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  Sediryl swept in, wearing a black cloak over her gown. She kneeled alongside him and began doing... something that he didn't feel very accurately, but it involved laboring over his torso.

  "Se... Sediryl?" he said weakly. "What are you doing here? No one is supposed to interrupt the vigil..."

  "I know," she said, grinning that feral grin at him. Her eyes were full of shadows; he couldn't read them. She resumed her work.

  "You're... you're going to... ruin it—"

  "I know," she said. "That's the point." She reached over and pried his jaws open, then shoved something—somethings?—so far down his throat he swallowed just to keep from gagging. "There, that should help."

  "What..."

  "An anti-toxin, among other things," she said, and waved away his protest. "I know, I shouldn't know there is one. I shouldn't know a lot of things, eh? But I do." She leaned closer, still grinning, but there wasn't the faintest shred of humor in her eyes. "I know all about this rite, since it was denied to me when I tried to make my lover part of the family, so I could properly marry him."

  "What!" he hissed.

  "Oh yes," Sediryl said. "You may be a terrible, awful outworlder, friend Vasiht'h, but at least you're not human. If you want to find any alien more offensive to the Eldritch, you need look no further than Terra... where we were born."

  "What!" he exclaimed again, so shocked he lost a few heartbeats. And then because the information was simply unbelievable, the word came out again, for emphasis. "What!"

  "Oh yes," she said, laughing. "Just like your Pelted, we had human origins. Even worse: long, long ago we were human. But unlike the Pelted, we chose to divorce ourselves, and engineered our apartness to guarantee we could never go back. You Pelted had your existence forced on you by humans. We clawed ours free by force and fled our parent race. So, no, there would never be any returning for a human, and never any hope of one becoming family, no matter how much one of us might wish it. Even if we are closer kin to humans than we will ever be to a Harat-Shar pardine... or, Lady! A creature like you." She slapped his back with something. "All right, up with you."

  "I can't..." He stopped; he could feel his paws. "What did you give me?"

  "I told you," she said. "An anti-toxin. You should be able to walk... carefully. I've hobbled you so don't take long steps."

  "Why... why are you doing this?" Vasiht'h asked. "Sediryl!"

  "You haven't asked what I'm doing yet," she said with a grin... and then hauled on the rope. To his dismay, the joints in his wings and arms sent spears of pain straight up his spine; he stumbled to his feet in sheer surprise and the pain subsided.

  "What did you do to me!" he said.

  "I tied you so I could control you, of course," she said. "I figured you wouldn't come if I asked." She bounced the rope lightly on his back. "Do what I tell you to and I won't pull."

  "You haven't left me much of a choice," he said from between gritted teeth.

  "Yes, well.... no," she said, and laughed. "Now walk."

  "Where are we going?" he asked, but he obeyed, fighting anger and distress. Sensation had returned to his limbs; he could feel where she'd knotted his hands behind his humanoid back, wrapping the rope around his waist as well as his wrists. Then there was some kind of complex arrangement trapping his wings against his spine... it hurt just trying to tug them free.

  "Don't bother," she said. "You'll just make the knots tighter."

  "So you learned bondage in the Alliance, is that it?" he hissed.

  "I'm surprised you even know about bondage, given the Glaseahn disinterest in sex," she said with insane cheer. "Now get on, there, pony."

  "You left my mouth free," Vasiht'h said. "What's to keep me from screaming?"

  "You can scream all you want," she said. "No one will hear. They're all off in a padded room, listening for your thoughts and wondering why they can't hear them." She laughed. "I've been hoping for an opportunity like this for so long... they have no idea how well I've planned it."

  "Planned what?" Vasiht'h finally asked.

  "Their comeuppance," she said, and slapped his back with the rope. "Now move."

  As he walked, Vasiht'h grasped frantically for the mindline and found it dead. Not all the hauling, the stamping, the wishing or the reaching forced it open... and he had no idea how to mindspeak the other Eldritch, though he tried, calling for them as loudly as he could.

  "No doubt," Sediryl said as she drove him through the halls for all the worlds like a carriage-driver guiding her horses, "you are trying very hard to tell Jahir or anyone else what's befallen you." She pursed her lips, looking up at the ceiling, and piped, " 'Help! The madwoman has abducted me!' " She laughed. "Don't bother. The anti-toxin wasn't the only pill I slipped you. The other will cancel your mental abilities. No use doing all this if they can hear you in other ways and come to your rescue, ah?"

  "You thought of everything," Vasiht'h muttered, his mood foul.

  "That I have," she said cheerily, and slapped his rump with the rope. "Get along now." She paused, then added, "I believe I'm even having fun."

  "I'm glad one of us is," Vasiht'h muttered.

  Fight her! something whispered. He shook his head, trying to clear the thought from it. There was no use fighting. Not only would it not accomplish anything, except maybe to tie the knots tighter and hurt him worse, but he was no fighter. He was a healer, and while half his arsenal had been neutralized by her esper-blanking pill (and who had ever heard of such a thing! He was alarmed), the other half... the more important half... she'd left him.

  He could still talk.

  "So a comeuppance," he said as they marched out of the house into a clear, cool spring night. The stars were a revelation; it had been a while since he'd been on a planet with atmosphere. The twinkling was beautiful, like gemstones throwing off sparkles. "Revenge for a spurned lover?"

  "Don't be ridiculous," Sediryl said. "I'm not avenging him. I'm avenging myself. On this entire debased culture. On a society that could call me a fallen woman for falling in love and daring to consummate that love. On a people who could mock me for making a mistake, to my face! And drive me from my own homeworld with their ridicule."

  Something about that felt wrong. "You don't seem like the kind of person who could be driven anywhere," he said.

  She snorted. "You don't know me very well, then. Go on, into the trees."

  "Where are we going?" Vasiht'h asked.

  "Not your concern."

  He wanted to point out that it was very much his concern, but doing so wouldn't get him anywhere. "Interrupting the rite doesn't seem a very useful way to punish the people who hurt you," he said instead. "If I fail, it's your family that'll suffer, while the people I'd think you would hate—the xenophobic, backwards ones—are the ones who'll benefit, because then they can break off the wedding and keep the alien influence at bay."

  Why are you bothering with this? She's a lost cause.

  Which was a thought he would never have had under normal circumstances... maybe he was going mad? Then again, he'd never been kidnapped before; Goddess knew what stresses he was under. He twitched his flanks as if to remove an offending fly, thinking that no one was a lost cause, who still lived. Sediryl was in pain. Maybe he could help.

  "You think like a mortal," Sediryl said with a sigh. At the narrow-eyed glance he threw over his shoulder, she said, "That's what Eldritch call you short-lived species, you know. Gathanaes, "mortal." As if we were somehow less mortal just for living ten times as long." Her smile was thin. "Nevertheless. You're thinking too small, Vasiht'h. My aim is not the destruction of this wedding. It's the destruction of this race."

  He remembered, sudden and ice-shocking, her off-hand comment about a civil war culling the species.

  "You see," she continued airily, "if I disrupt the wedding, it won't go through. The xenophobes will win. And if I disrupt it the right way... well. I'll ensure that no outworlder ever comes here again. And then the society will collapse, friend Vasiht'
h, and the Eldritch will die... and I will finally have my revenge."

  "You would kill an entire species in a fit of pique?" Vasiht'h said, horrified.

  The abrupt yank on his rope made him fall to one knee from the pain. Sediryl lunged in front of him and hissed, "It's not pique. It's justice. It's removing a mistake from the universe. And I won't be the only one doing it... the entire species will abet me. The blame won't be mine alone." She pulled back, eyes burning. "Do you understand now? I might set this all in motion, but if they choose to stop it... if they grow enough to deserve to live... then they can still do it. But if they remain benighted and sick, then they will career down the road I am about to lay down for them, and they will have deserved that too. It's perfect." She lifted her chin, voice gone cold. "I'm no simple storybook villain, Vasiht'h. I'm the pivot that history will turn on. Either I will become the midwife to our rebirth... or I will be the blacksmith who makes the sword we turn on our own necks."

  "Sediryl," Vasiht'h said desperately, "you can't do this."

  "Give me one good reason why not," she said.

  "Because," he said, "it's wrong. It's wrong, to take away other people's choices. It's wrong to play at being a goddess. We're not meant for such powers."

  She smiled. "You aren't, maybe, with your so-short lifespan. But me?" She straightened and tugged him toward a tree. He limped after her, desperate and feeling as if one of his wing-arms was only precariously still in its socket after her last punishment.

  "You never did ask," she said as she tied him fast to the trunk, "how I was going to precipitate my grand plan. How I was going to ensure that no offworlder would ever choose to come back."

  His heart was pounding painfully. "You really don't have to tell me."

  "Ah, but then you wouldn't know!" she said, smiling. She leaned forward. "A gruesome murder. Something horrific enough to make the Alliance label this world off-limits. Maybe even something bad enough to damage the treaty? We'll see."

  Vasiht'h met her eyes. "You are not a murderer."

  She paused at that. Then lifted her brows. "You're so certain."

  "Yes," Vasiht'h said. "I am."

  "Even though I'm planning the murder of my entire race?" Sediryl said casually, swinging the remains of the rope so it smacked his side. It distracted him, the little pinch of pain at his wing joints, the constant blows, but he focused on what he felt, knew, believed with all his heart was the truth. She had not been able to think of herself as her race's murderer, or she would not have concocted the entire fiction about being its midwife, about the possibility of its transformation. And even in that myth, her dark side had not been the murderer, but the manufacturer of the weapon the race would use to suicide.

  "You are not a murderer," he repeated, certain as Aksivaht'h had breath.

  She met his eyes, held them.

  Then she grinned. "You're right, I'm not."

  He blew out a breath in relief.

  "But I'm also not above letting other people... or in this case, other animals... do my dirty work," she said, and his guts knotted. She checked her work, tugging here and there to make sure he was well and truly affixed to his tree. "There are animals in these woods that will rip you apart in a fashion most spectacular. Far better than I could, anyway, with my poor imagination for such things. All I have to do..." She drew a knife from the shadows of her cloak. "Is invite them." A flash of starlight against keen edge and pain sprang up all along his side. "I believe if they aim here they'll get your organs, yes? You'll probably die slowly, unless they find that thing you use for a secondary heart down between your forelegs."

  "If they find me ripped apart by animals, they won't blame the Eldritch," Vasiht'h said, gasping. "Your plan will fail."

  Sediryl chuckled. "You just keep trying, don't you." She tossed the knife on the ground. "There are Eldritch footprints here. There's a knife conveniently stamped with a centicore and enameled in green and electrum. You are tied to the tree with knots that, I assure you, were not tied by animal paws. If some horde of predators devoured your carcass after you were killed by an Eldritch who dragged you to the middle of nowhere to kill you, well... you are in the middle of the woods at night." She studied him and nodded, eyes lighting with satisfaction. "You probably have a half hour or so, before they pick up your scent, maybe less. You have enough time to pray to your goddess to accept you back into her mind, if you're so inclined."

  He said nothing, staring at her while the blood drained, hot and swift, down the curve of his belly.

  "What, no last words? No comments?" she said. "I at least expected an 'I hate you!'"

  "I don't hate you, Sediryl," Vasiht'h said, quiet. "I feel sorry for you. I'm sorry that you hurt so badly. I'm sorry that you've been driven to this place. And above all, I'm sorry that no one was there for you, to help you work through your hurt before it could poison you this way."

  "Pity," Sediryl said. "How tiresome, and how predictable." She smiled. "Farewell, friend Vasiht'h."

  This was not how he had planned to die.

  No, this was not how he had planned to die. Goddess knew, he hadn't even believed the poison would kill him... not truly, not in his heart. He'd expected to spend the rest of his life with Jahir. Maybe find a priestess to give him children to take them back to the starbase to raise. But not to chain Jahir, the way the Royal Tams seemed to have chained their Eldritch, with generations of children as... as some kind of guilt. No, he thought with a fond, but faint, smile, it was far more likely that his children would have become Jahir's rather than the other way around... a generational army of Glaseah to help him settle this world's problems properly. Surely that's all the world needed... a good, long, multiple-mortal-lifetime therapy session.

  How can you laugh when you're bleeding to death?

  And that was a question he didn't know how to answer. Maybe it was the mental image of Jahir with Glaseahn kits sleeping on his stomach. Or the image of Jahir accompanied by a long line of Glaseah, growing up as they marched alongside him, growing old, dying, and being replaced by fresh versions. A renewable resource, like seeds from a favored tree.

  Doesn't that idea bother you? You hated the thought of Lesandurel being chained to the Tam-illee family. But you would indenture your own scions to an Eldritch?

  It wasn't indenture. It was service. Willing service, it would have to be... but then, he'd probably have enough children that at least one would be willing. Really, who wouldn't? The opportunity of a lifetime, something out of a book... to save a world.

  Assuming all your children are therapists...

  Not even that, he thought. There would be work for engineers, and linguists, for chefs and maids, for agronomists, for scientists, for administrators... and just for people, to be friends, to be Jahir's sanity. The way he was.

  Or at least, the way he had been supposed to be, before Sediryl dragged him out here. And now, if he died, all of that future would be forfeit. And Jahir would be left alone. That was surely the worst.

  The worst? So is Jahir more important to you than his world?

  That question gave him pause. He looked up at what stars he could see through the thin new leaves, some of them so young he could see the star-glow through them, just. "There's no separating them," he said. "I know that now. I can have Jahir, and his world alive and thriving... or I have neither." He sighed out, looking down at the knots tying him to the tree and trying to flex his wrists. "I made my choice. To be honest, I made it years ago, that first day that I met him, that I saw him trying to make some terminally sick children laugh. I already love him like a brother, and... loving someone means you inherit their family." He closed his eyes, trying to lean back against the trunk, to ease the pressure on his spine. "I would have gladly done it. Made formal what already is. But even if I can't... nothing will take away that it already is. Recognized by rite or not."

  The blood seeped down the curve of his side, dripped onto the duff. Eventually, it drew the feeling from his extremities with it,
and it grew harder to think. Not much time, he thought, and opened his eyes... on the knife.

  Which was close enough to his paw to reach. Could he? No, there was no way to get it to his hands, and he couldn't use it with a paw.

  ...but maybe, just maybe... he could bury it. The knots would still remain to attest to an Eldritch's hand, but if the knife was missing, they wouldn't conclude past any doubt that the groom's family had to have done it... would they?

  It was worth a chance. To give the world some slim hope of surviving him, it was worth it.

  Marshaling the last of his strength, Vasiht'h began to paw a hole in the dirt. He was still digging when his consciousness began to fail.

  No! he thought. Not before I finish! Please, Goddess! Let me at least do this one thing... please—

  "Arii! ARII! Stop fighting me, it's okay, it's OKAY—" /Vasiht'h! You're safe!/

  Vasiht'h stopped struggling against the arms, and doing so made it clear they were not holding him down, but embracing him. An embrace he found familiar, though he'd only felt it on the rarest of occasions. He and Jahir touched hands frequently in their work, but to hold one another was something reserved for the most acute of emotions.

  The relief he felt at being alive, at being reunited with his friend, was definitely, definitely acute. He pressed his head into Jahir's much broader shoulder and dug his fingers into the Eldritch's back. "You're here! I'm here! I... wait... what... the ritual!"

  "You passed," another voice said, and he stiffened in panic as Sediryl grinned at him from behind Jahir's back.

  At the /!!/ that threatened to shatter the mindline, Jahir said, "No, no! It's all right! Everything that happened was part of the rite."

  "W-what?"

  "We had to test you," Sediryl said. "And everyone agreed that I would make the most credible villain for the piece, a far better one than, say, one of the groom's family. Jahir said you wouldn't fall quite so hard for the obvious hatred, and would have an easier time believing something more... um... psychiatric."

  "Then you..."

  "...didn't tie you up and leave you for the wild animals," Sediryl said, laughing. "That was just the scenario we played out. Even then, I think you almost guessed it wasn't real a couple of times."