Page 125 of Stripped By the Alien

The ritual itself is stranger and more beautiful than I expected.

A senior Harrower draws a thin blade across each of our palms, not deep enough to truly wound, just enough to bead a little blood, and presses our hands together so the blood mingles between them.

"Chitin to chitin," he intones, and the translation flower renders it strangely formal in my ear. "Blood to blood, though the blood runs differently. What joins may not match in kind, but let it match in purpose."

Then he takes a small, living cutting from the wall of the chamber itself. It's something soft and rooted, still faintly pulsing, and presses it into the joined grip of our bloodied hands, where it seems, impossibly, to take hold, tiny threads of root already reaching into the shared wound.

"The Nest itself now holds a claim on this bond," the Harrower says. "What is grown from this joining will be remembered by the Brood, in flesh, for as long as the Nest stands."

I don't know if this is going to leave a physical mark or if it's purely ceremonial, and I decide, watching the tiny green-gold thread pulse between our palms, that I don't actually want to ask right now.

The vows themselves are shorter than I expected, though Lucius tells me later that's deliberate, that Brood custom holds long vows to be a kind of arrogance, an assumption that words alone can promise what only years can prove.

Krix'vorr says his first, low and steady, something about protection and duty and choice, freely made, that I feel more than translate.

I say mine back. They are shorter, plainer, and human, and I mean every word of it more than I've meant anything in my life.

"Then let it be sealed," the Harrower says, "in the old way."

Krix'vorr looks down at me, and for a moment the whole vast, glowing, ancient chamber narrows down to nothing but his face.

"Wife," he says, testing the word like he's never quite trusted himself to use it before.

"Husband," I say back, and it comes out steadier than I expected, given how hard my heart is pounding.

He kisses me.

Then the world goes white.

Lightning and thunder fill the chamber. It's not a single arc this time but a full, blinding storm of it, crackling hard and forking wall to wall like something being written into the air in a language older than either of us.

I feel it as much as I see it, a current running through both of us at once, bright and clean and filled with sweet bliss where the pain should be.

For five full seconds the Royal Chamber of the Brood's most ancient Nest looks the way I imagine the inside of a star must look: completely lit, every shadow burned away at once, as if the universe has finally run out of places for us to hide from each other and is putting its foot down.

Then it's gone, and the echoes of the thunder fade. The chamber is dark again, and every courtier present is either flat against the wall or staring at us in open, undisguised shock.

Krix'vorr blinks down at me, slightly dazed. "That," he says, "has never happened before. Not like that."

Above us, on her platform, the Queen has gone very still.

For one heart-stopping moment I think something's actually wrong — that we've frightened her, offended her, or broken some rule neither of us understood. Then the old, wet, rhythmic sound rolls through the chamber again, louder and longer than I've ever heard it, shaking servants loose from their footing along her flank.

She's laughing. Properly, helplessly laughing, in a way that seems to catch even her own attendants off guard.

"Oh," she manages finally, wiping at one clouded eye with something that might be a tear, if locusts cry. "Oh, that settles it entirely. Marankz, in my own chamber, by my own throne." She shakes her great head slowly. "A Royal Mate who is bonded, with lightning, to an alien from beyond the minefield. No. That was never, ever going to work. You did us all a favor, Chief Harrower, sabotaging yourself as thoroughly as you did."

The Queen moves her enormous bulk, servants scrambling beneath her, and when she speaks again her tone has settled into something more formal, more deliberate. It's the sound of a ruler about to make a pronouncement rather than an old woman enjoying a joke.

"Before you leave my chamber," she says regally, "there is a matter of order to settle. I dislike loose ends, and you, Nora of Earth, are the loosest thread I have allowed into this Nest in all my longcycles."

I glance at Krix'vorr, who looks as uncertain as I feel.

"You stand married to one of my Chief Harrowers," the Queen goes on, "and yet you hold no place in my Brood at all. No rank, no standing, no name that means anything to the order that governs everyone else in this chamber. I find that I cannot leave it so. It offends the shape of things, and I find, even now, that I still care about the shape of things."

She turns her head toward Morr'ak. "Bring the marks."

A servant scurries forward bearing a small, dark vessel, and Morr'ak approaches with obvious reluctance, though whether that's personal distaste or simple formality I can't tell.