…and I just never woke up the next morning. When I finally came to, it was ten days later and I was in the special secret infirmary that’d originally been arranged for Innocence. She was there too, just a bit under the weather, nothing serious… and most of the doctors who were supposed to be looking after the girl were locked full-time on my case, trying to keep me alive.
In a way, my condition helped keep Innocence a secret that whole year. Folks in the palace knew about the private infirmary — you can never hide things from servants — but everybody thought the doctors were for me. Innocence was just one of Verity’s many daughters, assigned by her mother to keep me company… and occasionally to see the queen in private to "report on my condition": a pretty good cover for the many times Innocence wanted to see Verity alone for a few minutes, and sip a bit more venom.
So Innocence and I got to know each other… when I wasn’t busy coughing my head off or lying jaundiced and comatose. Yes, I’d tried to spend time with all Verity’s children — my stepkids — but most of them seemed pretty uncomfortable having a human think he was their father. Me, I wasn’t so great at being a dad either; my own father hadn’t set much of an example, and anyway, what felt natural to a human parent was nothing like Mandasar kids expected. As just one example, the little boys had a habit of trying to clip me with their claws. Their baby pincers wouldn’t have done a thing to a real Mandasar’s carapace, but they could cut up a human nice and bloody. End result: I was pretty darned useless for playing that particular game.
But with Innocence, I could just talk. She snuggled with me too, because Verity was too busy for that kind of thing. The poor kid needed tons of snuggling, because she was halfway to terrified most of the time. Strange things were happening to her body. Doctors were constantly poking at her. None of her siblings or friends were allowed to see her. Worst of all, people kept telling her she’d have to rule the planet someday, and that she was going to become huge and dangerous and intimidating like Verity herself. Who wouldn’t be frightened by that?
It helped her to be with me. Sam said it was good even when I was sick or delirious — Innocence stuck right by me, holding my hand, giving me sips of water, talking and talking and talking. It gave the girl something to think about besides herself. Kind of like a sick pet. And she had queenly instincts waking up inside her: the need to be in charge of someone, to give orders. "Time for the muscle stimulators, Daddy Edward; and don’t say you can exercise on your own, because you don’t. The only reason you’re strong enough to push me away is because I use the machine on you when you sleep. So stay still and let me strap this to your legs."
Even six-year-old queens know how to lay down the law.
A year passed. Sam told me they held another ceremony when Innocence took her last drink of Verity’s venom — just a tiny tiny sip like the very first, because she didn’t need any more. The little brown gentle had become a little yellow queen: no longer scared of the future, even if she should have been.
They held the ceremony in my sickroom, just so they could say I was there. My body may have been present, but my mind wasn’t: far off and unconscious, suffering through the final throes of my disease. A few days later, I finally woke up… and not a single cough in my throat. Another week, and Innocence was threatening to tie me down again. I swore I was feeling a hundred times better. She told me a blood-consort wasn’t allowed to argue with a queen. "You’re staying in bed, Daddy Edward, till Dr. Gashwan says you’re healthy."
But it didn’t work out that way.
I woke alone in the night, wondering what the awful beeping sound was. Some annoying medical monitor? But there weren’t any nurses rushing to check my condition. In fact, there wasn’t even a light coming from the desk outside my room. Pitch-blackness, and nothing but that continuing beep-beep-beep.
The sound came from my wrist. Some navy someone was signaling a Mayday. It might have been anybody from the diplomatic mission, but I knew in my heart it was Sam.
Without thinking, I rolled out of bed and stumbled toward the door. After being sick so long, I was nowhere near my physical peak, but Innocence and the muscle-working machines had kept me from going to seed. I could walk just fine and even run a bit if worse came to worst.
And maybe it had. There were no lights anywhere, not even on the medical sensors that were supposed to watch me night and day — someone must have cut the power, and even the emergency generators. That meant big trouble. I didn’t know much about what’d happened in the year gone by, just that things had gone down hill. A long way down hill. Maybe so bad that one of the outlaw queens had decided to attack Unshummin palace.
Outside my room, the doctors and nurses were gone. In their place, five palace guards wearing gas masks had ranged themselves around the room, all with souped-up stun-pistols aimed at the far door… like they expected an enemy to come smashing through any second.
"What’s going on?" I whispered.
They whirled on me, and for a heartbeat I thought they were going to shoot; but one of them, a sergeant, snapped, "Hold your fire," and nobody pulled the trigger. "Go back to bed, consort," the sergeant told me. "There’s been a mutiny. It’s not safe in the halls."
"Is the queen all right?" I asked. "And my sister?"
"Don’t know." He glanced at the others, then turned back to me. "Our assignment is to keep you safe."
"Me? Who cares about me?" I held up my wrist; it was still beeping. "You and your men are going to help me save someone who’s in trouble. Do you hear me?"
For a second he didn’t answer: his antennas bent just a bit, as if he was smiling. Then he snapped a salute. "Yes, sir. We’ll follow you."
The six of us raced through dark halls, tracking the Mayday. Once or twice, we passed close to fighting; we’d hear the whir of stunners somewhere down a corridor, then running feet and voices shouting orders. But none of the action ever came our way. We saw plenty of bodies, unconscious and dead, but nobody stopped us as we raced straight from the infirmary to Queen Verity’s chambers… the source of the Mayday.
Outside the door, the queen’s personal guards had been butchered. Inside, so had the queen — decapitated by some assassin who’d crept unseen through the palace during all the ruckus. Verity’s head had been laid on a big serving plate in the middle of her own dining table.
A few steps away sprawled my sister’s body, apparently stabbed through the heart while trying to defend the queen. Sam had triggered the Mayday… and even as I stared at the blood spilling from her chest, the beeping signal stopped. I knew what that meant — not enough bioelectric energy left in her body to power the transmitter.
A navy quartermaster once told me those transmitters could keep drawing power from your tissues at least five minutes after you were dead.
I took one step toward my sister’s body. Then hands grabbed me from behind: bright red hands, the sergeant on my right, one of his men on my left. They were only using their Cheejreth arms, but at that moment, they were strong enough to hold me.
"Nothing we can do here," the sergeant said. His voice was muffled by his gas mask. "No one to save."
"Wrong," I told him. "There’s still someone unaccounted for."
Innocence. My sort-of daughter. The new high queen.
She had a secret room in the palace, but not secret enough. When we got there, the door had been blown off its hinges by explosives. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, no little yellow corpse; it looked like Innocence hadn’t been home when the assassin showed up.
Where else might she go? Would she run and hide like a seven-year-old girl, or throw herself into action like a queen? My first thought was she might run for my sickroom, to rescue her beloved Daddy Edward; but she hadn’t shown up, had she? The guards would have seen her the second she came charging through the door…