Amanda followed the laughter of a child down the soft twists of the carven tunnel. “Catch me, mama! Catch me!” called the high tones of her daughter, consonants shushing through the gaps where she was missing her front teeth.

  “I’m going to Liwellynn, run quick!” she called, as she came out of the tunnel into a wide, warm room, the stone smooth beneath her feet.

  “Ah-ha! Got you!” said George, as he snatched up their child and swung her around.

  “Papa!” shrieked Liwellynn, kicking her feet in the air as Amanda reached them. “You weren’t playing!”

  “No? But what if I wanted a hug?” he said, holding her close. She tucked her small head under his chin.

  Amanda wrapped her arms around both of them, pressed her forehead to George’s.

  “I also want a hug,” she said, breathing in deeply the smell of her daughter’s hair.

  “Tell me about ichor poisoning,” said Sister Young to Mr. Ludsic, the Minister of Health.

  “It is a madness,” he said, slouching into the seat across her table. “A disease of the mind.”

  “Specific’s would be preferable, Honourable Minister,” said Sister Young, her graphite scratching. “For the clarity of the record.”

  “It—causes visions,” he hissed, waving a hand through the air. “Hallucinations, delusions. That mad bastard Haddock is convinced that the wyrms speak to him through it.”

  “Speak?”

  “Communicate. Share experiences, their histories, their culture. It’s a psychedelic, nothing more. Any knowing is the interpretation of nonsense by addled minds.”

  “Your proof of this?”

  “There is observable damage to the brain,” he paused. “DuCourt is our primary proof. Plaques, neural tangles, the illumination is aberrant on all her scans. She doesn’t think right anymore, since the mauling.”

  “She received the injury to her right hand during the education of the Triad, yes?”

  “Yes, a perfectly healthy woman, reasonable, an excellent scientist, and now? Emotionally volatile, evangelically spouting the ‘truth of the wyrm,’ her husband is nearly worse.”

  “Nearly?”

  “It’s that damn emotive mirroring. We haven’t been able to pin it down. A result of the poisoning, no doubt.”

  “But you cannot prove this?”

  “Oh, we could prove it, all of it, if specimens could be taken for study. Instead our illustrious Empress leaves us to speculate for twenty five years.”

  “And Minister Capstone?”

  Mr. Ludsic stiffened. “We had no knowledge that she had been exposed to it before this meeting. She has worked diligently on our council for years. I had no doubts about her intentions until now.”

  “And now? You doubt her?”

  “It gets in the psyche, Sister Young,” said Mr. Ludsic through gritted teeth. “I have seen parents robbed of their children who will look into my eyes and say with unwavering certainty that their infants are receiving the utmost of care. That they seek no reunion with their children, for they are in better hands.” He wiped a hand over his sparse hair. “It robs rational minds of honest fear and puts illusions of awe in place of terror and revulsion.”

  “Illusions?”

  “Led by the words of Haddock, we believe a certain mind-washing is accomplished, new thoughts seeded and convictions encouraged to take root.”

  “The emissary did not speak to Minister Capstone.”

  That put a hitch in Mr. Ludsic’s tirade. His glance across at her was shrewd, mean, and stupid.

  “On whose side do you stand, Sister Young? If you were not aware, we are at war—a war against one man and an army of beasts—but a war none-the-less.”

  “My order takes no part in wars, Mr. Ludsic,” said Sister Young. “I stand with history and truth only.”

  “Mama! Watch this!” called Liwellynn from the cliffs above the bay. She ran and leapt into the air, soaring in an arc out from the rocks and breaking the wave swell with a small splash. Her dive was followed by a streamer of bubbles, and she emerged grinning, hair plastered to her neck.

  Amanda swallowed her heart from where it had risen into her throat and clapped. “Amazing darling!” she called, paddling close to stand on the sand, Liwellyn splashing up the rocks and stopping to peer into a tide pool.

  “How many animals do you think there are, Mama?” she asked, holding a little purple crab in her cupped hands.

  “You should ask your teacher to show you, darling,” Amanda answered.

  “Every wyrm is a dangerous wyrm, Captain,” said Mr. Reed. “the wild ones because of their wildness, and the tame because of Haddock’s influence. The best course, where safety is the primary goal, would be not to allow one on your vessel. But that threshold is long behind us.”

  Captain Havern set a cup down before the Minister and took his own seat. The suite Amanda Capstone, Mr. Ludsic, and Mr. Reed would use during the voyage boasted a fine entertaining space. To the Captain it felt harsh and stark, as his guests had set the sunlights to mimic Eros. “In your estimate, Honorable Minister, are there any particular risks to take preventive action on?”

  “Aside from the firebreath and tendency towards man eating?” Mr. Reed turned his cup on its cork mat. “I’d suggest locking the door and cutting the oxygen before somebody loses limbs or their life. But you of course have already promised them liberty while aboard.”

  “Yes, the first tenant of diplomacy is to murder foreign emissaries,” said Scholar Felsdam quietly from his kneeling seat by the door to Capstone’s room. “Very tact, Minister.”

  “The first tenant? Scholar, we long ago passed the time for diplomacy.”

  “No hostile action will be tolerated on my ship,” Captain Havern said, firmly. “From any party. This is a mission of peace.”

  “I sincerely hope you succeed, Captain, but for my part, I wouldn’t trust a wyrm not to bite. They are carnivores, it is in their nature to hunt.” Mr. Reed gestured to the door. “Haddock may have managed to raise that girl up to be a wyrm-tamer, but I would sooner trust a man that promises his lions are docile than one who claims that of a wyrm.”

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  “She is quite capable of controlling herself, I would think,” said Felsdam. “They are diplomats, Mr. Reed, need I remind that diplomats were never the cause of any harm on Theta Mars.”

  “What is your meaning, Scholar?” asked Havern before Reed’s snarl could sprout voice.

  “Several times Wyrms came to speak before parliament,” he explained. “To announce the Expulsion decree and again when the colony requested to negotiate. The only injuries were a few scratches around narrow door frames and a wing of pews knocked over. Most of humanities dealing with wyrms have come in complete civility.”

  “Hence the monument to the dead at the university—I’m sure all those passings are unrelated to teeth, fyre, and claws?” snapped Reed.

  Felsdam sighed, “I’m too old and too tired to argue this with you again. Captain, I advise that you take no action. The emissaries, I believe, will cause your ship and your crew no harm.”

  “Thank you for your council, Scholar, and you for yours, Minister,” said Havern, standing to leave. Minister Reed huffed and flurried his way to his private rooms. Felsdam remained by Capstone’s door. “Is there anything I may offer you for comfort, Scholar?” asked the Captain.

  “No, thank you,” said Felsdam. “I do not believe my wife will be long.”

  The comb slid slickly through the coils of brown hair. Amanda set it aside and parted sections for a braid. “I can do my own hair, mama,” Liwellynn said, shifting her seat on the stone. A white silk cloak billowed around her in the wind that wound its way in through the tunnels.

  “I know darling, but it’s a special occasion,” Amanda said. “You’ll let your mother dote a little won’t you? Before you go and grow up completely.”

  Liwellynn laughed, “you’re worried I’ll forget you?”

  “No,” Amanda lied.

  “I won’t, Mama. You know I won’t,” she said, as Amanda tied the end of her braid.

  She stood and twirled. She was so tall, like George, and her smile, though she didn’t know it, was her grandfather’s. “How do I look?”

  “Like a seeker,” Amanda whispered.

  Liwellynn puffed a stray strand off her forehead. “Not yet, when we come back I will though.”

  Amanda walked with her out to the slope, and stood on the stones under the red tinged evening. The pool of the stream glittered in its basin with the first impatient stars.

  “There she is, a seeker on her first knowing,” said George as he met them. He enfolded his daughter in a hug and spun her around.

  “Papa! You’ll mess up my cloak!” she laughed, but she held onto him a moment longer, after he loosened his grip.

  Liwellynn looked long into Amanda’s eyes, and was gone. There was no need for a goodbye.

  “You raised her well,” George said, as Amanda settled by the pool, tracing her reflection in the still water.

  “I don’t know that I…” she paused, watching as her reflection shifted, from the woman she knew herself to be, to the narrow head and shining crest of a red wyrm. She had only seen her once before, but she knew her anywhere.

  George stepped beside her, his reflection a man she had hardly known, with burning eyes and a terrible scar.

  “She loves her as you love her,” said George and the Teeth of the Lion. “She raised her as you would have raised her.”

  “I know,” said Amanda and the Inferno That Consumes All.

  DuCourt watched Amanda Capstone as she slept, lip twitching over fitful dreams. The restless tremors that crossed her were not unfamiliar to DuCourt. Long ago James had dreamed like this. She hadn’t known why then, and it had worried her for a time. Liam dreamed the same, in the Triad’s cave, as had their fellow students and she did not doubt, herself as well.

  Amanda had been beautiful, when they were young. DuCourt had seen her occasionally, gleaming with gemstones, Theta Martian silver and silk, at high society functions her father was hosting and James, as his newest naturalist, had brought DuCourt along to. She was her father’s liaison with the orbital, managing his exports there. She spoke almost like a starborn, and had seemed frivolous to DuCourt. Though after the Expulsion, she had managed her father’s off-world enterprises quite well. On Theta Mars, she had been a princess. Without a planet, she was just another refugee. A wealthy one, but homeless all the same.

  Their circles had ceased to overlap then. DuCourt had heard a few years ago that she had taken office, but by then she and Liam had all but completely retreated from activism and politics.

  Space had done to Capstone what it had to them all. Made them ancient when Theta Mars would have only left them wisened. Disease and maladaptation papered her skin, reddened her eyes, and shot her once thick hair through with grey. She twitched now on her bunk, thin and feathery, sweat matting her bedding.

  DuCourt had never found it in her heart to hate Capstone. The daughter, she had come to know, shared not the sins of the father. She often wondered if Capstone hated her, for her role in the Expulsion—or what, at least, the government had blamed on her at the time—things she had not and could not have orchestrated, or prevented.

  She shifted, drawing shaky breath, and her eyes fluttered open. DuCourt leant her arm, helping her to rise and sit up in her berth. She put a cup of cool water in her hands and sat with her in the dim bedroom, sharing the quiet.

  “I’ve doubted—” began Capstone, voice thick. She sipped from the cup. “Over these years I’ve doubted that it was real. It seemed at times a terrible nightmare.”

  DuCourt said nothing, but pulled the blanket that had slipped down back around Capstone’s shoulders. She didn’t know to what the woman was referring, there were many things behind her that could have felt as bad dreams.

  “That glimpse of her grief, it’s still there, burning like a comet in my heart. Were your teachers lessons like that? Shining, eternal?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said DuCourt, “and yet, no. Not everything remains. They were strangers to our minds, she had years to learn the shape of us, and I’m sure, a desire that you remember.” She couldn’t stop the bitter flash of jealousy. The empress had but once looked at her, never had any offer been made to share her knowing. DuCourt would have cherished it, even in the heartrending grief.

  “You have children?” Capstone asked.

  “No,” she said softly. “Liam and I, we are sterile.”

  “By choice?”

  “By choice. In our condition… there was a risk we might be… territorial, in a sense. Violent maybe. Or—possibly worse—we might pass it on to offspring.”

  “It is so terrible?”

  “I would not say that, no. But it is not ours to propagate, assuming it is heritable.”

  Capstone nodded, “it is a strange thing, fear.”

  DuCourt uncovered the bowl of broth on the side table and traded it for Capstone’s water cup.

  “I was angry for a long time, angry because all around me were voices shouting that I had been robbed, telling me that I was poorer, lacking. That something had been taken, that the unforgivable had been done to me. Those voices had no knowledge of the truly unforgivable. Not as I did, not as she did. Those voices made me doubt. George didn’t of course, but George was always that way. Solid, faithful. He kept my faith when I would not have. It’s only now that he is gone that I succumb to these doubts, that I chase assurances.”

  “And did you find them?” DuCourt asked, pining to know, to feel again, what she could no longer. “I am sorry, they are truths not for me to pry into.”

  “No, Madeline—may I use that name? It is good. You are the only one aboard this ship who would understand, at least in part. Perhaps your Liam as well, but,” Capstone paused to sip weakly at the broth. “My fellow ministers… ignorance and fear, greed possibly, those are the truths they paint with. They were young men when we left Theta Mars. All they have known of ‘governance’ is built on a platform constructed by those who came before.”

  “Is it not the same for yourself?” DuCourt asked quietly. “You keep your father’s industries, as few as they are, that made the leap to space.”

  “I do, and I am,” said Capstone. “I always wondered if there was a reason they chose my daughter. We could have gone to death with my father, it would have been fair—children for children. She had every right to take us as blood for her blood. My daughter was not the easiest child to take, there should have been repercussions… if it was not her… if it was not done in her way…” she sipped again. “It is not compulsion, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “She did not put some sort of spell on us. It was simply the truth.”

  “I know.”

  “I left Liwellynn that night expecting that I would never see her again. It hurt, yes, but I knew that it would be well.” Capstone’s hands trembled around the half full bowl. “I hadn’t thought that—but now of course it was always her intention to—she raised her as I would have. It was my love for her—and George’s—that she knew, that guided her all these years to love my daughter. And now I have it back. Madeline? Do you understand? They’ve sent it back to me.” she paused, blinking back tears. “I have the years without her, yes, long, lonely years… now I have the years with her, as well.”