Natale pisses pink lemonade into the squat toilet, white tights around his ankles. His bladder feels weaker every year, as if mother had birthed him with an inferior set of every organ, underripe or rotten.

He watches the drain swallow his crystalline urine, rage jetting from between his legs. His clothes are muddy with chocolate, bloody with syrup. As soon as the party is over, he’ll have his men drag that bastard for real across the rocks. And the afterbirth will become whole.

He wonders if the queen uses this toilet. No, she definitely has a special toilet, not even recognizable as plumbing, constructed according to the unimaginable standards of the royal body. But it’s still very nice, this outdoor chamber of reddish mulberry and pale dolomite. The air is cool, but midday heat lingers in the polished stone under his feet, absorbing through the white cotton wrapping his soles. Lavatories are the only rooms that don’t make him feel like a child.

Through a slit in the wood, he spies the gorgeous pink frenzy below. A wall of rhododendron, as if home was on the other side. How long did it take to grow, this gift from mother? At what stage of growth was it forever suspended in her memory?

A man walks past the flowers. He looks like a laborer or vagrant, wearing tight brown pants that seem nearly decayed from his body. His torso is shirtless and pale and emaciated. Natale worms his tights back up with a sudden dizziness, trying not to fall into the toilet. When he looks back, the man is gone.

When Natale emerges, his grandmother is waiting. He buttons up his white coat to conceal the stains. If she saw, she’d immediately know who did it.

He takes her extended arm. “Leaving?”

“I’m going home before I die in front of everyone.”

He supports her down the path, shirt sticking to his chest under the coat, secret smears of jam and frosting. When they arrive at the carriage, she says, “Don’t get in trouble.”

“I would never get in trouble.” They hug and he feels the low trembling of her frame, as if some essential stability had died with age, and now life was only held fast by an act of will.

Servants help her climb into the carriage where she lays back in the seat, parchment eyes shut.

Natale says, “Don’t die before I get back.”

“I love you too, ‘tale.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Don’t be too long. It gets dark faster than you know.”

The breeze trickles cold through the lobes of his bangs, clouds stealing the color. “I’ll be home soon.”

*

He finds another table to dig his fingers into, rage cooling in the custard, biting hot through apples dipped in honey. Something tickles his lip, a dead bee stuck to the glossy amber film.

It seems to vibrate with the drone of distant conversation, the buzz of flies and mechanized instruments. He cranes his head, then walks to the edge of the patio, smooth stone with no railing. The vibration itches through his shoes until his feet feel naked. He stares at the rhododendrons. Something is missing. A black hole. Like the kind an animal burrows.

How long has he been hearing that sound? All day, like a dog, but if he thinks back, it seems like all week, or even his entire life, marinating from the womb in this song of sugar.

He steps back, his gasp like a pen knife cutting the air.

Tenor waits for his horselike to be refueled, not knowing what to do with himself.

He climbs a random flight of stairs, trying to reach the raised stone floors where everything seems to be, emerging at the top of a wall instead. He sees beyond the streaming roads, the smoke of towns, the spiky fringe of the fortified border, into the thick wall of gnarled fog, trees strangled by reddish pink vines, the xrafjungle, a cancerous horizon.

Beyond the beautifully-kept grounds and the classical architecture and the sweet music, disorder accelerates. But the possibility of meeting the enemy is endlessly deferred, so that everyone can be nearly on the cusp of being a hero. Deferred with a kind of pleasure, like the pleasure of this wandering solitude, down from the wall and across a raised bridge, above the crowded earth but below the dizzying heights, avoiding the crowds. I am invisible, he thinks. I am no one.

The queen’s pavilion rises above, the abdomen of a pale insect, a cocoon unfurling, sails of silk sweeping shade and sun, he feels he is being played with at the bottom of a thimble. Grandmother is up there like a pearl hatchet, and the sight gives him a pang. I am no one, he repeats to himself.

A warm, choir-trained tone. “Tenor?”

Amnesty the autocephalous. Long pale hair, serene face notched by years, a choir boy grown old. His instructor at INNOCENT, with a uniform like his, except the black guiltweave has faded to dark gray.

“What are you doing here?”

“I rode with some soldiers to keep the tithe secure.” Tenor feels bad, polishing it in his mouth like that, to gleam by the best light. This defensive, juvenile instinct.

“You did well.”

“Thank you.”

“But these are not pleasant times for INNOCENT.”

Tenor listens, stomach hurting suddenly.

“The queen is abolishing our privileges.”

Tenor feels as if his second life is being taken away from him. Amnesty sees it in his face and grips his shoulder. “I promise you, INNOCENT will not die.”

The scriptural certainty in Amnesty’s voice gives a desperate cusp of calm.

“I will do whatever it takes. The world will not burn under their wings.”

Tenor can’t find words. His stomach growls instead.

“Go eat something, son.”

*

Table after table of food designed for the queen’s lips, or at least the idea of them. Food that must rot to prove her power. Bowls of clam on imported ice, flayed fish dusted with salt, stewed cat livers, fried silkworm larva, blackened crickets. He needs to eat, but he’s nauseous from riding. He finds celery garnishing a plate of smashed crabs. Even the brush of it against his lips is enough for him to salivate down the fluted stick.

In the next room, tables tower with brutalized cakes, gouged pies, ruptured custards. He freezes, but it’s too late.

Natale looks up at him, a hand dipped in frosting, oozing slow as wax from his fingertips. His mouth hangs open, green eyes huge and neotenous, amplifying whatever enters them. Warmth becomes gluttony, calm becomes arrogance, interest becomes fatal.

Tenor looks different. Mutilated, even. His pale gold hair is shaved at the side, darker at the roots, shorter than Natale ever saw it. The other side falls down, messier than Natale ever saw it. The ochre green eyes are underscored by fatigue. Every familiar thing is held captive.

His brother’s uniform, skintight black guiltmesh, high collar zipped tight, encircled with the word INNOCENT in red dye.

This uniform is a dark wall between us.

Natale wipes his face and crosses his legs, white tights across white, sun sparking across his shoe buckle. A black ribbon falls from his neck across his ruffled shirt of cream chiffon. His eyes are lazy.

Tenor stares back, fighting muscle memory from the past, old expectations that don’t fit what he is now. He changed, but Natale doesn’t look like he grew an inch. Is there something sharper about him? A wasp waist, and eyes the color of green beetles. Bright hair that would show every ant that dared crawl across it, cut in neat bangs of honeyed blond, descending behind his ears.

Natale says, “You look sweaty. And you smell like ethanol. You were riding.”

Wind stirs the mulberries, branches scraping the rim of the patio. A leaf lands on Tenor’s boot, flapping as if on a hinge. How is it that the leaves of the mulberry estate on a bright afternoon are heavier than horseshoes?

Tenor says, “Mother used to bring us here every year. They had a place for children to play. I don’t see it anywhere.” He stares through the wall. “But it wouldn’t look the same. We’ve grown since then—” He stops, realizing what he’s said.

Natale smiles poisonously. “I’ll let you know if I see it. From down here. When I’m crawling after my little ball.”

“Are you going to pick a fight?”

“It would be beneath my station.”

Pollen stings Tenor deep in the throat, an aching mucus drip. “Some things haven’t changed. You’re in here, trying to avoid marriage just like mother did.”

Natale’s men are visible down the row of patios, drinking at benches. “I should have them beat you.”

Tenor’s fingers twitch, and as ever, Natale notices. He says, “Do you regret giving me this power?”

“You can have it.”

“Heir. Hērēs. To leave. To abandon.”

“I save people.”

“Coward. You joined the church to avoid responsibility.”

The rose quartz cruce warms under Tenor’s collar. “I understand now. You’re still a little boy who can’t take care of himself, and you resent me for forcing you to grow up.”

Natale throws a cupcake. Tenor jerks his arm up and white frosting streaks his sleeve. Natale grabs another cupcake, hand shaking. “I can do whatever I want and you can’t stop me. Because you’re not a Stigmadonna anymore. You’re not my brother.” He squeezes, frosting worming through his fingers. “You’re just a fanatic who will die when an insect bites your head off and eats your hands and chews through your spine and tears and tears and twists and tears.”

“Only so many times?”

“I stopped to avoid frightening you.”

Tenor tilts his head back with disdain, letting his height speak. Natale clutches the tablecloth, silverware trembling. He wants to grab a butter knife and stab that dark chest. But he knows how to pierce without blood.

“Grandmother is lonely without you.”

Tenor sags, suddenly not as tall. “Natale.”

“How long do you think she has left?”

“You’re trying. To hurt me.”

“I succeeded.”

Tenor laughs suddenly. “You will always be a child.”

“I’m not a child.”

“Nature had other plans.”

Look at Tenor with his head pulled back, acting so important, as always. The sun cannot blind as this rage blinds.

Natale says, “Like nature planned for you to get pregnant?”

“What?”

“And instead you became a failed man?”

Tenor drags him across the table, plates rattling as the buckled shoes bounce, thrashing in panic, frosting kicked into the air, the table ends and his head hangs above the stone, cheeks red, bangs flying. The only thing keeping him from dropping is his brother’s gloved hands gripping his ruffled shirt.

Tenor whispers, “You fucking fetus.”

“Wait, wait—”

Tenor loosens his grip slightly and Natale grabs the tablecloth to keep from falling, heels digging in, tailbone pressed tight, forced to support his arching spine. The lemonade pitcher wobbles with each movement, soaking the tablecloth pink around Natale’s bunched fists.

Tenor says, “I’m a good person. You just ruin everything.”

The pitcher tips over.

Natale laughs suddenly, wild-eyed. “My brother is back.”

Pink lemonade spatters the floor like a flash downpour, a nasty loud noise like paper being crumpled or insects hatching, spraying Tenor’s boots with roseate drops.

“All I have to do is yell, and my men will cut off your hand.” Natale smiles. “That is the price for a non-noble striking a noble.”

Tenor pulls his fist back. “Then I should get my full use out of this hand.”

“How long has it been since the graveyard? When I stared up at you from this very position.”

Tenor’s eyes widen.

“Do you remember when this body blossomed with bruises under you?”

Tenor releases him like a piece of hot sugar and Natale flails over the edge of the table. Just as he’s about to fall, he grabs his brother’s jacket for support, swinging to the floor. He pants. “If I see you again. I’ll have my men ride you down.”

“You can’t do that.”

“INNOCENT is no longer in her immediacy. There’s no telling what a matriotic subject of the queen might do.”

Tenor feels his hands turning hot and alien.

Footsteps approach. Natale says, “My men are coming to check on me. What do you think they’ll see?”

His brother walks away as fast as you can without running, pleasantly fast with fear, tracking pink lemonade.

The mechanized orchestra drums a military beat, the tempo of Childrebrand’s bloodstream. He cracks open a mussel and sucks out the soft flesh. Still doesn’t taste like happiness. He walks blindly, tongue thrusting into the shell, licking the salt out.

“Congratulations,” the queen’s son said afterward, shaking his hands again. And Childrebrand had to say thank you. Thank you for the gift of

ABSOLUTE WAR
AGAINST THE XRAFSTAR

He splits the mussel in two, holding a sharp valve in each hand. They can’t make a blind man go to war.

But his eyes are so beautiful. Mother always said so. Blazing blue, effortlessly luring.

The estate is large and confusing, all these groves and alcoves and insides that become outsides. He finds himself in an airy patio above a river of mulberry trees. The room is full of sweet things, and a soft presence of insects: ants hauling crumbs past his boots, flies sticking to syrup, bees buzzing around jars of honey.

He moves with distaste, finding a pristine cake, unsullied by contamination. He slips a mussel shell into the smooth white surface, scooping up ermine frosting. Under the surface, a wound of red velvet crumb, darkly cochineal.

He lifts the crimson dirt to his open mouth, then pauses.

A boy sits at the table, concealed until now by towering cakes, looking as small in his chair as Childrebrand did at the elevated seats of the high table. Puffed shorts with big honeycomb buttons, white tights, and a ruffled chiffon shirt. The sun burns on the silverware, washing out the boy’s face like sculpted frosting, but finding all kinds of colors in his hair, oiled honey and mothered gold.

The boy’s hand rests in a bowl of melted ice cream, a milky maternal smell that brings Childrebrand closer. The tablecloth is dirty with massacred sweets. Are those currants everywhere? Dead flies.

He eats with his mouth open, childish and oblivious. He reaches into a cake, the yellow crumb breaking in his hand, cramming the spongy fistful into his mouth. He sucks his ring finger, which has no ring, and his index finger, categorizing his cavities, and his middle finger, which has a signet ring on it, a battered hexagon.

He plunges his shiny wet hand into a pie, pulling up a fistful of strawberry pulp, red syrup oozing through his fingers and drizzling onto his plate, a rainbow mess of every pastry and confection at the table. He licks the plate, his face becoming a circle, only the chin exposed, dripping with confectionary mud. He puts it down and frosting sticks to his nose like animal makeup for a costume party. The plate is wildly swirled with the path of his tongue through sugar slime.

Childrebrand feels like he’s going to choke.

Natale lifts a pitcher of pink lemonade with both hands, struggling with the heavy glass, limbs quivering as pink fluid slops his face. He slurps from it like a troth, fat gulps of rosy citrus until he has to gasp for air. He rubs his stomach with a pained expression, fingers digging into the waistband of the shorts, bewildered green eyes like candies wrapped in cellophane.

Childrebrand’s face tingles with pollen. He realizes a strand of white mucus is quivering from his nose. He wipes it with a napkin, then claps his hand on Natale’s shoulder. “Enjoying your ice cream?”

Natale looks at the hand on his shoulder, startled. Some guy, even taller than his brother, dark hair stained with faded red dye. An artificial red, dark as drying blood. Head held high by a vermilion cravat around the neck, tied in the military style. A crimson clover is nestled in his lapel, the tight cone of short sharp petals seeming to grow directly from the heart. Specular blue eyes like wells with Natale at the bottom. Nose flushed red from allergies, giving the otherwise attractive face a clownic aspect.

Childrebrand says, “What’s your name?”

The boy licks his lips, crusted over with sugar. “Natale.”

Such a warmed-over, docile voice, as if waking from a nap. Snotty from drinking milk, devoid of intellect.

“And how old are you?”

Natale tells him.

Childrebrand’s smile loses its animation, sticking to his face. The skin around his eyes tightens, pulling back from the whites as he looks around. The scar on his chest flushes red. An apology builds in his throat, then dies as he makes the connection.

This is the Stigmadonna boy. Heir to a dying family. A premy. Likely serious mental deficiencies. Moody. Addled. He feels better.

Smoothly he says, “I’m so sorry for your recent tragedy.”

“Tragedy?”

“Your mother.” Beautiful woman, in a sickly way. His father tried to arrange marriage between them at some point but it never went beyond a few chats. Too skittish. Skittish women remind him of insects.

Indolent pause. “Thank you.”

A fly buzzes onto the rim of the bowl but Natale keeps stirring the melted ice cream with his fingers. All that warm dairy makes Childrebrand’s stomach slap. His eloquence can’t latch onto this insensitive nothing boy.

“Pleasure talking to you.” Childrebrand steps back and his boots crunch the mussel shell. Natale doesn’t look up from his plate, tongue working up and down, wiping the ceramic clean.

“Try to be good,” his grandmother said, following his gaze as he stared from the carriage.

He smiled at her sickly and unconvincingly.

“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, ’tale.”

“Then why are you always drinking vinegar?”

She laughed. “What on earth would I do with a bunch of flies?”

“I don’t want them either.”

The carriage stopped and she dismounted, every step giving the impression her bones were about to snap and burst her skull on the ground. But she refused help from the servants, their smooth hands intruding timidly, then flying away. “You don’t have a choice. You’re the head of the family now. Or at least the toe. So eat your flies.”

Halfway across the concourse, she finally allowed a servant to assist her. Natale understood when he saw the steep stairs to the pavilion, the high table in the bracing breeze. She has to conserve her energy to talk to the queen. Forget talk. To even make a showing. To merely preserve their face as a family. So he probably owes her something. If not honey, then molasses.

His foot bounced on the carriage side step and his ring slipped from his finger, striking loud against the stone. He picked it up, trying not to count the featureless dark faces looking at him. He forces the signet ring back on his middle finger, to the very base, then curls his knuckle.

The women in their visard masks, eyes suspended in black velvet. They are silent, masks kept on by buttons bit between the teeth. Mother and grandmother always disdained them, although their friends would say:

Don’t you worry about the sun shriveling up your face?

You don’t want to become ugly…

They had to hold their masks in place to say it, as if stretching open the void under their faces. Their wet buttons dangled free, glistening in the sun like coins.

This button is your hidden virtue.

Mine is nacre, for my sacred femininity.

What is your button?

Many are flavored with peppermint oil, so he would lick them when the women put their masks down for dinner. But at some point, mother stopped having friends over. He was too young to remember exactly when or why. He’d assumed adults would float over him like clouds forever, murmuring their rarefied secrets. But now he’s one of them. The drawing a child makes of a cloud, scratched out and puffy.

He’ll have to marry one of these masks. His family will survive but become weaker, marrying someone from a lesser house, a youngest daughter, or even a merchant’s girl with no pedigree. It’s the best a stunted boy trapped in sickly adolescence can do.

He feels even smaller in the shade of the mulberry estate, the buildings taller than anything back home. A mechanized orchestra strums and plinks, the artificial rhythm coming across sad and hollow despite the gaiety.

Like every dynasty, he brought thirty soldiers with him, the minimum number for traveling while xrafstar exist. Any higher would disrespect the queen, who has a hundred of her own soldiers for every thirty, drilled in magnificent display on the lemongrass field until it is trampled flat and their boots stink of citronella. He hates that smell.

He told the captain to let the men enjoy themselves freely nearby, self-conscious of these real men emulating his uncertain, meandering movements. But he’s still being followed, girls orbiting into the same room, tracking him with their black masks. They want his honey money. Fuck these bitches. While everyone talks politics, the sweets table is free.

Childrebrand peels the congealed disc of lard from his fatwashed glass and drains the buttery alcohol, brilliant red with his family’s dye.

A quarter-mile of white silk hangs from every side of the queen’s pavilion, radiant carpets from the sun, transmitting the wind from high above; a demonstration of the great output of the queen’s silk farms. Mulberry pollen fills the air and he wipes his nose constantly on his tight parade trousers tucked into military boots laced high and hanging higher above the floor of the pavilion. The chairs are very tall, requiring a mechanism to lower.

He is happy again. The walk to the pavilion left a wake of admiring whispers and the trail of his vetiver cologne, and now the most important people in the world surround him. In fact, the queen’s son is clasping his hands impulsively from across the table. “Thank you for keeping us safe.”

Childrebrand’s face breaks into a smile, deeply touched. “I’m just doing my part.”

The boy picks at the brocaded sleeve of his dinner jacket in embarrassment, turning his milky profile away. “I must seem pathetic living in comfort while men like you fight the xrafstar. I would like to see the inside of one of those tunnels, and by taking hold of my fear, extinguish it.”

“You’ll be a fine officer when you’re older.”

“Yet we live in peacetime.”

“My prince. I cannot imagine God would construct such a frame without finding a manly use for it.”

A regal voice intrudes. “Childrebrand?”

He straightens up, caught in the queen’s gaze. She is in her late thirties, cryptically beautiful, wearing a silk dress patterned with the regal dark eyespots of the wild emperor moth, luminous threads woven into her hair, wafting distractingly around her pale face in the lofty breeze, hard to tell from loose strands, sandy locks streaked with early silver, a trademark of her family.

“What is that thing you keep fiddling with in your lap, Childrebrand?”

“Oh. Just something I wanted to give you.”

He hands it with a clammy palm to the queen’s bodyguard, a hundredkilling redhair who served during the Two Hour Hour. The bodyguard examines it, then wipes it with a napkin and passes it to the queen.

Childrebrand can’t stand the silence. “Happy…ah…birthday.”

“A brooch.”

“I suppose it is.”

She holds it up so the table can see the design: a broken beetle birthing a heavy drop of red. “What an enduring and versatile symbol your family has.”

The equal stress on all her syllables (except for a stronger stress at the end of each prosodic unit) makes her hard to read, the accent of her prestigious lineage. Childrebrand keeps silent, maintaining his smile.

She stabs the brooch needle through the fabric of her dress, clicking it into place. “I shall keep you close to my breast today.”

He sighs, and starts cutting his steak. “I’m so glad you like it.”

She pokes her fork at him, purple with mulberry jam. “But don’t think you’re getting off the hook that easily.”

He continues to saw through his meat, and casually says, “There’s a hook?”

“Just gossip from a passing merchant.”

His knife pierces the meat, striking the plate below with a ding. “Which merchant?”

Awkward silence. Cryptic smile from the queen.

“I was merely hoping to reconcile with him if there’s a grievance. I’m not in the habit of leaving unpaid debts.”

“That was not the story he told.”

“What is the nature of this story?”

“Sexual.”

His toes ache in his boots, laced too tight. “If any unnatural acts are going on, I’ll be the first to know.”

The queen picks up a bowl of fried silkworm pupa, sniffing the fishy smell.

Childrebrand says, “I won’t deny that soldiers are a hard type. This is the cost of sustaining a superior fighting force. Restless men, in close vicinity. And I must tolerate a certain amount of prostitution to maintain morale.” He hears himself spinning out like a silkworm, trapping himself in his own cocoon. “I’m a military man myself. I don’t drink often, but I drink hard. The town is full of men. Our men. Good boys. Soldiers during peacetime. A difficult adjustment. Endless vigils. They drink. They seek comfort. Rough men, but honest, at heart. On the whole.”

The queen listens calmly, betraying nothing.

He sets his knife down, the sun shining on the whorling grease of his plate. “But I give you my word. If a man of mine has been taking it too far, or God forbid, beyond the sacred union of man and woman, I will personally punish him, in the harshest military tradition.”

She has mulberries now, unusually long, their bubbling dark lengths like necrotic parodies of the very larva of her farms. She bites one primly in half, then looks back at him and says, “Good God, Childrebrand. It was just a bit of gossip. Wasn’t it?”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“Besides, the army is very important to me. Nothing must interfere with its functioning. Which brings me to my next point. I have a gift for you as well, Childrebrand.”

He can barely suppress an eager smile. “For me?”

“In fact, I wish to discuss my new edicts with everyone at this table, my most trusted faces, these most pureburning bloodlines.”

The queen waits as fresh drinks are poured by stilted servants, glasses renewed with red bitters. “My son is right, and has greatly influenced my thinking these past months. We live in comfort, not thinking of the future.”

Childrebrand drains his cup, feeling giddy. A gift? What could it be?

“Many of you will recall the earliest proclamation of my reign. To smash the sanctuary stones, which obstructed the elegance of our courts, and harbored fugitives and murderers.”

A regal pause.

“Today we crack another relic. Less visible, but equally unwieldy.”

Everyone listens tensely, knowing how much revenue could be gained or lost from the power of her words.

“For my first edict. We have to do something about INNOCENT.”

“It’s about time,” the commander of the army says.

“The church has attached itself to the vital functions of state. In the ideal case, it reinforces our cultural traditions. But in other cases. It is an impediment.”

Murmurs.

“INNOCENT collects tithes that have not changed since the first xrafwar. Their budget is frozen in history.”

100,000, the eldest son of his lac-selling family, says, “Their dissections were relevant half a century ago, but you can only learn so much from cutting something open.”

“Yes. We do not need to understand the xrafstar. We only need to destroy them.”

Murmurs of agreement.

“We relegate INNOCENT to an archival role, reserving the remaining positions for its most influential members to smooth things over. But public opinion is on our side. No one wants to pay this second tithe.”

Astrigane, aged grandmother to the Stigmadonna heir, says, “What of the darehanders?”

“Their greatest fighters are old and maimed. I am not convinced their younger recruits possess any remarkable qualities. All martial power must be consolidated under the queenwealth.”

“Brilliant,” Childrebrand says.

“The army will be the primary recipient of this liberated budget. Which brings me to my second edict.”

Childrebrand listens, alcoholic warmth saturating his limbs.

“Absolute war against the xrafstar.”

Childrebrand has something stuck in his teeth, which he realizes to be a smile. “Absolute what?”

“You seem to struggle with the smaller of those two words.”

“No. Yes. I simply was. Seized with excitement. Forgive me.”

The queen continues graciously. “Our borders have been unnaturally constrained. Xrafstar slavers prey on the roads. Foreigners are reluctant to invest. The capitol is overpopulated. People are afraid to move to the hinter towns where we should be expanding. A few xrafstar nests have transformed vast…what is that thing wildernesses are vast things of?”

Astrigane lifts her feeble head and says, “I believe it was swathes.”

“Yes. We need to get the swathes back. We are like picnickers who starve for fear of ants.”

The xrafjungle. The ruins of the old capitol. Flakes of mouthpaper drifting through the cloying air. Camping in the shadow of mountains that usurp the sun. Tunnels leering like open mouths. The buzz of malarial insects, tricking the ear into that fatal frequency. His scar itches with sweat. It seems hungry for everything on the table.

“Is there a problem, Childrebrand?”

“Not at all. It’s just, the people of my town. They’re like children to me. And I can’t help but worry if the border becomes—”

“Your concern is a model for everyone at this table. But we cannot wait for them to bleed us out. We will save more lives if we break them in a single blow.”

Childrebrand chokes back a nervous laugh, pollen burning in his throat.

The queen looks back at him. “I thought you would be excited to return to your telos. You are, as you say, a military man.”

He relaxes his face. “I must seem cheap to you.”

“Cheap?”

“I gave you a scrap of metal with a needle in it, and you gave me shield and sword.”

She covers her mouth to smile. “I will not suffer the comparison, Childrebrand. Have a mulberry.”

He takes the berry and bites down. It squirts unexpectedly and he covers his mouth, wiping the dark red from his lips.

The queen is talking to someone else now. Ants crawl across his plate. He stares at them, stupefied.

Maybe he can survive, if he stays far behind his men. Only natural for an archer and an officer. But dirt and air is their medium. All it takes is one stirring of the soil beneath his feet. One droning descent. There is no rule of engagement, no up or down, nowhere he can run. He rubs his chest, drops of sweat falling from the high table, bursting far below.

Who took my happiness?

Barefoot in a stone room full of candles. The snow has flowed inside, blending with the wax, and the wind blows, flames swirling like oil through the air. Natale’s feet are covered with cold snow and warm wax, toes peeking through these pale sandals. Snow without worms, strangely colorless, deathly white like dunes of sugar.

His eyes close and he sinks into the dark cloak behind him. Like the snow-wax on his feet, the body is warm and cold; armor hard and heated, uniform soft and chilled. It braces his spine, yet envelopes, a perfect fit.

The voice speaks like the last reverberation from catgut strings,

*you’d be a funeral knight

wearing a uniform dark as mine*

The words mean nothing without the music. But feeling swells even in the cold, like frozen tears.

a uniform dark as mine

He turns around slow as floating in water. The hands that held him are gone. They were holding back his wounds. Ankle bitten, without blood. Another, lingering in his wrist. A hundred stings across chest and belly. The final sting pierces his heart, with complete surprise and unspeakable agony, breaking the bone in his chest, filling his aorta with an inferno of venom, tingling from his eyes to his fingertips, tears without water, making his heart pound as if wringing the last life from it. That fatal penetration he felt as a child, the first bee sting, impaling his entire world. Just a sliver, but terrifying as a sword, for it was delivered with intent. This shocking betrayal of love, the love he thought all the world bore for him.

The message: there are those who would hurt you

He wakes and it is hot and bright and the sheets are soaked and white, these sheets which were chilled for him by a servant last night. He shuts his eyes to feel that wind again, sliding in bed, the unfinished voice in his ear. His slender wrist drifts through the air, fingers like broken hammers.

But the voice is gone, destroyed by the slightest sounds of the outside. Distant murmur of meaningless, mindless people, and slamming doors, and humming bees.

He rolls over, twisted up naked inside his voluminous white blanket. On his nightstand is an invitation to the queen’s birthday feast. He stares at it like a snake he had promised very solemnly to allow to bite him for some forgotten reason. On it rests his signet ring, honeycomb seal dirty with caramelized beeswax from stamping so many documents, his knuckles aching with responsibility.

He falls back into the sweaty sheet, this salted door to a dead dream.

Tenor practices his male movements. Knuckles pulled back. Fingers thrust forward. Destro and sinistra. Right and left. The fundamental organizing principle of thought and action. From his fingers, all reality breathes, creating the town he was sent to inspect on the western border, an autumnal barren of muddy trenches and stone buildings, in a sea of dead trees packed with fog like cotton. An estate overlooks the town from a hill, surrounded by walls of cacti.

Reality sucks back into his fingers. In the space of a breath, God creates and destroys the world, faster than we can see. Truth lives in the saccadian slit between breaths. His teacher at INNOCENT told him these moves were specially calibrated for “the male skeleton”. The outpost practices a particular school of flection that says all male movements lead back to God, and all female movements lead to madness.

When Tenor heard that, he thought of his mother. But that can’t be entirely true. Because no one could be as fucking insane as Natale.

These inspections are very boring. He visits various officials, collecting forms attesting that defenses are maintained against xrafstar, both physical and moral, along with a tithe. The tithe was the hardest to collect. He found his hand resting on his sword, lips pressed tight, silence building until the sheriff handed over the money. There is a dark mood that comes with collecting tithes nowadays. With no real xrafstar attack in years, people find it more and more unreasonable. Even for the church’s supporters, INNOCENT is increasingly seen as a useless branch which must be pruned to keep the tree alive. But for now, the deep furrows of bureaucracy are traversed.

As always, he second-guesses himself. Perhaps the tension was his, from being entrusted with this money. He imagines himself robbed, disgraced. Or worse, he spends it on horrible things, and has no one to blame.

Prayers are stitched into his dark jacket with the same color, threads of faith. He doesn’t remember what he looks like anymore. There are no mirrors at INNOCENT. Your reflection is a slow flaying. All he can see is hair, falling over the left side of his face, shaved on the right.

He stabs the air with two fingers, wondering what percentage of his skeleton is male and which is female. He prays it is enough.

Someone is following him. He walks faster, trying to avoid the narrow alleys and find a broader street. In these times, someone might be desperate enough to cut the tithe from his belt, and more. Or was it a confusion of patterns? All are inclined to self-deception, and his extend into the sensory. A high-strung instrument, like his brother the violin. And him, groaning deeper, but still strung miserable tight. But the music has left him. His fingers tap the beat of duty, the skeleton of music, a dry percussion of nails on pommel.

He passes soldiers in a tea-house, their crimson uniforms outnumbering the locals. He turns the corner, where he tethered his horselike to the tentacles of a dead jacaranda, the branches sprawling lateral as if the town were tipped on its side. As he prepares to mount, he feels the presence of the one who follows him, eyeballs prickling on his back.

A soldier in red stands at the alley entrance. “Your presence is requested on the hill.”

*

He walks through rows of cacti, so alien, especially in the fog. This part of the land is more arid than he’s used to, as if close to the desert, although the abrupt shift in terrain is the result of pesticide warfare, not climate.

Evening red stains the estate to the very soil. The minor shift in altitude seems to play with his ears, a pressure in the air like a bubble expanding, a sustained swamp note. He passes through a gate, finding himself in a garden overwhelmed with cactus in mad shapes, jeweled and bristling. He follows the path and the front of the mansion appears like the prow of a boat crashing into land.

The front door is slightly open. He knocks many times, with no answer, then goes inside, standing in a slice of red. He shuts the door to keep out the gnats and it becomes dark.
He looks for the parlor and enters a room of gloomy red wood. This is when he sees the antennae. He stands very still, not even daring to touch the handle of his sword.

He has never seen a xrafstar before. Only walked the bureaucratic trenches dug in history, and seen the signs of their damage in other darehanders; discoloration and mutilation. But the greatest of their wounds is disappearance. Into the earth, into hell.

The xrafstar has just emerged from a hole in the wall, body concealed. He sees then, other heads all around, of beasts, the creatures of the dead forest gathered here as if to pay fealty to the lowly insect which has risen above them.

Their heads are mounted to the wall. In the xrafstar’s chitin the last of the light is buried, a molten sheen of red. The uncanny mask is an insectile parody of his own.

He backs away, feeling stupid, and something slithers past his neck. He jerks, almost knocking over racks of weapons, domestic and exotic. The black tendril was only the breaker lash of the X-slavers, mounted like a snake. He passes a hunting javelin with leather amentum. An Antimony Atoll atlatl. A curved blade of Zand in a lead sheath, engraved with the mark of the undefiled. A quiver hanging from its strap, bristling with red-fletched arrows.

The room is larger than he thought. He crosses to an open window, trying to orient himself. On a table there is an empty milk bottle, refilled with a crimson clot of evening light, paperweight to a document bearing the queen’s seal. The seal is broken, wax scattered like the dried crust of that bloody dusk. Her birthday feast is today, he sees this, before turning away, feeling like a trespasser. As he turns, he catches movement. A long, naked torso, arms lifted, wrestling with something. A shirt, and as the man pulls it down, he is blind, and Tenor watches unseen as the fabric swallows the scar across the chest, deep gouges around the heart. Then the head forces through the collar, dark hair tight around the face just before it bursts free, sharp across bright eyes.

“What do you think?”

Tenor barely suppresses a jump. He was looking at the man’s reflection in a mirror, and the real thing just stepped from behind a divider.

“Of?”

The man looks at Tenor, no, past him, at the wall of trophies.

Tenor says, “Hunting was never my pursuit.”

“Pursuit is the shape of it, to be sure.” The man stares at the xrafstar face, greatly damaged and decayed. Just as Tenor clears his throat, the man turns and says, “I am a head myself, and soon to mount as well. If you would escort us.”

Childrebrand, head of the Violanthrone family. Mark of the western border, officer of the queen’s army.

“I know INNOCENT marks the roads by certain signs. And I would like to avoid insect trouble.”

Tenor says, “You have soldiers.”

Childrebrand opens a cabinet full of ice, chilled air washing across their faces, raising bumps on Tenor’s skin. “Would I be correct in saying, that men like you and I can’t be comforted by those words?”

“I am on church business.”

Childrebrand takes a fresh bottle of milk from the icebox. “I know it’s not your job. But we will protect that tithe from men, if you will keep us from insects. By traveling together we improve the other’s position.”

“I would be glad, then.”

Childrebrand smiles easily, snapping the lid from the milk. He drinks, then holds it out, condensation dripping from the glass.

Tenor is thirsty from the climb. He takes it and sips cautiously, afraid of spilling on the floorboards. Then he hears a cry of pain and the milk goes warm in his mouth.

*

There is a boy on the floor, clutching his foot, which wears a wooden slab like a sandal, secured not by thong or strap but a clamped metal bar the size of a thick wire. Next to the boy is a scattering of coins.

As Tenor enters the room, the mark holds his arm out, gesturing to stay still. By Tenor’s feet, another mouse trap. “We have a vermin problem.”

The boy looks up, his bare foot trembling in the snapped metal.

Childrebrand kneels by the boy, and softly says, “I already paid you for the milk.”

“Sorry. I was just…”

Childrebrand takes the boy’s foot, lifting it lightly by the heel. The boy whimpers, his brown hair mussed. Tenor stands at the back of the room, strung taut by the insistent sounds of pain.

Childrebrand glides his other hand across the top of the boy’s foot, sticking his fingers around the talus bone and the kill bar.

“Don’t move, please.”

He squeezes the foot and pushes the spring-loaded bar back, until it slips from the sweaty ridge of the talus bone. The boy clutches his freed foot, banded with an angry red indentation.

“Sorry,” he whispers, limping away like he’s about to run.

As the boy nears the threshold, Childrebrand says, “You forgot something.”

The boy freezes, his hurt foot barely touching the floor.

Childrebrand holds out the coins, his palm as flat and stiff as the mousetrap. “If you want them that badly, you can have them.”

The boy hesitates. Childrebrand smiles. “If tears have no value, what is the point of life?”

act 2

male movements

When the flight of a swarm is imminent, a monotonous and quite peculiar sound made by all the bees is heard for several days

— Ἀριστοτέλης

Childrebrand wakes in the jaws of an insect.

Teeth flash red through his chest, crushing his lungs, cradling his heart with hot knives. He rolls from where he was sleeping, falling from a ledge, landing on hard rock. He crawls, naked legs slapping, bare arms contorted, reaching out. His hand closes around the haft of something and he leaps up and swings it into the dark. It crunches shell, splintering carapace. Then stillness.

His eyes adjust. The axe he holds is sunk into the wooden post of a bed-frame. He releases it, looking around the battlefield. His bedroom, marble floored and curtains drawn.

He was trapped in an older version of himself, the one that will forever scream in that tunnel. He wrenches the axe from his bed-post, leaning it back against the wall, next to all the other weapons he doesn’t touch anymore. Even with gloves. His weapon of choice only requires half a glove. Incomplete. Exposed. He swings his hand across the room, striking time back to the present, the hand of a clock. Minute hand, hour hand, my hand. It finds the bow by his bedside, there all along. A recurve of exotic composite.

He started using the bow after the bite. Acting at distance. But there hasn’t been a real, actual war in years. His father died very well in the last one, leaving him the estate to convalesce in, and command of a regiment of soldiers, charged with protecting the border in the name of the queen, which makes him a markgraf, the highest honor in his family’s history. He came back a hero, valor wrapped across his chest in tight bandages.

He scratches the scar on his naked torso, enclosing his heart. It itches like infected gums. Nightmare sweat still glazes his body, the kind of body people expect to be brave, and he was, until the bitch sunk her teeth into him. He can still hear the unhinging of her jaw, the wet pop that told him he was in trouble. That nearly human face with its secret plates, alien subdivisions. He cracked a tooth in his sleep once, jaw tense and grinding, and when he woke up, he thought he’d become one of those creatures. There is a little too much bone about him. He’s been wasting away here, inside and out. Six feet tall, the great officer, the figure of martial poise, that’s what people expect of him. His mythological statue is eroding.

He stalks down the hall, not trusting that it won’t turn into a tunnel. Shadows fuck with him, you know how, after an ant infestation, you see ants everywhere? A speck of dust or pepper, a lick of dark hair flicking over his eyes. But the insects he faced were much larger, compromising so much more of the world. The scrape of bark, the grind of machinery, the human face. Everything familiar asks: could I crawl? Could I open?

That’s the thing about infestation. It lacks closure.

He gained a curiosity for the insides of things. Opening cupboards, pulling his eyelid back, dressing game, which he had always been squeamish about. But now it’s a relief to know nothing unusual is hiding inside the animals that roam the estate.

He almost trips in the dark hall, but the bow rotates in his grip, righting his movement. Whatever fundamental imbalance he gained in that tunnel is countered by his bow. So light compared to a cutting or bludgeoning weapon, not alien lopsided like metal, capable of playing with him, a wingspan that seems fragile until it fills with the force of the sky.

He passes the iron door of his trophy room, tapping it for luck. It resonates like an oven gone without fire for too long. His fingers brush the cast-iron sigil of his dynasty, a drop of red dye erupting from a shattered insect, crushed cochineal. His ancestral trade, although military proved a swifter advancement than ten generations of toiling at dyework. There’s nothing like the real red stuff to get people’s attention. The expensive crimson that surrounded him since infancy was a fastness of desire, an artifice of the blood under all things.

He grabs a slab of fresh game from the icebox and stands naked at the tall windows of the parlor, bow strapped to his back, enjoying the weight of his frame on the floorboards as his feet shift, still loose from sleep. He tears the meat with his teeth and juice squirts across his chest. It drips down his sternum, tingling in the bite scar, as if the ghost of those jaws was still slavering around his heart. Down the hill, the town is waking up, a few citizens beginning their early morning routine. A pair of river fishers. Soldiers on patrol. A boy carrying chilled milk from his father’s shop, carefully setting down bottles at doorsteps. Childrebrand’s mouth waters at the thought. Just the thing with raw meat.

A dark figure rides toward the town, distant as an ant. A darehander from INNOCENT, patrolling for corruption, a black star from other orbits, reminding him of things beyond this comfortable sphere. When was the last time he checked the calendar?

That’s what he was forgetting. He brushes aside a torn envelope, picking up the queen’s invitation, drops of pink juice falling from his mouth to the parchment. Her birthday feast is soon. All the family heads, gathered close, so she can count them. He cannot imagine a more infantilizing scenario.

He forces himself to smile, wiping animal juice from his beautiful jaw. His reflection in the glass is ethereal, dark burning hair and eyes like blue coals. And behind him, his shadow, absolute black, without color or expression. It remembers the shape of him. And the sun will rise and it will grow stronger still.