now they know most of what they need to: it's brutish, cold, and ripe for direction. The earth's wise men look to the stars and search for answers in science, and it's that ingenuity the Heseth intend to fan.
One of the geneticists becomes aware of his presence and turns to greet him. They have no need to face each other to make the other welcome, but making eye contact connotates particular honour. Within a moment everyone has turned to make that same greeting, and for an instant he feels he's already left them; that he's already become alien to his people. In so feeling, he sees them through human eyes.
They're delicate monsters, light catching silver scales and turning them to a host of shimmering colours that negates uniformity. They're sinuous beings, able to move with or without the help of many legs that are used as grasping appendages as well as for locomotion. They're creatures of cartilage and chitin, narrow chests coming to a rigid point from whence a long neck curves back and up into a slim, slit-eyed head. The queens have great and wonderful horns curling above their eyes, and the oldest amongst the males have similar, but smaller, protrusions.
Humans might call them dragons.
They're not, of course, not at all; they have neither wings nor breath of fire, but there's a certain pleasant grandiosity to the name. Robert-to-be likes the idea that a human legend will be birthed into mortal form to walk amongst them. He acknowledges his family's greeting, then takes himself away again: being watched over by one who is meant to change is distracting, and he has no wish to agitate them as they work. He'll come back in time; they, and his queen, will be the last thing in this life he'll ever see.
It will be worth the pain, when the moment comes; worth the long slow years of growing up in a human body, which is one of the necessities of this plot. They've never been certain if these created infants have personalities of their own, and rather than risk it, the chosen leave their first bodies behind when the geneticists are satisfied with their creations. They're guided by their queen's gentle touch into a new form, and there is no reversal: the journey is honor and death sentence both.
But Robert-to-be embraces it gladly, because if he succeeds in shaping this world—and the Heseth have rarely failed—then he will become a father to the next generations of his people. His genetic legacy will live on, a true prize indeed for a ship-bound race that must breed selectively and rarely in order for the whole to survive. It's a chance worth any risk: he'll die locked in human form, but his memory will live on, and his children will know his name.
There is, in the end, little else that drives a man, and Robert Drake is satisfied with his fate.
BELINDA PRIMROSE
21 January 1588 † Alunaer, capital of Aulun
It had not taken long to escape Gallin.
It had not taken long, and yet it seemed she had never left there at all. A day to cross the channel, another to wait and meet the Aulunian spymaster Cortes in secret, and on the third morning that man's expression had remained impassionate as he told her of how an Aulunian spy had been uncovered in the Gallic court. “Beatrice Irvine,” he'd said. “They also called her Belinda Primrose, and she is dead.”
Astonishment and ice coursed through Belinda, though wisdom had warned her there could be no other way for her story to end. The woman she had been lay dead, her head no doubt on a pike for all to see, and the woman who had returned to Alunaer would become someone else entirely. In a lifetime of doing murder, Belinda had never lost a role she'd played to death's dark hand. To do so now unmoored her.
She had drawn a soft breath, steadying her outward countenance: it would never do to show the spymaster how her hands wanted to shake or how the pulse in her throat threatened to choke her with its urgency. There were other matters to attend to; there always were. Matters more important than herself: matters such as Robert, Lord Drake, whose name she voiced quietly, hoping against an answer of a fate as black as the one Cortes had named for Beatrice Irvine.
“Ransomed,” Cortes replied unexpectedly. “Ransomed, but not yet returned to her majesty's court.” There was a question in his voice,