“No.”
The Queen nodded. “It is… unpleasant to see them harmed. Any of them. I am pleased that you are not distracted by such a thing at this time.” She looked up and squared her shoulders, straightening her spine—mirroring Invidia herself. “What is the proper Aleran etiquette when an assassination interrupts dinner?”
Invidia found a small smile on her mouth. “Perhaps we should repair the furniture.”
The vord tilted her head again. “I do not have that knowledge.”
“When my mother died, my father apprenticed me to all the finest master artisans of the city for a year at a time. I think mainly to be rid of me.” She rose and considered the broken table, the scattered splinters. “Come. This is a more demanding discipline than flying or calling fire. I will show you.”
They had just sat back down at the repaired table when the whistling, trilling alarm shrieks of wax spiders filled the air.
The Queen came to her feet at once, her eyes opening very wide. She stood perfectly still for a moment, then hissed, “Intruders. Widespread. Come.”
Invidia followed the Queen outside into the moonlit night, onto the gently luminous croach that spread around the enormous hive. The Queen started downslope, pacing swiftly and calmly, as the trilling alarm continued to spread.
Invidia heard angry, high-pitched buzzing sounds unlike anything she had encountered. The creature on her chest reacted to them uneasily, shifting its many limbs and sending anguish pouring through her body in a fire that threatened to rob her of breath. She fought to continue walking in the Queen’s shadow without stumbling, and finally had to put her hand to her knife and draw upon a pain-numbing metalcrafting to let her continue.
They came to a broad pool of water that had gathered at the center of a shallow valley. It was no more than a foot deep and perhaps twenty across. The shallow waters teemed with the larval forms of the takers.
Standing upon the waters in the center of the pool was a man.
He was tall, half a head over six feet at least, and was dressed in gleaming, immaculate legionare’s armor. His hair was dark, cropped short in a soldier’s cut, as was his beard, and his eyes were intensely green. There were fine scars visible on his face, and upon him they looked as much like a military decoration as the scarlet cloak secured to his armor with the blue-and-scarlet eagle insignia of the House of Gaius.
Invidia found herself drawing in a sharp breath.
“Who?” the Queen demanded.
“It… it looks like…” Septimus. Except for the eyes, the man at the center of the pool was almost identical to her onetime fiancé. But it could not be him. “Octavian,” she said finally, all but snarling the word. “This must be Gaius Octavian.”
The vord Queen’s claws made a quiet, sickly-stretchy sound as they elongated.
The watery image was in full color, an indicator of excellent control of furycraft. So. The cub had grown into a wolf after all.
The strange buzzing sounds continued, and Invidia could see something striking the watery image, small splashes of water leaping up as if a boy had been throwing stones. Invidia called upon her windcrafting to slow the motion of the objects, to focus more closely upon them. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be hornets. They were not hornets, of course, but seemed to be of the same general wickedly swift and quietly threatening appearance. Their bodies were longer, and sported two sets of wings, and they flew faster than any hornet and in perfectly straight lines. As she watched, one of the hornet-things struck at the water image, its abdomen bending forward to expose a gleaming, serrated spear of vord chitin as long as Invidia’s index finger. It hit the water image with an explosion of force and came tumbling out the other side to fall stunned into the water.
Invidia shivered. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of the things swarming out from innocuous lumps in the croach.
“Enough,” the Queen said, raising a hand, and the series of impacts came to an abrupt halt. The buzzing hums ceased, as did the trilling shrieks of the wax spiders, and silence fell. The surface of the pool rippled as thousands of larval takers came up to tear at the bodies of the stunned hornets.
The Queen stared at the image in silence. Minutes passed.
“He copies us,” the Queen hissed.
“He understands why we chose to appear this way,” Invidia replied. She looked down the shallow valley, focusing upon her windcrafting to magnify her sight of the next larval pool. An image of Octavian stood there as well. “He means to address all of Alera, as we did.”
“He is that strong?” the Queen demanded.
“So it would seem.”
“You told me his gifts were stunted.”
“It would appear that I was mistaken,” Invidia replied.
The Queen snarled and stared at the image.
A moment later, it finally spoke. Octavian’s voice was a resonant, mellow baritone, his expression calm, his posture confident and steady. “Greetings, Alerans, freemen and Citizens alike. I am Octavian, son of Septimus, son of Gaius Sextus, the First Lord of Alera. I am returned from my journey to Canea and have come to defend my home and my people.”
The vord Queen let out a rippling hiss, an utterly inhuman sound.
“The vord have come, and have dealt us a grievous wound,” Octavian continued. “We mourn for those who have already perished, for the cities that have been overrun, for the homes and lives that have been destroyed. By now, you know that the enemy has overrun Alera Imperia. You know that all of the great cities still standing face imminent attack if they are not besieged already. You know that the vord have cut off tens of thousands of Alerans from retreat to safety. You know that the croach is growing to devour all that we know and all that we are.”
Octavian’s eyes flashed with sudden fire. “But there are other things that you do not know. You do not know that the Legions of the Shield cities have united with those gathered from other cities into the largest, most experienced, battle-hardened force ever fielded in the history of our people. You do not know that every Knight and Citizen of the Realm has banded together to fight this menace, under the leadership of my brother, Gaius Aquitainus Attis. You do not know that not only is this war not over—it has not yet begun.
“For two thousand years, our people have worked and fought and bled and died to secure the safety of our homes and families. For two thousand years, we have persevered, survived, and conquered. For two thousand years, the Legions have stood as our sword and shield against those who would destroy us.”
Octavian threw back his head, his eyes harder than stone, his expression as calm and fixed as the granite of a mountain. “The Legions are still our sword! They are still our shield! And they will defend us from this threat as they have all the others. In a thousand years, when the histories are read, they will mark this season as the deadliest of our time. And in a thousand years, they will still know of our valor, our strength. They will know that the House of Gaius gave their lives and blood, fought with sword and fury against this foe, and that all of Alera stood with us! They will know that we are Alerans! And that this land is ours!”
A surge of emotion rolled over Invidia, so intense that she staggered to one knee. It combined exaltation and hope and terror and rage, all bound together so inextricably that they could not be separated from one another. She fought to strengthen her metalcrafting, to blunt the impact of the emotions, and realized with some dull, dazed corner of her mind that the tide was flowing over her from the direction of the little captive steadholt.