THE MEMORY OF THE previous day’s work hung thick on me. Wind strained through the branches of that aged and mighty tree, tugging at the roof of the pavilion and making the ropes that secured it snap as though we were aboard some sailing ship lost in the middle of a wood.

“We might consider limiting their campaigns to the Norman territories,” Varro suggested in muttered tones.

Crossflane had frowned. “Are you sure they could make that distinction?”

They had not noticed that the Cielcin already were making that distinction, referring only to we Sollans as yukajjimn and exempting Kharn. If they could distinguish between the Extrasolarian king and ourselves, it stood to reason they could as easily mark the Empire from its Norman counterparts. But the memory of Valka’s kiss still moved in me, and even if it had not, I would never have proposed so viciously calculated a posture.

“We’re not at war with the Normans,” I said.

“And I mislike the thought of using the Cielcin to single out foreign powers,” Jinan added, who of course represented a foreign power. Smythe took this all in with a waved hand, indicating the arrival of the Cielcin contingent at the far treeline. Kharn’s eye drones hurried away to corral his children from where they’d wandered down to the river.

We had not, in the end, offered the Cielcin free range of the Norman Freeholds.

I’d had another idea.

“Prince Aranata, let me be clear about one thing,” Raine Smythe said pointedly once the xenobites were all present. “This is not a war you will win.” When the Cielcin balked, she asked, “How many fighters have you? Two hundred thousand? Half that?” I wondered if the prince’s delay were not an admission that the number was very much lower than that. “My legion numbers twenty thousand alone, and we have thousands of them.” She made my play then, and placed a projector on the table before her. An image of the galaxy sprouted in the air before us, detailing the spiral arms. “We’re here,” she said, and a point glowed red near where the Norma Arm brushed against the bulge of galactic center. “And here is everywhere your people have attacked us.” Orange points flared in a tight cluster against the white stars, stretching across the whole Veil of Marinus. Hundreds of worlds. Thousands. Billions of lives. “Here is our domain.” The entire Empire glowed then, highlighted a friendly blue, with green areas demarcating the Principalities of Jadd, the Lothrian Commonwealth, the Durantine Republic, Demarchy of Tavros, and a dozen dozen smaller human polities that stretched from the Perseus Arm at our galaxy’s edge to that same narrow place in Norma where the fighting was thickest.

Billions of stars. Tens of thousands of worlds. Untold trillions of lives.

I could see what I thought was shock in the Aeta’s face. Horror. And I knew my plan had had teeth. The Cielcin were predators, so we treat them like predators. We teach them humility. It might just be possible to shame them into a peace—to subordinate them—without bloodshed. Uvanari had surrendered on Emesh because it was beaten. It had been amenable to our demands because it was in our power—impressed by our power. If the only language the Cielcin truly understood was power, then we would speak the language of power.

“So many . . .” the prince said, voice thin and far away. He bridled almost at once. “We will not bend to you! We will not be slaves to yukajjimn!”

There really was no middle ground, it seemed. One was either master or slave. There was no partnership, no friendship. The concept of equanimity itself seemed as alien to the Cielcin as they were to us.

“Not slaves,” I said pointedly, speaking Galstani for my companions’ benefit and allowing the slave to translate for the Pale. Ignoring the pointed looks from Smythe and Crossflane, I pressed on. “Neutral equals. We simply end the fighting between us.”

Aranata’s lips peeled back over glassy teeth. “Neutral,” it said, repeating the word as though he had never heard it. “There is no such thing. We would be your puppets.”

I pressed my lips together, remembering the discussion from mere minutes before about using the Cielcin to target the Normans in our ever-expanding conquest of the Veil. I was spared the necessity of responding by Smythe, who offered, “You would be left to your own devices. We would help one another.”

“Serve one another?” Aranata’s face wrinkled. “Degeneracy.” The word he’d used, serve, suggested something more personal than a mere diplomatic relationship. We were talking past each other, each using words the other party did not fully understand.

Smythe rapped her knuckles against the tabletop, frustration evident but perhaps meaningless to the xenobites opposite us. “An arrangement could be found that’s mutually beneficial.”

The slave translator struggled with mutually beneficial for more than a minute. Through the stammering and the babble I caught the word serve again. To serve. To give anything was to serve the receiver, and the Aeta only take. There is no reciprocity, no obligation, no noblesse oblige among the Pale. Only power and those too weak to hold it. Oppressor and oppressed. Finally, the slave girl said, “We could find a way to service one another.”

Aranata hissed like a bushel of snakes and lashed out, striking the slave girl on the flank. His talons tore her flesh and she fell gasping, clutching at her side. I was nearer the edge of the table and rushed to help her, ignoring both Crossflane’s command to halt and the sudden tension that rippled through the Cielcin line. I did not know what I was doing, only that I could not stand by. I had no bandages, no medical expertise, but some instinct moved me. Aranata pushed himself to his feet. “Service,” he spat. The word carried clear sexual overtones, things I did not understand. “We will not be your slaves. I will not.”

The girl was not bleeding badly. For all the force of his blow, the prince had pulled his talons, and the wounds were little more than scratches. I helped her to sit up, careful not to look at her ruined, spidery hands or the way they pawed uselessly at her wounded side. She was so light—it felt like lifting driftwood—and insubstantial that I half-expected her to float away in my hands.

Nobuta wailed. “No, get away! She’s mine!” it said, and yanked the chain. I caught the silver thread in my fist. Years of strength refined in Emesh’s heavy gravity held fast, and I did not flinch, but glowered up at the alien child with flinty eyes. It quailed.

Not releasing the chain, I asked the girl, “Are you all right?”

She did not answer. Perhaps she could not. Her eyes! Reader, her eyes! They were like deep pools, mirrors reflecting . . . nothing. What light had been in them at birth was long quenched, and she only murmured my words back at me in the Cielcin tongue. “Are you all right?” Those eyes found mine, and for a moment I sensed the faintest, quiet spark in them, a lonely cinder hidden in the ash of a long-dead fire. She was not the woman from my vision, but then Aranata was not the dark lord I had seen. One of her ruined hands found mine, too-long fingers struggling to close. In a faint voice dry as old leaves she murmured two words I have never forgotten. So small were they, I strained to hear them. But heard them I did. “Kill me,” she said. It was the only time I heard her speak the tongues of men. Horrified, I yanked my hand away.

The spark in her went out.

Nobuta yanked the chain again, and I pulled. The little Cielcin came half out of its chair and let the chain go. A cry of surprise and pain escaped the xenobite, and rough hands seized me. I was pulled unceremoniously to my feet, felt the needlepoint prick of talons on my shoulders and arms. Two of Aranata’s men held me, forced my arms behind my back. Smythe was shouting for my release. One of the guards seized me by the hair, forced me to look up.

I thrust out my chin, straining against my guards. These Cielcin were not weak as the child had been, and I could not escape. Aranata stood in a rush, horned bulk towering over me. One massive hand seized me by my tunic front, and the Prince hissed, “Apologize.”

I did no such thing, fists clenched behind my back.

Prince Aranata’s hand slid upward, overlong fingers closing round my throat. “I said apologize.” I glanced at Nobuta Otiolo. The herald Oalicomn had helped the child back to its seat, and it was watching me with eyes deeper and darker than—but just as lifeless as—the eyes of the slave girl. I clamped my jaw shut, knowing that to apologize was to lose the argument, to lose face in these debates.

The whine of plasma burners being primed filled the pavilion, and glancing to one side I saw Smythe’s guards had turned weapons on the Pale.

As if from very far away, I heard the sound of Kharn Sagara’s laughter. “What a farce!” he said, voice shaking the very air. “Release Lord Marlowe, my prince. And you, Knight-Tribune. Order your men to put down their arms. There will be no violence here.” One of Kharn’s eyes slid in an arc to glower at Aranata from over my shoulder, the threat there plain as day. Kharn himself had found his feet, machine hand holding shut his golden robes. His lips did not move. “I said release him!”

To my surprise, Aranata did as he was told. I only just managed to keep my footing as the prince unhanded me. The Cielcin lord drew back, looking down at me with an expression I could not read. “I should kill you,” he said, and there was no emotion in its voice that I could name. “Harm my child again, and I will.”

I could not show weakness. I could not apologize. I took a step forward instead, eyes never leaving the prince’s face. I said nothing. It was enough to signal that I was not afraid of him, however hard the blood beat in my ears. I have done many brave things in my life, and many more foolish. Which this next was I still don’t know, but I turned my back on the prince and returned to my seat without another word. For a brief moment, I alone of all that party—save only the alien child—sat in my seat. Even Kharn was standing, and in that instant the entire audience focused on me.

By refusing to apologize, I’d asserted myself in the alien dominance contest that passed for politics among the Pale. How diplomacy was done between their clans I didn’t dare guess, but I suspected that it had more in common with the way two rams butted heads or two lions fought than it did an international summit. We’d had to assert that we were a party worth honoring. We’d had to show some teeth and a backbone. The backbone had been mine, the teeth the weapons the others all carried and their willingness to use them.

“Enough posturing,” I said in Cielcin, posturing myself. “Please, take a seat, my prince.”

I felt an almost imperceptible shift in the air between the prince and myself, a respect and a grudging . . . wariness? Caution? We had not come to surrender to him, that much was coming plain, but he did not understand yet what arrangement might be made between us.

He never would.

But—desperate or merely hungry—he took his seat again.