darting without warning, plucking screams from the earth. But what draws his eye is a small shoe in the grass between trees, the tongue of its buckle hanging loose, surrounded by sticky red syrup.

“Tenor?”

His fist throbs until he can barely hold the sword, it hangs at his side, caressed by sunlight, how could such clean light fall from that sun?

He says, “Do you see it?”

The queen looks up. “See what?”

“This red and bestial sun,” Tenor says, then cries out as blood spurts from his hand, spotting his white armor. His sword bangs to the ground and the sun spins and he follows the blade. He lays there, staring up at her.

Something is wrong with the queen’s face. It has snow and worms on it, illuminated by his wrist, this burning torch of nerves.

She gets down next to him and they stare at each other. He licks his lips, but dares not speak.

She says, “Do you remember that thing you pray for?”

Is this what he forgot. Was it prayer. It was something with his hands. A wrongness. Lack of union. He tries to join his hands together but when they touch, one is on fire. He rubs it and feels a hole plugged with coagulated blood.

His mouth moves.

She stares.

The sword on the ground is black again, slender enough to wield with a single hand. A prayer for one hand.

He crawls toward it, his wounded limb dragging uselessly. He feels incredibly heavy. “Will you help me reach it?”

“Can you tell the difference between leaves on a tree.”

“I think so. With examination.”

“The leaves are falling now. Catch your leaf from the air.”

He reaches for his sword but the hilt is white and his fingers hover above it, confused.

She touches his burning hand and he feels her fingers through the fire, like gloves handling a coal. This dominant, crippled hand. He reaches out with it and the sword seems darker. But it might only be the shadow of a cloud.

He reaches again and feels a pang in his abdomen. Why would you do something that brings pain?

He relaxes his hand and there is no pain, there is nothing but scrubbed stone and smooth grass and all is well and shall be well for all time. It was a dream, not worth the thought, but he says a prayer anyway. The prayer passes like clear water.

The queen bids him come and he begins to prop himself up. With curiosity he checks his other hand and sees no terrible hole, just a dot the size of a splinter. He says another prayer and it does not touch the roof of his mouth or the tip of his tongue.

The woman says, “There is time to pray when the sun comes down.”

He places his palms together and blinding pain erupts, the second and third dread which came hence to banish the forth by was this despite enough to keep you crawling to us on hands and knees but it is shown to us without hands you are but kneeling to the tyrant and for it is given to us that we may not be without forever and ever and in the same manner the same of falling we kept are in the dark of his palm the broken wing forever and ever kept safe for smallness so that the fullness of time forever and ever.

Separation. No pain. His open hands frame the white sword, pure and beautiful. He closes them slowly, shaking as the skin hovers within a hair of contact, and the second dread shines between, the spark of lightning between earth and heaven, this unbloodied and useless blade, clean enough to reflect all manner of things. Sweat drips down his collar and he loosens his gorget, stripping the silk and breaking the armor from his neck. But the tightness remains, heavy as steel. In the blade, winged things spiral black around the red sun.

He reaches for the sword and heat creeps up his flexor tendons. At first it seems slight, but the more he stretches, the more unbearable the pain becomes, and the harder it is to breathe in this collar of anaphylaxis, and the sun brightens with each inch until he can barely see. His vision trembles, the sun bent like a hexagon. “Which sun is that again?”

The one that burns us, dear heart.

The sword is so close, but the pain is unbearable. “Won’t you help me?”

She cradles his hand between her cool and tender palms and he nearly weeps from the reprieve.

Her lips move without sound. If you pick it up, the sword will be always without handle. You will sheathe the tang in your own flesh.

The sun is a puncture in the sky, and this unbearable heat the venom.

The queen says, “I think he was stung by a bee.”

Someone says, “His throat is closing up. He has to take this medicine.”

The sky is calm and blue. Tides of green lap at the palace walls.

Tenor strains to speak. “What happened?”

The queen says, “The xrafstar are all dead. Don’t you remember?”

“Was I injured?”

“Your hand. But it doesn’t matter. The war has ended.”

“It’s over?”

The queen puts a hand on his burning brow. “There will always be a place for you here. You will never have to lift a sword again.”

He looks up dumbly.

“You’ll have everything you ever wanted.”

He feels the frustration of a child. “I just want. To move my hand. An inch.”

The queen says, “You’re only hurting yourself.”

He lunges and grabs the sword. As his fist closes around the hilt, the coagulated plug in his hand shatters between muscle and tendon and the venom runs from his body, black clots of blood snaking down the blade.

The pain remains like an acid burn.

“No, nnnh, nnnuh,” His throat closes up and he tastes the final breath of his mouth, his last word trapped behind his teeth, vision darkening as the queen’s murmuring fades to a persistent hum like mother would hum, until it disappears and all is silent, and then it explodes like a distant insect flung into his inner ear.

The black hole of his throat dilates and the breath bursts from his mouth with a shout but the word is lost, as if something leapt into the air and jolted him awake.

He sits up, wet between his legs with a stinging heat that seems to flow from the deepest part of his body. Smooth dark textile stretches taut across his pounding chest. His sword lays across his lap, hilt black, the blade pristine.

The flowers have released their pollen. The sky is a sickly yellow. Through the allergenic haze, soldiers swarm like panicked ants, tormented by the princesses of the hive. The simple addition of a Y-axis is enough to invalidate military planning.

It’s about that time in the massacre, when everyone is distracted. Childrebrand discreetly vomits, then stares at the glistening clam flesh stained with red velvet. The future of his innards, auto-haruspexy.

Childrebrand. Hero of the xrafstar war. Haha.

He performed his job competently, gave orders according to orthodoxy. Killing the drones is easy. Burning honeycombed houses in condemned villages is cathartic. Then one day he followed his superior officer into the tunnel and ordered his men to do the same, spurring them on with a laugh ripped from matriotic pamphlets. Something about being home in time for dinner. They were, but it wasn’t their dinner. He felt the ghastly tickle in the dark, her antennae flicking across him, and realized everyone who went ahead of him was dead or worse, and her teeth clamped across him with the force of a beast but the deliberation of an unfathomable intelligence. This thinking jaw, with the pace of a nightmare, that says, there are things with goals beyond mere consumption, that torment without relief. You will not be relieved of this agony, no more than an ant crushed under a boot may know when the immense shapes above it will cease to apply pressure.

He reaches for his bow again, but it isn’t here. He misses it like a muscle.

The queen pulls her boy to her side, the prince Serico. They’re surrounded by soldiers but he can see they don’t understand, they’re going to fortify here, on the high ground. Except their enemy can fly, which makes this pavilion a bowl of chocolates.

“We have to reach the palace,” someone says in a stuffed-up voice, and to his surprise, it’s him. Everyone looks over and he wipes the mucus from his upper lip and says, more clearly, “We’re going to bring the queen to the palace.”

The palace is an island in the trees, surrounded by the remote isles of the pavilions, the air between jaundiced with pollen thick as ocean fog. It looks deceptively close from here, but he knows the route is full of meandering dead ends and exposed open areas.

War can be reduced to a set of zones. Each combatant has an effective range. The rest is managing risk; choosing when and where a zone collides. But the princesses and their queen have infinite range. They can cross the grounds quickly and hover at any height and strike from any direction. But they are flesh and blood like us, so the beating of their wings must require great energy. So, one might say, every ten minutes we survive, our odds increase.

Here’s to another ten minutes. He drains his glass of fatwashed alcohol, tasting the dirt of her wings.

“They’ll try to flush us with the drones. The drones are just naked humans, brain-damaged, undisciplined.”

The chain of command swings broken, held together by his body.

“If we get in a lock, strike to disable. That’s easy, they’re unarmored. But don’t stop to fight. Don’t stop for any reason.”

He goes to the edge of the pavilion, to the steps marked with dirty footprints.

“Their goal is not to kill you. Their goal is to slow you down. To make you a target for the princesses.”

He turns to see the queen cutting the sides of her dress with a letter opener, legs freed to run. “Let’s go,” she says.

Boots clatter down the steps. The watercolor landscape of massacre disappears, replaced by trees and stonework. When they reach the bottom, Childrebrand knows immediately that it’s not good enough, the pace is too slow, and the worst part is, everyone thinks they’re trying.

He tries not to jerk his head every time he hears buzzing. You can’t control the wind, only beg with your tensed body, try to control it with the tightness of your chest.

He leads them down a narrow servant’s path with some tree cover. Dresses tear behind him, nobles stumbling ineptly. They enter a building with a wide mouth and jog past shelves of pale worms laying on mulberry leaves, over and over until the pattern seems to be repeating. If everyone here dies, the worms will hatch, destroying the silk. Moths will fly past their corpses and there will be no dresses.

They emerge and there’s too many people out here making noise. He wants to stay in the silk harvest building, he can feel the others slowing too, but the building is a trap. The entire world is made of traps. A trap is anything with only one way out. And the way is death.

He sees nobles at the bottom of an embankment where dancing was happening, screaming and running poorly in their voluminous skirts and tight trousers as princesses dive for them. He wants to shout something, but everything has been decided already. They’re in the trap, which was laid a long time ago. The trap is how long it would take to climb up those pretty crisscrossing stairs. The trap is those beautiful, expensive clothes they wear, trussed up like holiday meat. Even his pants are too tight, but at least he’s moving, the trap hasn’t clamped around him yet.

A naked man runs toward them with something sharp and ugly in his hands and Childrebrand reaches for his bow but it still isn’t there. Then the redhaired bodyguard swings, startling Childrebrand from his periphery, and the drone hits the ground, neck split open, air and blood emptying out.

Everyone stares at the filthy nude body, the eyes that rapidly blink after the limbs have gone still, subvocalization tripping through the throat. Then Childrebrand says, “They know where we are.”

They run in silence for another ten seconds, then drones start to climb up the trees, the walls, crawl from the holes, casual, without fanfare, filthy figures following them like cats, and when you run, they match your speed, so you run faster, and they match it again.

The Mors Arch is up ahead, tall and wide enough to not feel like a trap, as long as they keep moving. And it will conceal them from the air, the air, why is he thinking of the air, something screams from the sky and hits the ground with a heavy slap and the scream stops. Everyone steps around the blood spreading from the noblewoman’s ringlets.

When he looks up from the red mess, a wall of white silk ripples before them, hanging in the mouth of the great stone arch, divided into banners like the pavilion, and behind them, more banners, soft walls demonstrating the prosperity of the queen, the lustrous fabric she brings to the world, that no other culture is capable of reproducing. To walk through the arch to the palace, you must touch and acknowledge my power.

The silk caresses Childrebrand’s face as he breaks through the first wall, then another, and another, and he can’t see who is behind him or ahead of him, but something has changed, something in the air, bitter and burning as if the pollen had turned to cinders. The allergy sting in Childrebrand’s throat becomes truly sore, that doomed feeling of when your throat is sore but nothing else is wrong but you know you’re getting sick and soon you’ll be in the grip of a fever.

The soldiers are fighting the drones, emboldened by how effective their blows are against naked skin, that interchangeable, replaceable skin. He understands how hard it is to turn off the instinct to fight back, to solve simple equations of survival relating to your own body. To defend yourself at any cost.

The trap has finally caught him.

The trap is his connection. The trap is what all of this means outside the violence. His reputation, his lineage, his culture, his queen. He would run if he thought he could make it, he would chew off the leg of his pride. But he knows they’re watching up there, the closest he’ll ever come to a sense of God, those winged things that wait for people to panic and split off.

He picks up a sword, in plentiful supply, still warm from the hands of a soldier who was brained with some blunt object. Shadow puppets of violence play behind the silk all around him. He doesn’t want to join them, doesn’t want to lose his color. The sword feels foreign in his hands, as if he never used one before.

He hears a voice cry out and he knows it’s the queen, even though he’s never heard her reach that pitch. The wind picks up and he sees the redhaired bodyguard, sword dripping, drones dead all around. One of the bodies stands out against the dirty corpses, pristine and pale. The queen is on the ground, the prince kneeling next to her, talking frantically.

Everything has become slowed and untenable. An officer reels from a concussion. A soldier clings to a curtain of silk, dying of venom, eyes bloodshot, mouth erased by foam, fist clenched so tight he can’t let go, swinging back and forth even after the life leaves him. Childrebrand watches the fabric sway on every side, every ripple seeming to be the one that splits apart to show him his death.

The queen sits up, clutching her ankle as if pain radiated from it. “You.” She points to the nearest officer. “Escort the prince to the Impregnable Chamber. Take as many men as you need.”

Over half the soldiers leave with the prince, eager to reach safety. Childrebrand watches them go, crestfallen. Why can’t I go to the Impregnable Chamber?

“It’s a sprain,” the bodyguard says.

“Help me up,” the queen says. “I’ll hobble.”

Childrebrand takes the queen’s hand, the silk of her demi-glove soft and delicate in his grip. The bodyguard takes her from the other side and they bring her up.

“I won’t be killed by some counterfeit queen.” She moves urgently, trying to keep pace despite the pain. Childrebrand admires her pragmatism, but the dryness of her hand shames him. He sweats into that powdered, lacy palm, his trembling pulse betrayed. He hopes she doesn’t notice.

They leave the dying behind. The light behind the silk grows brighter, the fabric clean and white. The prince made it this far at least.

In the distance, a grinding sound. Childrebrand almost crushes the queen’s hand with a twitch, but she sighs with relief. “He’s safe. That was the south portcullis.”

Childrebrand looks back and the silk behind them is spattered with blood, layer after layer of death and dirt flowing silently. He can’t help the feeling that something is pushing through, more than a strong gust of wind. Pushing closer and closer to him.

He pulls them through the next billowing wall and the silk slithers across their bodies and they stand at the edge of the queen’s garden. Paradise as it once was, boxed into acres, the green skirt of the palace.

Pollen rolls like dust clouds across the manicured grass. A soldier’s body is cradled in a tree, blood seeping down the trunk, veining the mulberry bark. The queen and her court limp past as Childrebrand stares at the sky.

I pray, my gloves smelling of pink lemonade, a distracting smell. I am aware of my own prayer like someone becomes aware of their tongue. I haven’t eaten a thing since that celery stick, but meat feels wrong in my mouth, the thick fibers knitted from blood. My blood is too thick today, within and without. I thought I became someone else, but I only removed the temptation to bash his little brains into jam (forgive me). In matters of faith I am stilted, stiff, stuck, dry, colorless, and second-hand. Anger is my only eloquence, an ugly mother tongue.

I pray quickly without hearing myself, cheap and quick as superstition, unfilling as the celery. I squeeze tighter, gloves groaning, trying to say something true through these dark fingers, please save me from this rage (his face in genuine surprise under me, cake slicking his ears) this fury this poison in my blood—

I cannot hear myself. Something is wrong with the air. My hands crumble, knuckles breaking the symmetry of my prayer, exposing the dark void inside my gloves.

Screams, then wings, above my head, my prayer shatters.

“Tenor,” someone says, and I am relieved to hear a familiar voice.

*

As the tide of screams pours across the palace grounds, I wonder why Amnesty is staring at me so intently. Then I realize the test before me. Every darehander renounces their titles and blood. If I run to my family, searching frantically for brother and grandmother, privileging their lives over the world I’ve sworn to protect, my vow is betrayed.

So I stand still, waiting for an order.

Amnesty’s gray gaze returns to the landscape before us, the mulberry palace with hell bubbling up from below. I cannot afford to lose myself to a smeared, totalizing vision, a nightmare or painting. We are the ones who diagram hell, who tally the devils. The drones, her human slaves, naked and rabid. The princesses, her elites, venom and wing.

Amnesty says, “We must find the queen and protect her. If we prove ourselves, she will change her mind about INNOCENT.”

Something buzzes beyond the trees. I reach for my sword, but Amnesty grabs me, shaking his head.

“The venom of the xrafstar paralyzes at a scratch.”

“Paralyzes?”

“God grants at least two steps before stillness. There will be a chance to rescue the other. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But if you see blood, don’t stop for me.”

“I can’t just leave you—”

“No one has survived a puncture of the skin.”

“Ever?” The finality sickens me, like when I learned about unforgivable sins, convinced I was damned at the age of thirteen. The more afraid I became of blaspheming, the louder my internal voice became, an itch in my head.

“If they pierce the skin and you can still move. That’s how you know they’ve killed you.”

The buzzing returns and Amnesty makes a gesture with his fingers, a male movement to usher us through a panic of skirts, toward the palace glimpsed through gaps in trees and limbs. A noblewoman stumbles past, tripping on her dress, saying something so fast I can’t make it out and then a dark figure stabs through the air and grabs her hair, pulling it back until her scream breaks and she is dragged from the path into a hole, torn lace all that remains on the foliage.

I stop and Amnesty says, “If you step in that hole, you’ll slide down and not be able to get up again.”

The darkness of the pit pulls at me, then I rip away, following him into a fresh rush of bodies, turning sideways to slice through the crowd, silk dresses flurrying across my skintight suit.

“They took a boy,” someone says, drunk with shock. “Screaming in the sky.”

And then everyone else is gone and we’re surrounded by lost shoes and spilled drinks, running in the direction everyone else is fleeing from. I can finally hear our boots, too loud on the stone, and the rhythmic flap of my asymmetrical cape, a black diamond across my right shoulder, a grave accent.

Suddenly my arms spin at my sides and my boots slap the stone almost comically like the hill I ran down as a child and couldn’t stop it was too steep but the ground is flat, my eardrums are shuddering, I can’t tell which direction the whining comes from, pitching up and down, compass spinning, I veer, crashing through a wall of acanthus, white petals crying out under purple lips, and Amnesty is shouting my name but I can’t tell the direction and the ground opens below my feet, a bone-breaking drop which seems frozen in time, the air strangling me as if to have its fun before I am broken on the earth below.

I lay in a shady trench at the bottom of the slope, a narrow groove between earth and wall. I stand up, shocked that my legs aren’t broken, then see a rag of shadow fluttering from a branch at the top of the slope, half my cape torn away. I walk until I emerge into a grove of mulberry trees, sun pouring into the center, a warmth that tells me I am alive. A cricket chirps and I wish for a moment to be such a small thing, beneath all notice. A fountain trickles nearby. This recessed place seems separate from the world, distant cries blending into the high sweet sounds of water and wing.

The sun disappears and I am cold. I look up and she shrieks laughter, braking in the air so suddenly her legs are flung ahead of her, then she drops into a tree, leaves exploding in my face, rasping my cheeks, she bounces on a branch, bare toes wedged into the crooks. Her arms hang forward, claws bloody, scraps of skin stuck like melted cheese.

Her hormones announce her, trumpeting through my apocrine glands, banners of sweat unfurling from my armpits. The queen of the xrafstar.

I step back, then freeze, knowing if I return to the narrow trench I won’t have room to swing my sword. Her armor is fractured, muscular abdomen exposed. It tapers, not with fragility, but as if engineered, the rotation point of a mechanism which is now tilted toward me. I know everyone that broke her armor is dead.

She says, “The dark plumage of INNOCENT. Did you take a vow to exterminate me?”

My throat twitches and she seems to take it as a reply. She leans forward, the branch sagging under her weight, and sniffs. Her antennae convulse as if releasing an invisible charge of pleasure. “Did you swear that vow with this same breath?”

Sniff sniff. Smile.

“I think not.” She drops from the tree and in her split smile speech dies, a single word dissolving to saliva in her mandibles: “Perish.”

I whip my sword out and blink stinging sweat from my eyes and on the other side of that salt curtain her claws glitter and between them, her exposed stomach, I thrust at the hollow between her ribs and a great fire bursts around us, a heat that steals the air from my lungs.

I stagger through the blinding smoke, barely a step ahead of the flames, I drop my sword, I fall to my knees, the grass is green but my suit is still on fire, I beat myself to extinguish it, clawing at my back, I am charred black all over, my hand comes away burnt, still on fire, but I cannot see the flame, only the sun high in the blue sky, endlessly far and uncaring.

There is a hole in my glove.

I open my mouth to pray and a hand cups my throat, squeezing with naked palm, I feel the blood beating through it, near as my own heartbeat. The skin turns to armor, a merciless gauntlet that crushes the breath from me. Anaphylaxis.

Please, star of paradise.
Not alone.
Don’t let me die alone.

My sword is clean.
I haven’t done anything yet.

My sword is clean.
I see you in the glowing blade, no blood to interrupt you.
If I stare until I am blind, will you hear me?

One hand is on fire and cannot touch the other but I am praying.

Just one more step.
One more word.

The sun disappears.

act 3

ultraviolet tribute

A buried war-horse produces the hornet.

— Florentinus

Pocket Queens

Childrebrand watches the queen, waiting for an opening. He watches the gifts pile up around her, watches people play their little games. The table has been lowered for this relaxed stage of the day but he feels as if his own skeleton had shrunk instead.

Her cat brushes past his ankle and he pets it. “You’re a fuzzy little buster, aren’t you?” He laughs softly, then strokes faster, eyebrows furrowed.

“You’re petting her very vigorously.”

He glances at the queen, taken by surprise. “Sorry. She has a soft pelt—”

“Don’t go skinning her, now.”

“Haha. I never. Intended to do any such thing.”

The queen smiles, popping another mulberry into her mouth. “You’re usually the one making the jokes, aren’t you?”

“Ah. Do you think I make too many jokes?”

Agonized harping from the mechanized orchestra. Can’t anyone hear how out of tune it is?

The queen studies the mulberry juice on her fingers. “Do you miss when your family made its living from cochineal?”

Childrebrand pets the cat distractedly. “Well. You know what they say. It’s a dying trade.”

The queen throws her head back with a quick laugh, exposing the silkbound column of her throat. “In another life, you could have been a clown.”

“Thank you,” he says automatically.

“You look as if you had something to say.”

Childrebrand sniffs, nose red from pollen, and perhaps cat fur. “I don’t want to ruin your birthday. I just had a little thought.”

The queen waits without expression, a mulberry rolling in her palm.

“I was wondering if. Perhaps the judicious thing would be fortifying our borders instead.”

The queen says, “The calcification of our borders is the exact problem. We build a prison around ourselves.”

“Of course. I only want to make sure we’re prepared—”

“What about the offense?”

“A defensive offense, perhaps.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“Well you see—”

“Your diligence is appreciated, dear Childrebrand. But we cannot live in fear.”

We can die in it.

“I trust you to help me honor my declaration. A good, hard stab in the name of peace.”

“In the name of peace.”

Childrebrand sits there as a servant refills his glass and replaces his half-eaten steak with a fresh one. It feels like the day is repeating. The orchestra winds its gears and begins again. But the mucus is different. There’s just so much of it, dripping from his nose. He’s never had it this bad. He stares at his fingers, the ones he would use to notch an arrow. Phantom feathers whisper across them, as if telling him to draw. As if to say, you will quiver one way or another.

He turns to see seven feet of dirt standing at the top of the pavilion stairs. It towers like a statue, and just as still. Was it placed there for artistic purposes? He doesn’t find it very aesthetic.

The queen says, “Who is that?”

The pavilion goes silent. The figure approaches, and at the same time, the redhaired bodyguard castles the queen, crossing to the vulnerable side, hand on sword.

The air vibrates, stinging every eardrum, eyeballs shuddering with double vision. Something moves at either side of the figure, twinned ghosts, unreal, invisible but raging. The force of its wings scatters the dirt in a single blast, speckling the table.

Childrebrand’s drink is full of dirt, muddy clumps clinging to placental strands of fat. His heart pounds, the scar stretched across it like barbed wire. The puke in his throat strains to rise past his tightly bound cravat and he swallows it, terrified of making the slightest sound.

The vibration was enough to clean the loose earth from the stranger’s body, revealing dark armor and wings that divide the sun into veined glass. Gauntlets hang at her sides, angular and sharp.

Black hair spills past her ears, cut unevenly, the smell of it filling even this open air as if locked in a room without ventilation. Then she steps into the sun and it turns blinding gold. Her pale skin glows with an elegance that makes the streaks of dirt look like marbling. Dark hair bristles from her collar, and it too turns gold in the sun. Her eyes are black as pitch, with pink irises slit like a cat, difficult to tell what she’s looking at or feeling. They do not change in the sun, like holes punched to night.

With another step, her limbs seem almost jointed like a doll, or segmented like an insect. Muscle and bone, but harder and cleaner, moving like well-oiled parts.

The queen says, “Melissa.” Her voice is strange.

“We didn’t receive an invitation.” Melissa’s voice is almost lisping, jaw crowded, something wrong with her teeth or tongue, a deepness behind each word, resonating like an instrument. She sticks her armored finger in a mulberry pie, stirring the dark purple sludge. “Was it lost in the meal?”

A stark piano key repeats, the mechanized orchestra gritty with dirt.

“I thought you were dead.”

“She died for you. Your knight.”

Childrebrand recognizes the armor now. The suit of a queenwealth knight, tarnished with no common rust. When the light hits just right, the black shell runs with warm streaks, like flames raining in the night. Honey is highly acidic.

The queen says, “I waged war to find you.”

Melissa smiles like someone about to laugh before they can finish their own joke. “Here she is.”

“What did you do to her?”

Melissa pulls her finger from the pie and sucks off the mulberry guts. She wasn’t wearing gauntlets. Those are her hands, dipped in darkness, fading to pink at the edges, knuckles arched like cruel armor, fingers sharp.

“When choosing our next body from the combs, this was the most diplomatic flesh.”

The queen says, “You’ve stretched it out.”

“You remodeled your palace when you moved into it.”

“So it is a mask, then?”

“What do you think?”

“You remembered my birthday.”

“We did.”

“But I think you are the one in search of a present.”

“Yes. We. I want. My ultraviolet tribute.”

“What you ask is unspeakable.”

“Do you stutter?”

“I—”

“Of course you cannot speak it. What you call language is your attempt at ours. You chase the shape of our throats. Your language is baby talk, infanta.”

Gruyere says, “That’s putting it a bit strong, isn’t it?” Gruyere is the marshal of the queen’s army, nearing fifty with hollow cheeks and white silk stitched through his uniform, a constellation in honor of the queen.

Melissa bends back like a dancer to look at the marshal. “You killed my body, not my jelly. And you told her it was a victory?”

In a more subdued tone, he says, “We thought you’d gone to ground.”

The wings beat up another burst of dust, whirling bright in the sun. “We did.”

We didn’t beat them, Childrebrand thinks. We held parades as they tunneled below with insectile patience.

The queen says, “I am no child, to be taken in by a puppet show. This tribute is impossible.”

Melissa spreads her hands, claws pointing upward as if beseeching. “My jelly is strong. It cannot be denied.”

“We cannot accept these ruinous conditions.”

“The royal we. Mmmha. You learned it from us, aping the ape, regina. But this jelly contains our dynasty, unbroken for all time. Not disintegrating through sperm.”

The queen does not respond, only makes a subtle gesture with her finger. A servant comes over and places a glass diadem on her head, set with an iridescent opal that changes color with the slightest movement.

Melissa recoils. “We’re getting our paraphernalia out? Our queenshit?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“My crown grows from my skull.” Dark antennae slither from Melissa’s hair, encircling her head in hairy halos.

“The queenwealth does not recognize this crown.”

Melissa’s mouth turns down. Under her black eyes, the open mouth seems strangely pathetic, like a dog. “You deny my jelly?”

“Your brain is so eaten through, you really think you’re one of them.”

Melissa stabs her claw through the air, pointing at the queen, and the ants on the table swarm into a frenzied spiral, a deformed hexagon rolling over mounds of meat and vegetable, drowning in pitchers until corpse bridges reassert legibility, stampeding over hands that dare not move. The mechanized orchestra chugs feverishly. “A taste of my jelly. Would make you into me.”

The cat walks over to Childrebrand and nuzzles his leg. He tries to force down the mad laugh building in his throat.

The queen says, “Your dietary dynasty has ended.”

Melissa’s wings beat faster, hotter, until frosting melts down the legs of the table. “If you wish to end it, you must kill every last living being on earth. And even then we would remain, in golden majesty.

“If the sun clung when night fell, it would burn the earth black.”

Melissa’s antennae curve back, sharp as scythes. “Then black it shall be.”

“Not while my family is sovereign.”

‘The bones of your family will caulk the cracks in our hive. Your skull, toothless, lost in my walls.”

“Toothless, no less.”

“And less.”

“We knew each other, Melissa. We played as children.”

For a second, the pink irises of the xrafstar queen oscillate against her black sclera. “It was raining, wasn’t it?”

“Sometimes.”

“I liked that sound. We hear it pounding on the ceiling.”

The human queen folds her hands on the table, demi-gloved with silk. “Is there a rational sliver left of your brain? Or is it all honeycomb?”

“Was it rational to slip on time like a piece of rotten fruit? And be laughed at by God?”

“I have made use of my limited time on this earth. But I think you have squandered eternity.”

Melissa speaks as if they were the only ones standing in the pavilion. “We could have made a pair of queens.”

“A fine hand. But the ante remains bellum.”

Melissa twitches and the leaves rustle around them like a lake of bones. Warmth builds in the ears, an itch that cannot be scratched. She says, “Their every muscle trembles with my anger. But if you are tender, they are soothed. Bring peace with your hand on my cheek, in amity and friendship.”

The queen loosens the silk ribbon around her throat, as if to permit the passage of words that could not be spoken until now. “The touch of your cheek has a heavy price.”

“Three ultraviolets. We can do it with three.”

“The fate of the queenwealth has hinged on less than three families driven mad by grief.”

“Then confine this discomfort to your least favorite family. Strengthen your hive.”

The queen speaks through set teeth. “This is ugly and indecorous and it offends the queenwealth.”

“You are the queenwealth.”

“I am offended. You have caused offense. Did you forget the pain of being torn from your family? Did you think your disappearance was. Unviolent to me?”

“What violence was it to you?”

“Like slices of pomegranate from my heart.”

Melissa is still for some time. Then she says, “An apt fruit.”

“Come back to us.”

Melissa pivots to regard the sun. “Did you cry as you were torn from the breast of your mother? Did you weep to walk? And do you remember a moment of it?”

“So we have passed beyond communication.”

The xrafstar queen puts the tip of her claw in her mouth, a thoughtful expression that ends at the cryptic black eyes. “Have we?”

“It saddens me that our ways of thinking have become so different. Like animals.”

“Then perish like a dog.”

“Melissa.”

“Melissa! Melissa! Bleating heart. You masturbate a castrato.”

“I hear her still—”

“If a piece of her still exists, that is the piece that offered you treat. So accept treat. Or become treat.”

The human queen is very still. Every courtier, officer, and noble watches her. She gathers breath, then says, “We deny you.”

“No!”

“By the grace of God and man, by the vow of my coronation, by the unicoloricity of my diadem, you are denied.”

“Agh!” Melissa spins to face the sky, then jerks back again, stooped over, claws out. “The diadem on your head was once around your neck. And it was not glass. It was steel.”

The queen’s bare throat pulses just before it is covered by her lace hand.

Melissa says, “You were our pets. And you mistook your collars for finery. Like a baby is dressed up. In frills.”

“The children grew up. And now you are old.”

“We do not age.”

“Immortality with dementia.”

Melissa’s face is set like a mask, except for the antennae that bends in half.

The queen continues. “How long would the bodies of our nobles give you? How many days of dubious sanity can be squeezed from a single life?”

Melissa spreads her arms to frame the table. “Do they wonder why she is so calm? She was bred to be calm. Because of what her stock was used for. So they could bear it.” A gap appears in her teeth, top and bottom, air whistling. “You are not nobles. You are pedigrees.”

Her jaw splits open, cheeks snapping to the side, mandibles of glistening intricate enamel that drip to either side of her, painting crescents of boiling drool on the floor. And this is when Childrebrand knows the jaw that bit him.

She was not upright and dressed in finery. She was a blur of muscle and hair, naked in the tunnel, a humming eruption of the dark.

The head mounted on his wall, he chopped it off a decayed corpse, some princess of the hive that had been shot to death days ago. Caulked and painted and filled in, the taxidermist could only imagine an insect to fill the gaps. Perhaps it was unimaginable to restore the face of an insect and watch it become a human face. So eyes of bulbous obsidian were jammed into carved flesh, then the hidden jaw was rudely wrenched apart, held in place by metal bolts drilled through the bones. Because even in death, those mandibles can snap like a steel trap.

Drip drip. Someone gags. Another cries behind muffled hand. The marshal Gruyere grips the arms of his chair, exchanging a glance with the queen. A queen can be graceful, but a marshal must be firm, especially after remaining silent for so long. He says, “You are surrounded by a thousand soldiers of the queenwealth.”

Melissa’s face folds to speak, but wetly, wrongly. “So it is war?”

The marshal says, “War was declared at this very table.”

Her face clamps tight, suddenly regal, antennae tucked back, wings folded, eyelids at half-mast. Only lines of saliva mark where the flesh fused, glinting in the sun like a translucent diagram. If it heals so rapidly, the skin must tear to open every time.

In hormone-gilded speech, the queen of the xrafstar says: “You will hold the final meeting of this war in an outhouse.”

Wet spots appear on the swell of the human queen’s chest. She crosses her arms, steeling herself against the flood of prolactin from her pituitary gland. For a moment it seems that anyone could say or do anything in this frenzied, adrenachromic atmosphere.

The cat meows. The xrafstar queen stares at it, claws out, then bends down to pet the lustrous white shorthair. The tip of her antennae brushes Childrebrand’s hair and he almost laughs in terror. Pheromones burn from her like invisible flames and Childrebrand feels his balls retract, then the milking of his pineal gland, a sudden sleepiness that burns off when his adrenal glands pop, vision tunneling, the tunnel is back for him, his hands shake under the table until his knuckles start banging into the wood above, he has to run—

She rises above him and for the first time in his adult life, Childrebrand is shorter than someone else. Her smile fractures her face, resonating her words from the core of her skull. “Don’t we know you?”

His thyroid swells at the base of his throat like a second cartilage bump, sweat soaking his cravat dark red. His heart beats fast as her wings. “I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.” But the agony, yes. Buried alive with you in my dreams.

She picks at the seams of her face, nails clicking on concealed teeth. “He has a nice smile. What do they call him?”

“Childrebrand,” he says.

“A feast of a name.”

“Thank you,” he says, blind with sweat.

She plays with his meat, the steak falling apart under her sharp claws, specks of juice grazing his gasp. Her black eyes search him, irises like pink-hot metal. “You are the most familiar face.”

“Leave the poor man alone,” the queen says, sounding bored.

The marshal says, “Don’t you hear the soldiers running up the steps?” He stands tall, that posture that has silenced so many just before a speech of victory, or a command to charge.

Melissa’s head darts in every direction like a subject painted from different angles, then settles on him. “Trying to save face in front of your queen?”

“Fly back to your hole—”

The tendons of her arms stand out horribly, as if pierced by pipes. Her claw flashes through the air and the marshal’s face turns red, except for the whites of his teeth and eyes. He gawks liplessly, lidlessly, his face dangling from her nails.

She stoops over and pulls the face snugly over the head of the queen’s cat, then pats its flank. It trots off, paws bouncing, nearly tripping the first soldier to reach the top of the stairs. He drops his sword, one leg jerking up, “Whattheshit.”

Childrebrand can feel the alcohol and meat in his stomach trying to come up, but it seems disrespectful to vomit after someone just had their face removed. He suffers the burn of bile in his mouth, remaining very still.

A whir of wings, a blast of heat and dust, and the xrafstar queen is gone.

The marshal begins to scream, and Childrebrand wants to say, save some for later. Or it will hurt your throat when it comes time to really scream. It’s unbearable if you can’t scream.