“You beautiful brave wonderful stupid dumb idiot!” Sykora leaps into Grant’s arms as the screen flickers away. “I love you, I fucking love you, you’re free, what the fuck were you thinking?” She kisses him madly. Her tail thwaps the top of his head. Her heartbeat hamrs against him.
“Majesty.” Raelix clears his throat. “Perhaps I might be dismissed.”
Sykora glances past the shoulder she’s nuzzling. “Yes. Of course. Yes. Thank you, clerk. You may go as well, Governess.”
“I— uh—” Garuna’s fists open and close.
“Go, Governess,” Sykora says, “before I change my mind about the lenience I’ve granted you.” Grant feels the notches in her spine straighten as she adopts as imperious a posture as she can with her ankles wrapped around her husband. “I will send the scouting reports presently.”
Garuna scurries out of the command deck in the red-cloaked train of Clerk Raelix.
“You are the most perfect husband in the firmant,” Sykora says, “and I worship you, and also you are a lunatic. What the fuck, Grantyde?”
He shrugs helplessly. “I misjudged her. I thought—I didn’t realize she’d just be a person. I thought I’d ask.”
“She’s not just a person, you dope! She rules a half trillion lives!” Sykora shivers. “She could kill us all with a word. With a sentence, in my case.” She taps the base of her neck. “Rember?”
He shudders as he does. “It all ended up okay, though.”
“It did. Gods of the Firmant, it did. More than okay.” She laughs, bright and relieved. “Grant. My love, you’re free. You’re free to everyone. No more pretending. No more having to sweat these parties out without anticomps. You’re the first free husband-of-the-void in I don’t know how long. Ever.”
He feels in a daze. Drunk or high.
Sykora pokes his nose. “I told you, dove. Didn’t I? How wonderful you were and how wonderful she’d be to you?”
Grant’s thumb pensively rubs the stalk of his wife’s tail. She didn’t seem wonderful. She seed busy. The ease with which she freed him was no less than the ease with which he was enslaved. And it’s occurring to him that an Empress doesn’t have to be bad for an empire to be bad. Even if Zithra were flawless, she’s one woman. Just one woman, managing the galaxy. It still makes no sense to him. It still seems abominable.
And he still doesn’t think of himself as her subject.
But his wife called it. Empress Zithra XIX has freed him. “You told ,” he says. “I should have had more faith that you knew what you were saying.”
“I knew you doubted .” Her grin is smug. “You looked at like I was a brainwashed little bimbo.”
“I promise, I never thought that.”
She tuts and shakes her head. “I don’t care one way or the other. You trusted enough not to say it, and to follow my lead. And I love you for that. And I am so relieved. God.” She tips back and he releases his hold on her hips. She lies down on the conference table. Her tail swishes invitingly.
He slips up onto the surface and joins her, lying on his back. He’d be worried about this thing holding his weight, but he’s fucked Sykora on it two or three tis now.
She drapes herself into his lap and happily shudders the last of her tension out. “I’m glad you got to et her, finally,” she says.
“I am, too,” he says, and decides that’s the truth, or close to it.
“And now,” Sykora says. “Now that the conspiracy is smashed and the pirates are in disarray and my station is secure and my husband is free.” She scoots so that she’s nose-to-nose with him, straddling his stomach. “Now I am going to take you to Rax, and we are going to make love in the sabsum springs.”
The conspiracy isn't smashed, not if Thror was telling the truth. The conspiracy is wider than any of them had guessed. But Grant grins anyway. His prudence finally relents its grip on the rest of him. His cute little wife is lying on him and he finally t the Empress and she's a bureaucrat, not a monster, and that's sothing, anyway. And they're safe, for now. He lets himself be happy.
“Do you—” Sykora’s nose rubs his jaw. “I think we have ti, now. If you want to. Now that this isn’t hanging over us. We could find a night. And a day.”
Her breath is damp on his neck. He sees the gleam of her fangs.
They’ve talked about this a few tis in the wake of the Ptolek action. They’ve talked about the breeding bite. Every ti, he’s demurred. He sees himself a hectocycle from now, the two marks on his neck. Sykora’s forever, by joyful choice this ti. And he wants it. He does. But the thought has opened strange little holes in him, and opens them again now.
And he thinks he’s brave enough to tell her why.
“Not yet,” he says, carefully. “I’ve, um. I have a proposition.” He rolls over so they’re on their sides. He puts his hand on her hip.
“Go on,” she says, softly.
He tries to force his heart to stillness.
“I’ll do it when it works,” he says. “I’ll be your breedmate when we can breed.”
Her lips part. “What are you saying?”
“I want to do the real bite. The bite that sticks. If we’re gonna be breedmates…” He takes a deep breath. “I want to breed. I want to get re-encoded. I want a family.”
“Grantyde.” Her tail, which was slowly wagging, has frozen. “That’s not possible.”
“Neither was this.” He sits up. “Neither was being free. I didn’t believe you about the Empress. And I’m still skeptical of it, of living in an empire, but you were right about what she’d do, and I was wrong.”
He slips his hand under her ribcage and lifts her into a seated position opposite him. She stares agape.
“Maybe it’s greedy of or ungrateful of , but I’m not satisfied with just this from her,” he says. “If she can give my citizenship, she can give you the right to have children.” He leans forward and rests his forehead on hers. “And if you don’t want any—like if you don’t, I don’t care about the Empress—then I can live with that. I promise. I can be happy with just the two of us. I can. But I think you want this too.”
“I don’t—” She swallows. “I don’t even—I never even…” She trails off.
“Tell ,” he says. “I don’t care what you tell , as long as it’s the truth.”
“The truth.” She leans back. She steels herself like she’s circling at a spear duel. She takes a deep inhale.
“The truth is I cry sotis in the mornings before you’re up,” she says, “because I imagine waking up in a little pile of our children. Sons with these eyes, daughters with this pokey nose. The truth is I’d give anything.” Her voice breaks. “But they won’t let us, Grant. We have to bury this in us. We’d drive ourselves mad thinking about it.”
“No,” he says.
“Grant, please…”
“No,” he repeats. “You’re the first Void Princess with a free husband and you’re gonna be the first Void Princess with a family. I’m not about to call her up again and demand it right now. I can wait as long as I have to wait. I’m glad to have you to myself for a while. But know that I’m not giving up. Now that I know there’s a way. You gave my freedom.” He scoots forward and lays his head on her shoulder. “I’m gonna find a way to give you yours.”
She shivers. “God, Grant. You’re so stubborn.”
“That’s right. I am. And I’m going to be stubborn for you.” He settles back and stares into his wife’s fearful eyes. “If you really want to stop, if you really want to, if you don’t want to fight for this, tell now. Say it. I’ll obey you, Majesty.”
Her mouth opens. It shuts again. Her lip quivers.
He leans forward and kisses her. A few stunned seconds where she doesn’t move a muscle, and then she whimpers and kisses him back like the only breathable air in the firmant is between his lips.
He pulls away. “Are you gonna say stop?”
“No.” Her voice is hoarse. “No. I’m not. I—” Her fingers tighten on his chest. “Oh, God, Grant.” The horror at herself for saying this is mingling with desperate, whispered excitent. “I want your babies.” A terrified little gust of laughter. “I want your babies so badly.”
“Then we’ll find a way,” he says, and he believes it with all of him. “Soday, we’ll find a way.”
He swings his legs over the lip of the table. He stands up and turns around. The table is high enough that he and his wife are more or less eye-to-eye. “And in the anti, to make up for it, not doing the bite thing, I had another idea.”
“God, spare .” But she says it with a smile, as uncertain as she is.
He clears his throat. “That stuff you put in Azkaii,” he says. “The compound seventy stuff.”
Her ears twitch. “Yes?”
“You said you didn’t want to know if it would work on .” He puts his hand on her knee. “What if… what if I did?”
Her eyes dance. “Grant?”
“I know it’s controlled and secret and we don’t have much,” he says. “And I would only want enough to have it work for a little bit. One night, at most. And I only want to do this once, ever. But all the other guys, they’re always talking about the warmth. And how good it feels when it’s from soone you trust. Soone you love.”
He raises her hand and kisses it. He puts its palm on the side of his face. He stares into the conqueror crimson of his wife’s eyes.
“I’d like to feel it,” he says. “If you’d be willing. I want you to compel .”
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