Princess of the Void ch 40 - floor position

Smell that? That new-volume smell? Welcome to the third tale of the Taiikari empire, gang. Oooh am I excited for this volume. It's going to be a lot of fun, I hope.

You're going to notice a bit of recap here and there in this chapter. My goal there is to let people start at later volumes and not be totally lost.

Grant Hyde—Grantyde, Prince Consort of the Black Pike, as the Taiikari call him—kneels before the Princess of the Black Pike. His kneepad plants on the arena floor, within the painted circle where he saw his warrior wife fight like a valkyrie.

Now it’s his turn to stand across from her.

He knew he’d have to learn this, eventually. He can’t stay innocent forever. The Imperial coterie in which he’s found himself will eat him alive otherwise.

These are the things he tells himself, but a part of him wishes this lesson wasn’t necessary.

The Void Princess Sykora, his kidnapper and commanding officer and the love of his life, surveys him critically. Her tail switches back and forth from the back of her baggy joggers. Today she wears little bronze bangles along its length; they glint in the clinical light of the arena. “Other leg, dove,” she says.

“Shit.” He swaps knees. “I’m used to leading from the right.”

“It’s my right. Remember? So that’s floor position.” She oversees his shuffling correction. “Good.” She taps her tail against the floor; it makes a musical chime. “Low position.”

He stands and puts his left hand on his hip. “This one’s the little teapot, right?”

She chuckles. “If you say so, Maekyonite. High position.”

He braces his legs, extends his knees, and steadies himself in a half-crouch. He tries to make it look as graceful as he remembers it being on the gallery floor. “Why do they call this one high position if I’m getting lower?”

“I’m the one going high, dove. You’re the base.” She couches her forearm in the crook of her elbow and pulls it across her body in a trapezius stretch. Grant admires the soft crescent of cleavage the movement forms on her chest.

He needs to focus. His wife is teaching him how to dance.

“We’re going to start with a simple routine,” she says. “Just make the changes when I call them out, and then do the stand bridge when I say so. Show me the stand bridge?”

He obediently extends his arms.

“Lovely. Okay.” Her tail thumps the ground. “Floor position to start.” She raises a red-switched box and clicks a button on it. An arpeggio-heavy string orchestra begins, its tune a beguiling interplay between organic and synthetic.

“First step, lady approaches.” Sykora takes three winding steps toward him, her hips swaying gracefully with her approach. “I extend my hand, and if you want to accept the dance, you just…”

He takes her palm.

“Ooh. The bachelor accepts.” Sykora licks her lips. “Maybe I have a chance to get my bed warmed tonight.”

“Maybe.” He winks. “Play your cards right.”

She winks back. “Floor position.”

He drops to one knee—the correct knee, this time. She walks a slow circle around him. Her tail lingers on his waist. “One two three, two two three, three two and low position.”

Grant stands up. His little wife’s tail goes rigid and her feet leave the floor with him. She twirls into his arms and dips perilously backward until she’s on the verge of going upside down. She laughs. “You are so damn tall, dove.”

Her foot hooks into the crook of his arm and she slips through, executing a graceful half-spin. Her butt rubs against his side as she twists herself right side up again. He watches her sinuous passage across his body with no small awe.

Her tail thwacks the floor twice. Ding, ding.

“Five two three, six two three, floor two three—”

He drops back down to one knee. She flickers around him to the front again and executes a neat standing turn atop his bent thigh. Her dark, waist-length hair flips like a silk scarf across his face. “You’d be doing a tail thing with me at this point. Don’t worry about it. We’re going low position into bridge soon, right? One, two, three, up—”

He stands, and she spins into his body, her thighs snapping around his waist, her arms on his shoulders. She splays herself across his outstretched arms like a lounge singer across a grand piano. Her eyes sparkle. “And now turn with me, turn turn turn, good. High position.”

She slips up and across his shoulder. Her body slips off his. He gasps a “Shit” and grabs her.

“Oh, dove.” she laughs. “It’s okay. I’m bracing on the floor with my tail. You just have to… uh…”

In grabbing her, his palm has landed right between her legs. His fingers press against her crotch. Her lithe legs close around his forearm.

“Um,” she says. “Floor position.”

“Babe,” Grant says. “We need a dance instructor.”

Sykora pouts. “Am I not explaining it right?”

“You are,” he says. “But when we’re alone, we end up fucking instead of dancing.”

She whines as he eases out and off of her. “But that’s my favorite part.”

He sits up, the arena floor chilly on his butt, and ties the condom off. Sykora wasn’t thrilled when he started carrying these around, but considering the varied locations in which they give into temptation, it’s become necessary. His wife commands a mile-long voidship with seven hundred subjects aboard. He’s not about to leave his DNA all over it. Sykora assures him that there most of the Pike’s janitorial staff are automatons, and he’s seen the humming little cleaner bots making their rounds. But he put his foot down (especially once he found out how enjoyably unobtrusive Taiikari rubbers are).

“It's my favorite part, too,” he says. “But it’s not educational. I think we already get enough practice at this. Someone’s gotta keep us on-task.”

She giggles. “Perhaps you have a point.”

“I’d love to dance with you one-on-one more.” He kisses her clavicle. “But I gotta figure out what the hell I’m doing first.”

Sykora wiggles her plump blue butt back into her joggers. “I’ll ask the majordomo. She’s fabulous at this stuff. And she’ll tolerate a modicum of handsiness.”

“Floor position,” Vora says. She pushes her glasses up her nose. “Prince Consort. Your foot needs to be planted. Her Majesty needs a stable platform.”

“Oh, it was stable enough,” Sykora says.

Vora shakes her head. “Your heel slipped.”

Sykora tucks a loose billow of her tank top back in. “You, uh, you imagined that.”

Grant scoots his foot back. Majordomo Vorakaia is a much more stringent teacher than Sykora. He wants to complain, but he’s improving much quicker under her unsparing tutelage.

“All right.” Vora claps. “We’ll run it from the top. Oryn and I will do it with you.” She looks over her shoulder and her eyes light up with the compulsion flash. “Let’s dance, Ory.”

Vora’s husband, a stout, barrel-chested Taiikari man with little corkscrew horns and a genial smile, steps to her side. He’s one of the shipboard psychologists. A proud nepotism case, he told Grant. Perks of a powerful spouse.

Before his initiation into the world of the Taiikari, Grant would have looked at Vora’s mind-controlling flash to her husband with horror. Without anticompel glass over their eyes, Taiikari males are powerless to resist any command that accompanies the natural compulsion the female of their species are capable of. All men are powerless. All men but human men, apparently.

And okay—it’s still messed up. Of course it is. But the usually compulsion-proof Grant has experienced it, since. He’s felt how it is, to be compelled by someone who’s in love with you.

He doesn’t intend to feel it again. But he sees the smile on Oryn’s lips as he takes Vora’s hand, the little rub of his thumb on her knuckle.

“God, I’m sweating.” Oryn fans his stomach with his shirt as he takes floor position. “You’re exposing how behind I am on conditioning.”

Vora glances at Sykora. “Pretend you didn’t hear that, Majesty.” She removes her glasses and places them in Oryn's shirt pocket. Her hand goes to his arm.

Sykora mirrors her Majordomo’s movements. Her palm is warm and humid on Grant's bicep.

Vora clicks the music on. Her tail taps to the darkwave groove. “First sequence. Four, five, six…”

Grant can’t say whether Oryn’s position as a shrink is nepotism or not, but when it comes to cutting a rug, the guy’s qualifications are absolutely unimpeachable. He and the majordomo move like poetry, like flowing water. Oryn is more than a pillar—he’s the wind bearing his wife like a balletic bird, catching and releasing Vora as she spins and slithers around him. They are in flawless sync with one another.

For as close and compatible as Grant feels with Sykora, he looks at Oryn and Vora’s surefooted interdependence and feels a pang of jealousy at how effortlessly they fit together. Oryn’s tail loops and stabilizes around Vora on the riskier moves. Grant and his wife are doing their best, but these dances were made for two Taiikari. And he’ll never be Taiikari.

Then Sykora’s calf wraps around his arm, and her chest smushes into his face. And he isn’t sure how he could ever be jealous of any other man in history.

As they decamp to Vora’s cabin through the voidship’s brass-and-scarlet hallways, he nods and waves to the crewmates he recognizes. It’s an ever-increasing list. That’s Meena, a peppy strawberry shortcake of a woman who works in the hangar bay. Her marine boyfriend, Ajax, was one of Grant’s earliest associates aboard. She delivers a bow and a salute to the Princess and a bubbly “Hi, sire!” to Grant.

Sykora has gotten better at controlling the little downward twist of her mouth whenever a woman is too familiar with her husband. But Grant always looks for it. Her greediness for him puts a dash of cinnamon warmth in his chest.

Every day, he feels more and more at home among the beautiful aliens who have claimed him as their fellow citizen. He supposes, in part, that’s a consequence of where he ended up. Would he feel welcome as the only Maekyonite in a Taiikari city, surrounded by gawking red-eyed gremlins? He doesn’t know; he doesn’t even know what a Taiikari city looks like. But here, aboard the Black Pike, by the side of its unquestioned ruler, he’s granted absolute deference and respect. It’s been difficult, sometimes, coaxing the crew of the Pike to treat him more like a comrade than a nobleman. But over the last few cycles, his charm offensive has flaked some of the natural Taiikari obedience away and uncovered a few friendships.

Sykora views his efforts with a certain discomfort—it’s not how nobles are trained to act, she tells him. But she’s never tried to prevent it. When their marriage began, she stubbornly insisted he was her property. She’s just as stubborn now about his freedom.

Vora’s cabin is a cozy chestnut-colored hideaway with the smell of leather clinging pleasantly to its chilly air-con. The four of them take their pick of a hodgepodge of overstuffed chairs and talk idly about the Pike and the past, the world Grant left behind and the new one he’s joined. Vora uncorks a floral bouquet of sloshing, colorful drinks.

Grant selects amrita, a rich, dark blue spirit that is one of his favorite alien discoveries. In a fortunate coincidence, it’s also one of the few drinks with enough booze in it to affect him. His hosting species are literal lightweights.

Oryn tries his best to hide his consternation as Grant takes a sip of amrita like it’s wine.

“So how did you two meet?” he asks.

“Oh, we were an arranged marriage,” Vora says. “I met Ory when I was about a hectocycle old.”

“Mmhmm.” Oryn takes a strip of radish from the spread laid out on the hexagonal table. “We grew up together, more or less.”

“His mother’s a shipbuilder on Achra,” Vora says. “Having a daughter-in-law in the Imperial Void Navy was her way to a few lucrative contracts.”

“She was an absolute twerp in secondary school.” Oryn nibbles his crudité. “Always pulling my tail.”

Vora’s tail tuft swipes his. “Well, you were a rockhead.”

“I tried to convince my mother to call it off,” Oryn says. “Threatened to run off and join the navy. Not that they’d take a preteen.”

“It’s not so uncommon that the gents in the Void Navy are running from engagements,” Vora says. “Hence the nickname.”

Grant shifts in his seat. Its synthetic leather squeaks. “I haven’t heard the nickname.”

Oryn raises his hands in a pair of air brackets (the Taiikari equivalent of scare quotes). “The Bachelor’s Brigade, they call it. Anyway, she talked me down.”

“What’d she say?”

“She said tail tugging is just what you do before you’re brave enough to hold hands.” He scoots closer to his wife. “And she was right.”

Vora giggles. “She was sour when I stole him into the Navy anyway. She presumed I’d be a mostly absentee wife, I think.”

“Arranged marriage is very out of fashion on Maekyon,” Grant says.

“Well, monarchy is too, yes? They go tail-in-tail.” Oryn sits back into the overstuffed loveseat he and Vora occupy. “I’m not about to defend the practice. The majordomo and I got lucky. We’re certainly not about to entertain all the offers for Alakair’s hand.”

“That’s our son,” Vora adds. “He’s on Kontai right now at the academy, learning geoengineering. And calligraphy.”

Grant gives a surreptitious glance at the pipped collar of Oryn’s uniform. There’s the breedmate scar peeking over the lapel.

Oryn chuckles. “I’m sure that he’d reverse the order of that. Geo’s the backup plan right now, if you ask him.”

Grant sips his amrita. “What if I ask you?”

Oryn clears his throat. “He’ll be amazing at either. I’m sure. But there’s composing proclamations and there’s composing continents.”

“Discreetly stated, dear.” Vora smirks. “We’re hoping if he goes Geo, he might find his way back to the Pike someday. On the survey team, maybe.”

“I’d take a good calligrapher,” Sykora says. “My letters could use some spicing up.”

“Please do not encourage him, Majesty,” Vora says.

Grant selects a three-bulbed fruit, about the size of a cherry. He’s never had one of these. “Was he an only child?”

“He was,” Oryn says. “That’s not regular, but we decided it was how we’d start. Maybe sometime we’ll have a litter.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you have the technology to decide these things,” Grant says. He bites into the cherry thing.

“Oh—” Vora reaches out. “Those are zaikem. You peel those, Prince Consort.”

“Hmm?” Grant chews. “But the skin’s tasty.”

Oryn laughs. “Why not? I’m sure it’s got plenty of fiber.”

Sykora plucks another zaikem and gives it an experimental bite. “I think Grantyde might be onto something.” There’s a fibrous crunch as she chews. “The number of children, you can decide,” she says around her mouthful. “The gender, you can’t. That’s illegal.” She spits out a crescent of rind. “Or we’d be awash in daughters.”

“That’s why my mother went for quantity,” Oryn says. “I was part of a large litter. Five of us, and we all had a strategy attached in the womb. I was quite literally born to be Vora’s husband.”

Grant can’t hide his grimace. “Jeez. That’s...”

“Awful?” Vora supplies.

“Yes.” Grant is privately relieved to hear her say it.

Vora nods. “We’re in a time of transition. The practices which we turned a blind eye to… it’s not fast, the change. But it’s there. And we’re trying to take part. One kid, and they can be whatever they want to be.”

“That’s kind of you,” Grant says.

“Check back in with us after he graduates the academy and tells us he’s writing greeting cards,” Oryn says. “We’ll see how kind we manage to be.”

Vora tsks. “Ory.”

A rising tritone chimes through the cabin. “That’s the bridge.” Vora stands up. “We can silence that.”

“That’s all right, majordomo.” Sykora lays her legs across Grant’s lap. “The priority tone has me curious.”

Vora clears her throat. “Answer audio only,” she says.

An amplified click as the call connects. “Mistress. We’ve got something big.” That’s one of the bridge ensigns. Shala, Grant thinks her name is. “Survey team reports one of our monitor probes may have picked up a post-light civilization.”

“Oh, my,” Vora murmurs. “What’s our level of confidence?”

“Eighty percent, ma’am. Multiple sweeps detected.” Shala’s voice is colored with a grin. “Maybe if you can pry Her Majesty off her hunky alien, we can do a briefing, huh?”

Sykora folds her hands in her lap. “I am present, Ensign.”

The voice immediately snaps to contrite formality. “Majesty. I spoke out of turn.”

The hardest thing to get used to, living with the Taiikari: you never say sorry.

“You did. But it appears you’re about to have a prime opportunity at recompense.” Sykora gives Grant a nudge. “This might be your first uplift, Grantyde. A rare event.”

“How many sweeps, Ensign?” Vora asks.

“At least a dozen detected, ma’am. Well within the margin of consideration for approach.”

“That’s successfully pried me.” Sykora stands up. “We’re on our way to the bridge. Prepare that briefing.”

“At once, Majesty.”

“Right. Dismissed.” Sykora finishes her wine as the call disconnects. She gives a shallow bow to Oryn. “Thank you for opening your home to us, Specialist.”

Oryn bows back, deep and at the waist. “The honor was mine, Majesty.”

“Fall in, majordomo and husband.” Sykora’s tail presses the door-open seal with a flourish. “It’s time to meet the new neighbors.”