Princess of the Void

Hyax returns with an even smaller handgun than his. She occupies the booth to his right. “Have sex with your wife, Prince Consort.”

“I figured this was coming,” he says.

“Of course it was,” Hyax says. “Sykora of the Black Pike is a superlative woman. One of the finest Void Princesses the Taiikari empire has produced, in an otherwise ignominious generation. And you are winding her up past the point her mechanisms can bear.”

“If she didn’t want that, she shouldn’t have married me against my will.”

“How terrible. Forced into servitude, and your bare consolation is delicious cuisine on demand, your pick of the treasures from across an interstellar empire, and sexual bliss with a nubile noblewoman who’s obsessed with you.” Hyax loads her gun. “The hearts of the free firmament weep at your martyrdom.”

“I don’t need them to weep,” he says. “And I’m not a martyr. But my refusal is all I have. My only leverage. if I’m gonna be what she wants me to be, she either needs to force me or free me. And neither of us want the former.”

“She’s not mistreating you. She saved you from execution. She’s offering you a pleasant, comfortable life, and your only job is to let her fawn over you and give you excellent sex.”

“You all seem overconfident we even can,” he says. “I’m twice her size.”

“You can,” she says. “Taiikari girls are one-size-fits-all.”

He tries to banish the lascivious imaginings that statement raises. “Look—I didn’t ask for any of it. I didn’t want it.”

“So what? That doesn’t excuse your attitude. Nobody wants most of what they’re given. Precious few of them have the pickings you have. Earpro on.”

He slips his earmuffs back on and she stomps a pedal by her feet. The targets spring up at the other end of the firing range, much farther out than his were. The pistol blinks blue under Hyax’s rock-steady hand. Bright blue light blooms and burns. Five sizzling flares. Three wooden hearts and two wooden heads burst.

“What are we shooting, anyway?” he asks.

“Targets.”

“No, like—what comes out of the gun?”

“Bullets.”

“It’s not lasers or plasma or micro black holes or something? They seem quite destructive.”

“They’re going fast.” She raises an eyebrow. “What do Maekyonites use?”

“We use bullets, too,” he says.

“First thing I’ve heard about you gals that gives me hope for your civilization.” She slides the magazine from the pistol.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s pet, Brigadier,” he says. “That’s what it comes down to.”

“Men.” Hyax rolls her eyes. “So dramatic sometimes. Do they have sex with their pets on Maekyon? Do they give them feasts and gifts and royal titles?”

“The former, no. The latter, all the time.”

She snorts. “I revise my opinion. You are a strange and unfit empire.” She clacks bullets into her magazine. “Like how often you say sorry. You really ought to stop. It’s not the Taiikari way.”

“Where I come from, it’s the polite thing to do.”

“Fine. But in the wider firmament, you do not apologize as often as you are. You can’t continue to insist so incuriously upon these Maekyonite impositions, or you’ll keep crashing into things. I don’t care if it ends up hurting you, but if it hurts my Princess, I’m going to shoot you.” As if to punctuate her threat, she slots the reloaded magazine into the pistol. “In the leg, so she doesn’t execute me.”

“How are you meant to show regret, then, without an apology?”

“You fix it,” Hyax says. “An apology is what a Taiikari gives when she has nothing else. It’s an acknowledgement that her offense goes beyond her ability to repair it. It’s a very sad thing to say and to hear. Acknowledge your fault. Sure. Say that you wish you had done otherwise, fine. Do not apologize. Fix it. Give a gift, or show it won’t happen again. Sorry is surrender. It’s despair. Not good.”

He thinks about Sykora last night, holding his hand and weeping in the dark. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. His stomach twists. “The way she talks, it sounds like there isn’t any way to repair this. No way of having my freedom.”

“Of course she’d say that,” Hyax says. “She’s a Princess of the Taiikari Empire and she’s desperate for you. This is how she was taught to woo.”

“How is it not patently obvious I don’t want anyone else deciding what I do with my body, Brigadier?”

She scoffs. “Listen to him. Is she trying to sell your organs? You want her and she wants you. She cannot parade around proclaiming herself equal to an alien husband who breezily ignores compulsion. Not if she wants to keep you both safe. It’s facile to imagine she can. It ignores the laws of empire and reality. Insist upon these impossibilities and make yourself miserable, or meet her somewhere in the middle and live a happy life. Were you free back on Maekyon?”

“Yes.”

“Guarding our Princess’s cell was what you wanted to be doing with your life, then.”

“Well, no—”

“So someone else was deciding what you did with your body.”

“I wasn’t—at least I had—” Grant cuts himself off. “That was labor. Sex is different.”

“Why?”

“It just is. If the Taiikari don’t think so, I don’t know how to translate it.”

“Perhaps it’s a fault of your implant,” Hyax says. “Or perhaps things truly are different on Maekyon. But in the Taiikari empire, none of us are free, Consort Grantyde. We design our own prisons; we trade pieces of our so-called freedom away for the beautiful things in life. Love, status, safety. And we hope that what we trade for is worth it. You have received an unbelievable bargain, and you’re moody because you weren’t present for negotiations. You surely don’t think your wife is free, do you? Do you know how many edicts and restrictions bind her?”

“Garuna’s mother said that she can’t have children. And that’s why she has to marry an alien.”

“That wasn’t her place to say, but she’s right. An alien or a womanborn, but that’s barely ever done because you can’t compel a womanborn. So now you’ve got a vulnerability.”

“A vulnerability?”

“A non-compellable spouse can be turned. Or can cause the kind of scandal and drama that would sink you in the coterie. A void princess must command an entire sector. One who can’t even command her own spouse is a punchline. The two remaining options are you stay chaste, maybe take Kabira’s wort to squash your libido, or you get a husband-of-the-void. An alien. Usually it’s a Kovikan. They’re one of the few other taiikarinoid species in the firmament with conversational skills and compatible anatomy. And don’t get me wrong, all right, there’s some good-looking Kovikans, but you.” She whistles.

“You, too?”

“Not me, no,” she says. “I’m a duelist. I’m speaking objectively.”

“A duelist?”

“Gay,” she says. “Two lovers who can’t compel each other. Duelists.”

“Oh.”

“But your average straight lady likes a big fellow who can keep her warm and throw her around. A man a full head taller than the tallest Taiikari maleborn? With no horns and kind eyes? Sploosh.” She accompanies this onomatopoeia with a gesture that makes clear its meaning. “No tail, but not everyone is into a tail, and there’s certainly plenty to hold onto. And the—what do you call this.” She mimes a goatee.

“Beard.”

“The beard is odd but fetching. You’re built like a Taiikari maiden’s wet dream. One Taiikari maiden’s wet dream in particular, in fact.”

A creeping realization. “When you say maiden…”

Hyax shrugs. “She’s barred from her own species’ men, and most of her life has been training and duty. She’s schooled herself in the arts of the betrothal bed, but in terms of raw experience, how much do you think she’s had?”

“Am I—are you telling me I’d be that woman’s first?”

“Don’t bring it up. She is going to work very hard to hide it from you, I’ll wager. Too proud not to.” Hyax’s tail is occupying itself by flipping a spent shell into the air and catching it. “But yes. Quite likely. By order of the Empress.”

“That’s cruelty.”

“We are an empire, Grantyde. Empires are cruel places to live. You have drawn the winningest ticket an alien male can in our lottery. Earpro on.”

They blitz through another round of targets. Grant tries setting his out at Hyax’s distance and promptly humiliates himself.

“Dismal,” Hyax observes.

“Thanks. I have a dismal instructor.”

She smirks. “We’ll have to get you trained up more.”

“Would Sykora allow that?”

“Of course she would. She wants you happy, Prince Consort. You know this.” Hyax releases a thunderous sigh. “Look, Maekyonite. Sykora is returning to a world of tense political machinations after fifteen cycles away, during which her enemies tried their hardest to encroach and expand and chisel away at her power. And in her absence, they have. Vora’s good, but there’s only so much room she had to maneuver without an imperial title. The Princess is bearing a deep-sea trench amount of weight. She has self-control, but I am seeing cracks in her foundation, and I can’t even blame her, because the beautiful alien she liberated from his class-H barbarian empire is some kind of monk. If not for her sake, and if not for your sake, then for the sake of her underlings, and for the love of the Gods of fortune who have blessed you, please fuck your sexy wife, you big handsome dunce.”

“You can’t blame a class-H barbarian for being slow to act.”

That wins him a brief chuckle. “You have me there.”

“I can’t have sex with her while I’m her property, Brigadier. Maybe that’s juvenile. Maybe it’s a Maekyonite absurdity, but it’s one I will not surrender.”

Hyax shrugs. “If that’s truly what it takes, figure out a way to un-property yourself to your satisfaction so you can pack her properly.”

“I’m trying.”

“You said your refusal was all you have,” she says. “That’s not true.”

“What else do I have?”

“Your desire for her, and her desire for you. Use it. Sykora is going to snap in half at some point, whether into your arms or into a total meltdown. If you time it right, you can push her over into an advantageous position.” She bumps another crop of targets out of the ground. “Pun halfway intended.”