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I would not lie to myself or anyone else; jealousy of that love burned in my belly every time I saw them together. Saw his father give him the barest nod of approval. Saw the way his mother—our mother—doted on him, when she could not lay eyes on me without a shudder in memory of my father’s touch.
Or perhaps she hated me as much as she hated him, simply for existing.
I had decided, long ago, to hate her back, for not loving me as she did her precious Kaelum.
“I suppose you’ll insist on fighting in the tournament?” Crux asked me over dinner the night before.
He already knew the answer. Knew that I had spent a day in the qualifying rounds. So what was his game in asking? There was no way to know until he stuck the knife in; no way to be sure of his intentions until he twisted it in your soft guts, hitting his real target.
“It is the appropriate thing for a warrior to do, to attempt to further one’s house.” It was the most innocuous answer I could manage.
I couldn’t tell him the truth, after all.
That I had spent a handful of days drifting around his lab, playing at being his personal guard dog, just for the chance to spend more time around Beau. Sweet, kind, docile Beau.
My father’s assistants glared at the humans, and most of them either jumped in fear or glowered back, occasionally snapping out angry retorts—some even quite clever. But Beau? He just did as they demanded, went where they told him to, and responded to the boorish behavior with a slow, easy smile. If I hadn’t met him, spoken to him, I wouldn’t have understood.
He wasn’t slow, didn’t misunderstand that they were being rude. No, Beau had been treated worse, and he knew how to handle... what was it he’d called them? Jackasses.
Beau knew what it was to have a father he wanted no part of.
I wondered if his father, too, was viewed as a hero by his people, while in private, he was the very essence of a monster.
Crux must have decided he’d stared at me in silence for long enough, because he huffed and shook his head before going back to his food.
As he brought a hunk of meat to his lips, they twisted in a rueful smile. Ah, of course. He wasn’t letting it go. He was drawing it out. Like a predator that enjoyed tormenting the creature it intended to devour, his smile showed me all his sharp teeth.
“You don’t truly think a hybrid has a chance to win the tournament, do you?” He chuckled as though he’d heard a pitiful joke and was only being kind. “Oh, Vorian. The very best you can hope to do is not bring further shame on me.” His eyes hardened into chips of stone. “And see that you do not.”
“I will not,” I agreed, meeting his gaze and willing him to read my mind. To see how much I despised him. How little I cared about his shame, all of which was his own.
He had been the one to kidnap humans and mistreat them, causing my mother’s desertion of him in favor of King Xyren, and a host of laws protecting humans from abuse. His abuse.
He had been the one who had bartered for Zathki technology that allowed him to create children, but kept it a secret from all of Thorzan, pretending instead to be a great scientist who had invented the splicer and the tubes.
The... the jackass barely knew how to repair them when they broke, let alone how to make more of them.
Lyr’s gift had simply allowed him to take advantage to best effect. He had no skill or strength of his own.
He huffed again and went back to his dinner, clearly dissatisfied with my lack of reaction.
My fourth mark, attained the same year I came of age according to Thorzi custom, had signaled a difference in our relationship in every way. Not only did he no longer trust me because he could not read my mind, but I realized a great many things.
One of them was the fact that the purpose of his awful words was often simply to hurt me. He did not care about his family honor, or how my showing in the tournament would affect it. He simply wanted me ashamed and afraid.
If my shame and fear made me make a mistake at the tournament and fail, then so much the better.
The tournament, you see, was to choose the first warrior who would share his gametes with the new human arrivals. To create a new child, part of the next generation of Thorzi warriors.
If I, or any hybrid, were to win the tournament, Crux would be furious. Oh, he would smile and applaud himself, making certain to once again point out how he had been the one to bring humans to Thorzan, and the one to make the first hybrids. It still pained him that he could not claim us all, but when King Xyren had impregnated his queen, and my mother had carried Kaelum in her body, Crux had lost that right. Not many had followed her lead, but a few had, and each time, it made Crux so angry that he snapped and spit for days. As though a mated pair deciding to procreate was a personal insult to his supposed capabilities.
Capabilities to trick the Zathki out of their hard-won technology with the promise of supplies he saw they desperately needed.
If only our people knew of his deceit. Knew that in all likelihood, Crux and his theft were why our people were once again on the brink of war with the Zathki. That we, not they, were the aggressors. We, the villains.
I might have told Xyren myself, if I thought he would believe me, or even listen. But the last time I had tried to speak to the king, at all of five cycles of age, to ask him if I could see my new little brother, he had snarled at me, told me that I had no brother. That I was no one in his eyes, and if I dared ever touch his son, he would gut me.
Crux hadn’t known whether to laugh or pretend offense at the king’s behavior, so in the end, he’d done the latter immediately, and the former that night, when we were back in his residence.
