Princeps’ Fury

Amara awoke with a gasp as water trickled into her nose. She coughed and tried to lift her arms to her face, but couldn’t move them. Her body ached in every joint and muscle, and she was ravenously hungry. She flung her head back and forth, and realized that she was almost entirely submerged in something liquid and warm.

Her eyes flew open in a panic, images of sleeping bodies wrapped in glowing green croach filling her thoughts, her body contracting and convulsing to pull her free. Her arms flexed but refused to move from her sides, and her legs stayed firmly clasped together. Pain burned through her biceps, her thighs, and the warm liquid covered her face entirely as she slipped lower into it.

“-her head out of the water befo-” shouted a woman’s voice.

It was cut off completely. Then a fist seized her by the hair and hauled her up, out of the warm liquid.

“-ld have warned me she was about to wake!” said a petulant male voice. The hand grasping her hair kept hauling, and she suddenly fell over a slippery barrier of some kind and onto hard, cold stone.

Amara coughed the water-for it was water-clear of her nose and lungs and lay panting for a moment, dizzy and drained with the aftereffects of a watercrafted healing. She looked down at herself and found her arms bound to her sides, her legs trussed together at thigh and ankle. She was still clothed, though her outfit was soaked entirely through.

“Welcome back, Countess,” came Invidia’s voice. “We feared for you for a time.”

The voice of the Vord queen buzzed weirdly against Amara’s senses. “I did not.”

Amara shook her head, blinked the water from her eyes, and looked up at them. If she didn’t show them defiance quickly, the cold air of the deep night would suck the warmth from the water soaking her clothes and leave her shuddering and freezing. She thought the defiance might be less convincing if she waited for that.

Invidia sat in a chair that had been brought out from one of the nearby buildings. She looked hideous. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was a deep, sallow shade of saffron. The Vord creature upon her chest was gone. Holes like little gaping mouths in the pale flesh beneath where it had been leaked dark fluid that only faintly resembled blood.

“Invidia,” Amara said. “Finally, the outside matches the inside. Treacherous, cowardly, petty.”

Invidia sat in her chair and slowly withdrew a hand from the waters of the healing tub. She tilted her head at an angle that made Amara acutely aware of the fact that she currently lay bound at Invidia’s feet. Other than that one motion, she did not move, until she turned her head to the Vord queen. “Well? She lives.”

“Yes,” the Vord queen said. She walked past Amara’s view, pale ankles and delicate feet tipped with green-black toenails walking with deliberate grace across the stones and stepping over Amara’s bound form. She stopped behind Invidia’s chair.

Invidia shifted her body, settling her back upright against the chair’s straight back and gripping the arms with weak fingers. “Countess,” she said. “As ever, swift to judge.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Amara said. “You must have an excellent reason to explain why you are toadying for the enemies of the Realm and murdering and enslaving her citizens. Any reasonable person should be able to forgive and forget. Surely.”

Invidia narrowed her eyes. “Does it look like I would be here if I had a choice, Countess?”

“I don’t see a collar on you, Invidia,” Amara said.

For the first time, the other woman seemed to notice the way Amara had entirely omitted her title. Her expression flickered with surprise, then offended anger, then-for just an instant-with what might have been a flutter of regret.

“The people here, the ones you’ve had broken and enslaved, they didn’t have a choice. You took that from them.”

The Vord queen settled her fingers lightly upon Invidia’s neck. The tips of her green-black talons dimpled the delicate skin of the former High Lady’s throat. She shivered and rippled hideously, as if some other creature entirely had writhed in its sleep beneath her skin. Her fingers tightened, and tiny trickles of blood coursed over Invidia’s pale white skin.

“After your mentor betrayed me,” Invidia said, her mouth spreading into a rictus, “and left me bleeding on the ground with garic oil poisoning my wounds, I fled and was found by my new liege.” She tilted her head slightly back toward the Vord queen. “She made me an offer. My life for my loyalty.”

“You make it sound like barter,” the queen murmured, her faceted eyes half-lidded. “It is not so much an exchange as an ongoing arrangement.” Then she closed her eyes, and shivered again, something undeniably alien in the motion, and Invidia fell silent.

Amara shuddered and stared, revulsion and fascination competing for her thoughts.