Princeps’ Fury

Amara took a moment to admire Rook’s delivery, as her words went home in as deadly a fashion as any sword thrust, planting discord and division among the enemy while remaining concealed as simple self-interest. Amara could think of any number of women and men who had urged their mates in a similar fashion, attaining position and prestige by proxy. Crows, but the woman had guts. Amara could not say if she would act with as much courage in the same circumstances.

Suddenly, half a dozen vordknights simultaneously leapt into the air from rooftops around the courtyard, their wings making a heavy, thrumming burr of the evening’s silence.

“She’s here,” Brencis murmured in a numb tone.

The oppressive buzz of Vord wings faded-and then grew louder again, and louder, multiplying in volume, until it filled the stone-enclosed courtyard with thunder. An instant later, a veritable legion of vordknights descended from the night sky. They came down like locusts, all at once, landing upon buildings, cages, and cobblestones alike, covering everything in sight in a living carpet of gleaming black chitin. It was sheer luck, Amara knew, that one of them landed a bare couple of inches beyond where the tip of her outstretched fingers would reach, rather than upon her head, and it was only the practice and discipline of the endless days of stillness and silence that prevented her from flinching into a spasm of motion that would have concluded with her fleeing for safety and finding only disaster.

Instead, she held her place and waited.

From somewhere near the center of the courtyard, a Vord screamed, a high-pitched, chittering shriek that ripped at Amara’s ears.

A second after it had faded, the cry was repeated from above them.

This time, the courtyard filled with the thunder of windstreams, as Knights Aeris in gleaming silver collars descended from above, in an armored-guard formation around a pair of figures Amara recognized at once:

The Vord queen.

And Lady Aquitaine.

Of course, the Knights Aeris can’t fly among the vordknights, Amara thought, with clinical detachment. Their windstreams would make it too difficult for the Vord to use their wings.

It was the training she’d had as a Cursor. One never allowed emotions to control one’s reactions. Whether those emotions were abject terror or bitter hatred so vile that it made her mouth twist at the taste, they couldn’t be allowed to take the upper hand. When you felt it happening, you focused on details, the practical, connecting one fact to another, until the surge of fear and hate washed by and receded somewhat.

Only after she had done that did Amara look back at the would-be authors of Alera’s destruction.

The Vord queen was shorter than Amara had expected her to be-not even as tall as Amara herself. She didn’t know why she had thought it would be otherwise. Thinking back on it, the queen she’d fought and helped to kill in Calderon had not been particularly tall or imposing, physically. It had been a human-shaped creature, but there had been nothing human about it.

This queen was different.

Her cloak was finer, for one thing. The other queen had been dressed in cloth that could have come from a not-too-recent grave. This one wore a great cloak of black velvet so deep that it rippled with illusory colors in its folds. She stood in the courtyard with something else in her posture and bearing, too-something alert, almost electric. The other queen had never projected anything but cold and alien patience.

The Vord queen reached up with slender, pale hands, and drew back her hood, revealing a face that was youthful, beautiful, and shockingly familiar.

She looked almost precisely like the Princeps’ lover, Kitai.

Amara stared in such shock that she almost forgot to maintain the veils around her. The queen in Calderon had looked human in form, but had been covered in gleaming, green-black chitin, much like the vordknights. This one, though, looked almost entirely human…

Except for the eyes.

The eyes were a swirl of black and gold and green, in hundreds of glittering facets. Without those eyes, the Vord queen could have walked down any street in Alera without raising eyebrows-beyond the fact that she was, except for the cloak, apparently naked.

The queen turned those alien eyes in a slow circuit of the courtyard, and with a collective sigh that approached a moan of adoration, or terror, the collared Alerans as one sank to prostrate themselves upon the ground before her.

The queen’s mouth curved into a small, satisfied smile. Then she moved her right hand in a liquid, precise gesture, and Lady Aquitaine stepped up to stand beside her.