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She laughed at me, and like he found joy strange and possibly intolerable, the king’s eyes turned immediately upon us. His expression didn’t change, but he eyed me up and down before turning back to watch the still-empty tournament area.
She turned and watched him a moment, then gave a soft sigh and turned back to me. “He’s worried, but there’s nothing he can do about it. It makes him seem harder than he is.”
“What’s he worried about?”
She sighed and shook her head. “What are kings always worried about, even back on Earth? The line of succession. His legacy. His people.”
“I don’t get it. Why humans?”
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a scientist, but my understanding is that the Thorzi simply started dying out. Something about genetic dead ends and plummeting birth rates that I couldn’t hope to explain, but they used to have another... not gender, but there were another kind of Thorzi. Mages. And they simply stopped being born. Technically, they could all carry children, but fewer and fewer of them are actually capable of doing so. It doesn’t help that most warriors, when they reach the age of majority, have their ability to bear children ritually, er, removed.”
She flushed pink at the notion, no longer meeting my eye.
“What, like a hysterectomy?”
“Sort of,” she agreed. “It’s how they get so...” She trailed off and waved a hand in the direction of a particularly buff alien.
Holy shit. They deliberately removed their ability to have kids, so they could be bigger, buffer guys. Kaelum must have done this, I realized. Kaelum, who clearly still wanted children, had given up the clearest route to get them.
No wonder he wanted to win the damn tournament and... well, yeah. Anyway.
“So they’re bothered by femininity?”
She snorted and waved me off. “They don’t have a concept of femininity. They think all humans are soft, men and women alike. It’s not about gender, it’s about strength and weakness. I don’t know how much Kaelum has told you, but Thorzan is a harsh planet. They’ve only survived here by being strength personified.”
But they thought all humans were soft. Weak.
And they were no longer able to have children with each other, only humans. The result of which was smaller, softer aliens.
Oh.
Oh hell.
They were a whole species in crisis.
I wondered if Kaelum’s mother understood what she was telling me. That they were being forced to weaken themselves as a race, in order to survive. No wonder Kaelum felt alone. No doubt as the king’s son, he was the very symbol of that new world order. A symbol many likely didn’t want to see. A symbol of weakness in themselves.
And of course they all wanted to succeed in this tourney, to pass on their DNA—that was a genetic imperative felt by every successful species. But at the same time, to win and have children was to further the process of weakening their species.
I sat back hard in the chair, my mouth falling open. “Your husband doesn’t like me because Kaelum having kids with me would be a sign of weakness.”
Her lips quirked up on one side, but there was sadness in those warm brown eyes. “I just overheard Kaelum telling one of the others that you were exceptionally clever. I see he wasn’t exaggerating.”
“We’re not weak,” I hissed indignantly. Humans weren’t weak. Sure, we were smaller and softer than Thorzi, full blooded or hybrid, but that wasn’t a weakness. They had closed their minds to the idea of anything but armor and muscles being strength.
Of course they had, though.
Apparently, the non-warrior Thorzi had died out, and along with them, the understanding that non-warriors had value. Mages, they’d been called. A strange thing to call a... what, a subspecies? Just a different body type?
“What about mages? Were they eight feet tall and built like bodybuilders?” Across the room, someone called the fighters to order, but I ignored it. I would continue to ignore it, to try to squeeze a little information out of Kaelum’s mother, at least until he fought.
I had the distinct notion that it would hurt his feelings if I didn’t watch his match, or matches, and despite everything, I found that I very much didn’t want to do that.
She stared off into space for a moment, eyes narrowed in thought, before shaking her head. “I... there were only a few left alive when I arrived, but no. Not that they were short or tiny, but they were built more... I don’t want to say slender, but it fits, some. The last Proeliator’s mage was a bit—chubby?”
Chubby. I looked around the room, at the vast array of perfect, buff, alien flesh. There wasn’t an ounce of fat in the whole room. If they were humans, they’d have been the kind who had nightmares of butter chasing them. Chubby had not been a word I thought they would even know.
“But they didn’t think mages were weak?” I asked as an alien dressed in black who seemed to be a referee set the first two fighters against each other.
