He strikes me on the arm, managing to inflict some small sensation of pain, and laughs, spinning like a lunatic. “You are off your game today, Kapsuk Rysethk. And now, you bleed to death again.”
I grow bored with this display. It’s tempting to cut Zethki down to size: he’s smaller than me; even his most ardentkrythis weaker than mine by an order of ten; he’s not as agile as I am; and his mind is the weakest link in all of his armor. He is unscrupulous, a little mad, unpredictable, and too undisciplined to pose any real challenge to me at any martial art or feat of strength,kria’skleast of all.
I stop and place the tip of my sword in the floor, leaning on the handle with my wrists crossed in acquiescence. Zethki laughs, and ‘playfully’ takes a swing at my blade, hoping to knock it away and send it clattering to the floor. I allow this happen—Iallowit, because if Zethki were anyone else but the general and son of the Krezikth, I would have held fast, before humiliating him easily. In fact, boiling inside of me is a desire to go even further, to drain him of hiskrythafter slicing off his arm, sucking it from his pulsing, severed arteries.
I stand, my face neutral, while he lifts his sword and holds it above his head, growling and turning circles to the applause of our elite guard. They growl back, fists in the air, but I know that many of them find Zethki’s display as grotesque as I do.
He faces me. “Don’t look so sour, cousin,” he teases. Perhaps even Zethki knows when he has gone too far. He kicks my sword up and into his hand; clearly, he knows better than to make me retrieve it myself. Such a gesture would be considered an invitation to a real fight, and I believe that Zethki knows that in such a situation, should I take it seriously, he would lose. And that even cousins, even a Kapsuk, have limits.
I take it from him and sheathe it. I don’t comment on his violation of conduct, because I never do. Zethki is like a half-domesticated animal, and one never knows when he will strike out.
He prances around a little more, and challenges a few more guards, who fight valiantly and are easily disarmed. After humiliating them—something he does dare to do with distant relatives and even more so with those who are not related at all—he cedes the floor and comes to stand by me. He holds an arm up to mine to compare the shades of ourkryth.
“Are you getting old, cousin?” he quips. I ignore him. He continues. “No matter. Your human girl will revitalize you.”
When I don’t respond to this, he looks at me critically. “Come, great Rys. We all have days when we are blanched and weak.” He slaps me on the back. “You begin training my lovely bride today. And you must have strength! You have your work cut out for you, if our appraisers are correct.”
I decide to play nice with Zethki. It’s my calling, as Kapsuk. I’m a soldier and a diplomat, his most trusted advisor. What I think of Zethki’s behavior is not my purview, and his whims are not mine to judge. I’m to follow orders and to make his orders work.
This has never been a problem for me. It should not be a problem for me now.
“You are right, cousin,” I tell him, slapping him back. I slap him hard, but it’s plausibly deniable. He winces, and I hope I will leave his flesh bruised. He will never say anything about it; to do so would be to admit to weakness. “And, as you have mentioned it, I should attend to the matter of your bride.”
A snarl lurks beneath his lips; perhaps I have misjudged him, and perhaps he suspects something of what I’m trying to hide in my mind. Fear is not an emotion that I feel deeply, and it never rises to the surface. But it flows through me, controlled and carefully measured, and I feel it now.
“When will she be ready?” he asks. His voice is dripping with lust, a hunger inside of him is feeding hiskryth, and it becomes almost golden as he thinks of the human, Anya Mann. He wants hernow, and if her life was not important for business alliances, he would take her. “I don’t wish to wait long.”
I look straight ahead. “This is never known,” I say, “until I begin. As you know, cousin.”
He turns to me. “The Apparit believes she’s physically strong,” he tells me. “That she should be ready with little effort to accommodate her mates.”
I nod, still looking ahead. I have learned to give Zethki time to think before I speak, to walk halfway to what I’m about to tell him, so that he doesn’t feel lectured.
“If you only require her physical submission, my cousin, then the Apparit is correct.”
Zethki is annoyed, because he knows that I’m right.
“She will take more time to truly dominate,” he declares, as if the idea is his.
This is his way.
“I have been told,” I say as casually as possible, “that the human females are most fertile if they submit of their own free will.”
Zethki finds this amusing, as I knew he would. Impregnating Anya Mann has always been his ultimate goal, for their offspring would ensure inviolable guarantees from a business perspective, and they would be formidable hybrids, guaranteed to be free of the mutant genes that plague the Kerz and threaten to end our bloodline.
This is all a dark secret, of course, known only to the highest orders of Kerz.
“Well,” he says, smiling, his attention captured by the fight in the center of the room. “Make certain that she’s submissive of her own free will, then, Kapsuk.”
And then, dirty fighter that he is, he skips into the ring and begins to chop mercilessly at his unsuspecting victim.
I turn and leave.
* * *
“She’s bathing,” Trasmea tells me.
She is an insolent one, perhaps because we have had our share of intimate relations, and because of her human blood, Trasmea is more perceptive of some weakness in me that Kerz don’t sense.
