Tamion’s rim of volcanic hell burns a halo out the window. Sykora’s tail threads onto Grant’s arm. He holds it gently. Her snug black dress and her curtain of dark hair obscure her reflection. Just her face and her sweetheart neckline, bright blue in the indistinct glass overlooking the lava fields.

“I never even imagined I’d see something like this.” Grant stands behind her, his hands crossed over her heart. “Never thought I’d make it to fucking Cancun, even. Now I’m on a world so far from home I can’t even see my planet any longer.”

“There are so many empty places on every planet,” Sykora says. “Yours included. We could return to Maekyon and find one. I still want to go camping with you, you know. Set ourselves down in some forest and just be, for a while.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not homesick for Maekyon. Sometimes, I guess.” His hands slip up to her shoulders. “But mostly I’m grateful for these things you’ve shown me. This life you’ve given me.” He glances behind them, at the mingling crowd of noblewomen and husbands and foundry bigwigs. “For all its terrors.”

“You are going to do fantastically, Grantyde. I know you are. Remember all those pretty speeches you gave the Eqtorans?” The distant eruptions shine in Sykora’s eyes. “And if anyone is so absurd as to think they can ignore or reprove you, I will deal with them quite thoroughly on my return.”

He nods and cinches her a little closer. “I like this dress. First time I’ve seen you in this much black.”

“Reka’s got red in her house colors,” Sykora says. “And I wanted to match my collar.”

“Choker.”

“That’s what I said.”

A row of towering pipes let out a deep tone that rumbles at the soles of Grant’s shined boots.

“That’s the dinner bell.” Sykora detaches herself from the vista view and gives Grant’s fingers a gentle tug. “Let’s find our Quartermaster and then our seats.”

Grant spots Kymai’s cardinal uniform and waves the frowning man over to them. “It’s going to take some getting used to, this taster thing.”

“It was foolish of me not to have one before. I sat next to that woman.” Sykora shudders. She doesn’t say Marquess Paxea’s name; she doesn’t need to. “I broke bread with her. Last time I slipped up at one of these parties, I ended up on Maekyon. I will not slip up again. Kymai will keep us safe. Won’t you, Kymai.”

“I, er.” The perpetually fretful Black Pike Quartermaster smooths and straightens the hem of his uniform tunic as he arrives in their train. “I will make every effort, Majesty.”

A gaggle of multicolored Taiikari nobility proceeds through the mansion’s echoing black halls to its dining room. Their hostess, the Marquess Reka, a tall Taiikari woman with artificial red in her hair and an artificial smile on her face, walks with them through the igneous-lined atrium. Great geometric panels of natural lava-flowed rock decorate the walls, frozen in flux like the depths of a petrified ocean.

“I am just so thrilled that you chose Tamion as your homecoming visit, Majesties,” Reka says. Her dress flares at the shoulder and flows to the floor like one of the magma streams that light the Tamion night. “And Prince

. What an indescribable honor to host you. The first alien Prince of the Void. My goodness. Such an achievement.”

“Thank you,” Grant says, and bows. He’s gotten quite practiced at his thank you bow.

“Governess Manif sends all her love,” Reka continues. “And great regret she couldn’t be here.”

The little blue hand that isn’t couched snugly in Grant’s rests on Sykora’s hip. “Your recent tiff with the Governess over the import tax from Aodok having nothing to do with that, hmm?”

Reka sighs and shrugs. “We all serve the same mistress. As you so trenchantly observed at the last party we were at together. Speaking of which—I have some of that wine you so kindly complimented.”

“How thoughtful of you, Marquess.” Sykora’s tail gestures behind her, to her and Grant’s twitchy plus one. “If you could furnish the Prince and I a bottle, we’ll pass it by our Quartermaster.”

Grant looks to Kymai, and then past him, to a pair of servants have a hushed conversation with one another. One is a ponytailed woman, the other a yellow-eyed man with a close-cropped haircut and forward-curved horns. He whispers; she stifles a giggle. They’re standing in such a way to hide their tails, but Grant sees they’re wound together. The man glances Grant’s way and, seeing him looking, stiffens and steps back, muttering something to the woman that jolts her the same way.

They return to their automaton stiffness; she folds her hands behind her back and gazes unfocused outward at the passing crowd, with such a frozen look of impassiveness on her face you could mistake her for a statue, not a person. Her partner slips into a side door, which opens for only a moment into a fluorescent prep room where a group of uniformed Taiikari jostle and laugh, anticomps on. Grant gets just a snatch of sight into a piece of his new world that might have felt like his old home.

Then the door seals, and the sound and light are gone, melded once more with the dark stone of the wall.

The toroid table at which they arrive sits under a glistening chandelier of volcanic glass, suspended in a humming antigravity field that drifts its gleaming spines and shards like an underwater anemone. It strikes Grant as terrifying—what if that field failed and a sea of magma-forged knives rained down?—but nobody else seems to notice. Not the dining and chattering nobles, and not the industrious cooks who surround the grilled pit in their jagged shadow. A thousand black swords of Damocles, held in check by technology and hubris.

The feasters ring a crackling cylindrical firepit built into the brick floor, that glows and spits embers upward like a gate into Hell. Its perimeter is manned by aproned and heat-masked sentinels. Occasionally, one of the chain pulleys spins upward. A man with thick leather gloves pulls the grille open and pulls out an iron tray, loaded with blackened meats in fragrant beds of char-tipped vegetables. Smiling servants load the blistered and broiled bounty onto cedarwood planks and pass them to the revelers. The searing heat of the open-air cookery is contrasted by the goosebump-inducing chill of the refrigerated bowls set into the tables, filled with shaved ice and chilled fruit.

“Majesty.” Count Tikani of Korak puts a soft-boned, lime green hand on the heavy stone seat to Grant’s right. “This seat taken?”

“Tik. Hey, brother.” Grant pulls the Kovikan into a quick hug and pulls the chair out. He bows to Wenzai, who’s swaying over, raising her wine glass in greeting. The Countess is in a backless dress in her customary black, its lacy keyhole sized as generously as the round violet confections it displays. The chandelier is the most impressive feat of antigravity in the hall, but whoever designed Countess Wenzai’s undercarriage is surely due a silver medal.

“Wen.” Sykora rises from her chair and kisses the shadowy little Countess on both cheeks.

Wenzai laughs and squeezes Sykora’s arm. “Hey, Majesty. Hey, Bigger Majesty.”

“Where’s Lady Lakai?” Sykora asks.

Wenzai points. “Other side of the table, with Mava.”

Grant follows the jet-ringed finger to Lady Lakai of Kyin, Wen and Tik’s—whatever-she-is. He’s too polite to ask. The ginger skimmer pilot is laughing behind her hand at something the Countess-in-waiting of Korak, a purple kindergartener named Mavakai seated on her lap, has just said to a flustered-looking Lord.

Wenzai tsks. “Teaching her all the wrong lessons, I’m sure. Going to have to flash that kid later and flush the hussy’s hussy lessons out of her memory.”

Lakai looks over and blows a kiss to Wenzai. The Countess sticks her tongue out in reply as she takes her seat.

“She’s actually quite well-behaved, Majesty,” Tikani says.

Sykora smirks. “Mava or Lakai?”

“Mav. We’re working on Lakai.” Tikani waves away one of the passing planks.

Grant accepts a half-rack of sticky ribs with a quick thank you that provokes a ninety-degree bow from the waitress ferrying it, her arm rising like a perfect fulcrum to keep the food level. He pulls a glazed hunk from it and brings it halfway to his mouth before he remembers to pass it to Kymai.

“Interesting set-up they got here.” He licks sauce from his fingers. Sykora’s foot nudges him, but he figures they haven’t figured out how much poison to use on a Maekyonite anyway.

“It’s called Gradient Cuisine,” Tikani says. “Pioneered on Tamion itself by the foundry workers centuries ago, before the reforms moved them a safer distance from the ring of fire. They used to do this at the lips of those volcanoes outside, apparently. Sending platforms into the fissures and broiling their dinner in ambient heat.”

Grant blinks against a blast of hot air as the grille opens again, and chews a pre-approved frozen berry to ward the tingling heat off. “It’s very, uh—thermally confusing.”

“I kind of hate it, to be honest with you,” Tikani mutters. “Apparently the temperature changes are meant to be therapeutic. But it’s drying the hell out of my pedipalps.”

Wenzai slides him her water glass. “Can we get some more over here for my husband, please?”

Kymai chews the rib that Grant supplied. His head bows. A muscle in his neck twitches. This is the first time Grant’s seen Kymai eat; the man approaches it with the reverence of prayer.

“Fascinating,” he murmurs. “Simply fascinating.” He surreptitiously inches a sample rib into a pocket container and passes the rest to the Royal Couple with a brief nod. He dabs his face with a napkin to catch a tear that’s drifting down his cheek.

Grant gazes at the barbecue that now gilds his asymmetrical place setting. “Is it really that good?”

“Kymai cries a little every time he tries something for the first time.” Sykora pops a bite into her mouth and chews. “Oh. But it is quite good.”

It really fucking is.

They eat, and drink, and the wine flows copiously enough that even Grantyde’s sizable Maekyonite metabolism allows him some of that silky lift. Marquess Reka talks Sykora’s ear off about the finer points of fabricant management. Wenzai and Tikani fill Grant in on the contentious first few cycles of Ptolek’s new governess, a firebrand called Duma who’s cozying up to the unionists and causing conflagrations in the baronies.

As the last of the Gradient Cuisine makes its way along the ringed table, Sykora gives Grant a quick squeeze on the thigh and pushes her chair out. “May I borrow an escort, Marquess?” She gestures to one of Reka’s guards. “Restroom.”

“Absolutely, Majesty.” Reka raises her sloshing glass toward one of her obsidian estate’s vaulted byways. “The ladies’ room is just down that corridor.”

Sykora stands and extends her hand to Grant. He takes it and kisses her wrist.

She switches to her heavily accented English: “Ready, my love?”

“Ready,” he replies.

Her hand darts down to give his beard a quick scritch. Then she’s off, heeled boots clicking down the arched corridor. A plume of magma out the western window throws her and her escort’s long shadows back the dining hall’s way.

Grant surveys the laughing nobles and the shining guests and the black-clad butlers who stand in peripheral shadow. He takes a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Then he raps his knuckles on the table. “Pardon me, everyone.” He stands. “But I have a few words I’d like to share, now that we’ve dined.”

The conversations reduce to parting whispers that slither shortly to a halt. A sea of scarlet turns Grant’s way.

He clears his throat. In through the nose, out through the mouth, Grant. You are a Prince now.

“First off—thank you, Marquess, for the hospitality. The Princess and I appreciate your pains, and the delicious feast they furnished.”

He tilts his head to Reka, whose big replying smile is tactically measured to the centimeter.

“I guess I ought to reintroduce myself to you all,” he says. “Some of you I’ve been able to meet and speak with separately, but between the work we’ve had to put into the Eqtoran annexation and the Void Convocation that followed on its heels, we’ve been too busy for a social calendar. I’m glad to put that right. Last time many of you saw me, I was Sykora’s consort. Now I am Prince of the Black Pike sector.”

Wenzai is the wellspring of a smattering of applause that’s quickly joined by the main body of the company. Grant smiles and waits for it to tamp off.

“A lot is changing. I understand that. A Princess Margrave on the frontier, an alien Prince, billions of new alien citizens. And I know some of you are wondering just how much of those changes are based on my influence. I’ve had cause to wonder that myself. Countess Mani, wait for me to finish before you return to your conversation, please.”

The woman he directed those words to snaps straight like she’s been slapped, and redirects her attention to him, her face flushing.

“I can promise you this,” Grant says. “My loyalties lie where yours do. I am dedicated to the preservation and peace of the Black Pike sector, and the continuing reign of its Princess. Sykora trained her entire life for this career. I’ve been at it for a little under a decacycle. In matters of import, her voice supersedes mine, as it ought to. But I swear to you all that I’ll be the best Prince I can be. To do that, I need to cut my teeth.”

He glances around the table. Blank faces.

“Uh—that’s a Maekyonite phrase meaning learning by doing,” he says. “My first assignment, by the Princess Margrave’s command, is the initiation of the Paas system’s exo trade, centralized on the gas giant Qarnaq. My first step is finding a colleague in the Black Pike’s peerage to run it while I’m unable to. You won’t be Governess, but you’ll work with her, and with our Eqtoran partners. You’ll be my boots on the ground, my advisor whenever I’m reachable, and my proxy whenever I’m not. I need someone with experience in the field, who will be enthusiastic about working alongside alien partners as the second to an alien male.”

He draws himself to his full height.

“And I really mean that,” he says. “I am not interested in lip service or reluctant subjects. I know that might chafe. But whoever I work with, I expect their loyalty and their deference. Our Princess has given me this title and charged me with this role. You might call that nepotism, and maybe it is. But if you don’t think I’ve proven myself in the wake of our successful annexation of the Paas system, surely you have to admit I’ve earned the chance to. So if you can’t respect my authority yet, respect hers.”

He loosens the tension that’s been built up in his shoulders and gives them all a winning smile (he’s still getting used to that, having a smile they call winning).

“All right,” he says. “That’s all. Thank you, everyone. I hear the Marquess has prepared some lovely afters for us in the ballroom.”

He slides his seat in. All around him, the nobles follow suit, leaving their partially finished meals and wine-stained glasses for a dark-clad murder of servants to descend upon and remove. A constellation of eyes remain on him. He’s used to that gleam in them when they look at him. The tall drink of water their Princess so jealously hoards.

The hunger has grown. He recognizes it—the same obsequious smiles that Sykora deals with at every public function. The peregrine Prince has put up a piece of himself for their unslaked appetites.

He returns those voracious grins and steps away from the table, scooting past a perambulating tray of thick amrita cocktails to the ballroom, where the real feeding frenzy is due to begin.