The food was… “revolting” fell so far of the mark that it seemed an injustice. Invidia had learned to eat the raw croach. The creature keeping her alive needed her to ingest it in order to feed itself. She had been startled to learn that it could taste even worse. The vord had no grasp of cooking. The very notion was alien to them. As a result, they couldn’t really be expected to do it very well—but that evening they had perpetrated nothing short of an atrocity.
She choked the food down as best she could. The elder Queen ate steadily. The younger queen was finished within two minutes and sat there staring at them, her expression unreadable.
The younger queen then turned to her mother. “Why?”
“We partake of a meal together.”
“Why?”
“Because it might make us stronger.”
The younger queen absorbed that in silence for a moment. Then she asked, “How?”
“By building bonds between us.”
“Bonds.” The younger queen blinked slowly, once. “What need is there for restraints?”
“Not physical bonds,” her mother said. “Symbolic mental attachments. Familiar feelings.”
The young queen absorbed that for half a dozen heartbeats. Then she said, “These things do not improve strength.”
“There is more to strength than physical power.”
The young queen tilted her head. She stared at her mother, then, unnervingly, at Invidia. The Aleran woman could feel the sudden heavy, invasive pressure of the young queen’s awareness impinging upon her thoughts. “What is this creature?”
“A means to an end.”
“It is alien.”
“Necessary.”
The young queen’s voice hardened. “It is alien.”
“Necessary,” repeated the elder Queen.
Again, the young queen fell silent. Then, her expression never changing, she said, “You are defective.”
The enormous table seemed to explode. Splinters, some of them six inches long and wickedly sharp, flew outward like arrows. Invidia flinched instinctively, and barely managed to get her chitin-armored forearm between her and a flying spear of wood that might have plunged through her eye.
Sound pressed so hard against Invidia’s eardrums that one of them burst, a wailing thunderstorm of high-pitched, shrieking howls. She cried out at the pain and reeled out of her chair and back from the table, borrowing swiftness from her wind furies as she went, embracing the weirdly altered sense of time that seemed to stretch instants into seconds, seconds into moments. It was the only way for her to see what was happening.
The vord queens were locked in a fight to the death.
Even with the windcrafting to aid her, Invidia could barely follow the movements of the two vord. Black claws flashed. Kicks flew. Dodges turned into twenty-foot bounds that ended at the nearest wall of the dome, whereupon the two queens continued their struggle while crouched on the wall, bounding and scuttling up the dome like a pair of dueling spiders.
Invidia’s eyes flicked to the ruined table. It lay in pieces. A ragged furrow was torn through one corner, where the younger queen had surged forward, plunging through the massive hardwood table as if it had been no more a hindrance than a mound of soft snow. Invidia could scarcely imagine the tremendous power and focus that would be required for such a thing to happen—from a creature who had been born, it would seem, less than an hour before.
But swift and terrible as the young queen might have been, the match was not an even one. Where claws struck the elder Queen, sparks flew from her seemingly soft flesh, turning the attack aside. But where the younger queen was hit, flesh parted, and green-brown blood flew in fine arcs. The vord queens fought a spinning, climbing, leaping duel at a speed too swift to be seen clearly, much less interfered with, and Invidia found herself tracking the motion simply to know when she might need to leap out of the way.
Then the elder Queen made a mistake. She slipped on a slickened spill of the younger queen’s blood, and her balance faltered for a fraction of a second. There was not time enough for the young queen to close in for a more deadly blow—but it was more than time enough for her to dart behind the elder Queen and seize the fabric of the dark cloak. With a twisting motion, she wrapped the cloak around the elder Queen’s throat and leaned back, pulling with both frail-seeming arms, tightening the twisted fabric like a garrote against her mother’s neck.
The elder Queen bent into a sinuous bow, straining against the strangling cloth, her expression quite calm as her dark eyes fell with a palpable weight upon Invidia.
The Aleran woman met her eyes for a pair of endless seconds before she nodded once, rose, lifted her hand, and with an effort of will and furycraft caused the air within the nose, mouth, and lungs of the young queen to congeal into a nearly liquid mass.
The response was immediate. The younger queen twisted and writhed in sudden agony, still holding on desperately to the twisted cloak.
The elder Queen severed it with a slash of her claws, slipped free, turned, and with half a dozen smoothly savage movements tore the younger queen open from throat to belly, removing organs along the way. It was calmly done, the work of an old hand in a slaughterhouse more than the intense uncertainty of a battle.
The young queen’s body fell limp to the floor. The elder Queen took no chances. She dismembered it with neat, workmanlike motions. Then she turned, as if nothing at all had happened, and walked back to the table. Her chair remained in its place though the table had been ruined.
The Queen sat down in her chair and stared forward, at nothing.
Invidia walked slowly over to her side, righted her own fallen chair, and sat down in it. Neither of them spoke for a time.
“Are you hurt?” Invidia asked, finally.
The Queen opened her mouth, then did something Invidia had never seen before.
She hesitated.
“My daughter,” the Queen said, her voice a near whisper. “The twenty-seventh since returning to Alera’s shores.”
Invidia frowned. “Twenty-seventh…?”
“Part of our… nature…” The vord shivered. “Within each queen is an imperative to remain separate. Pure. Untainted by our contact with other beings. And to remove any queen that shows signs of corruption. Beginning several years ago, my junior queens have universally attempted to remove me.” Her face was touched by a faint frown. “I do not understand. She did no physical harm to me. Yet…”
“She hurt you.”
The Queen nodded, very slowly. “I had to remove their capacity to produce more queens lest they gather numbers to remove me. Which has hurt us all. Weakened us. By all rights, this world should have been vord five years ago.” Her eyes narrowed, and she turned her faceted gaze upon Invidia. “You acted to protect me.”
“You hardly needed it,” Invidia said.
“You did not know that.”
“True.”
The vord Queen tilted her head, studying Invidia intently. She braced herself for the unpleasant intrusion of the Queen’s mind—but it did not come.
“Then why?” the Queen asked.
“The younger queen clearly would not have permitted me to live.”
“You might have struck at both of us.”
Invidia frowned. True enough. The two queens had been so intent upon one another, they would hardly have been able to react to a sudden attack from Invidia. She could have called up fire and obliterated them both.
But she hadn’t.
“You could have fled,” the Queen said.
Invidia smiled faintly. She gestured to the creature latched upon her chest. “Not far enough.”
“No,” the vord said. “You have no other place to go.”
“I do not,” Invidia agreed.
“When something is held in common,” the Queen asked, “is it considered a bond?”
Invidia considered her answer for a moment—and not for the benefit of the Queen. “It is often the beginning of one.”
The vord looked at her fingers. Their dark-nailed tips were stained with the younger queen’s blood. “Do you have children of your own?”