Page 1 of Rook Takes Queen
Chapter 1
Rook
The compound is loud tonight, as it is always nowadays.
This isn’t bad, simply an observation.
My loud, raucous family devours their meal. All my brothers together, along with their brides and offspring. I sip my drink and watch them all, with a smile on my face. What would I do without them?
Chief, the brother chosen to be the leader of our mining crew, sits at the head of the table, next to his bride, Naomi, her belly round and high under the table. Scar sits to his right, forking something yellow onto his plate and saying nothing, the way he does. Trunk is seated beside his pregnant bride, Ines, with one claw on her thigh under the table. Cannibal and Roxy are across from them, their daughter Zora between them, trying to feed purple-root to a stuffed creature that has no mouth. Heavy and Jana sit near me, at the far end, their son Rux in a high chair and Jana already pregnant again. Claws and Lila are squeezed in beside them, their daughter Argylia between them, Lila rounder than ever. Hook and Leah have come down to visit from the employee housing, and Leah’s second pregnancy is just starting to show. Daxon, my eldest brother, lives off-world now with hisbride, Darcy, and their offspring. The rest of us still live here, on Timbur.
So it’s only eight of us Margol Xylan brothers at the table tonight.
There are nine of us, total, and the colony calls us the Fever Brothers, though no one asked us if we wanted the name.
On Timbur, a mining crew is usually a patchwork of males drawn from a dozen family lines, because attunement to the Illibrium crystals that power the known universe, doesn’t run clean through a bloodline. Within a single family some sons, and rarely daughters, feel the fever and some never do; a father attuned to the deep seams might raise five sons and see only one of them take the calling. But every brother born to our line came up attuned, every one of us is able to bond with a personal crystal and feel the Illibrium sing in the rock the way you feel heat off a fire. The crystals have agreed to allow us to extract them, carefully, from the mine. When my oldest brothers came of age they mined together. I am the youngest, and when I came of age and proved attuned, I joined the crew too. The other miners started calling us the Fever Brothers before I was old enough to swing a pick, and the name stuck the way names do.
And now, the Fever Brothers are in fact, a large family line. Seven humans have arrived on Timbur, and strangely, each of them was scented by one of my brothers as a match, and each couple performed the hand-clasping ceremony.
The other miners, and really the whole colony of Timbur, call us “human lovers.” They find it odd that all of us have mates not of our own species, and specifically from the rare human species. I have to admit it is odd. What are the chances? You’d think at least one or two of us would’ve mated with another Xylan, or at the very least another species besides human.
I look at the pleasant human faces smiling and laughing at the table tonight. Good thing I happen to really like all of thesehumans. Before Saxon originally mated with Leah, I’d never met a human in real life and barely knew what they were, and now I understand humans as well as my own species.
Only Scar and I are still unmated.
And I assume I’ll be different from my brothers and eventually end up with a Xylan, though. Someone sensible, from the mating database, once all of this crap happening to my family finally ends and we’re all safe—this is when I’ll get in touch with official matchmakers and let them know I am formally ready to start being paired for hand-clasping ceremonies. This will need to happen with Xylan who are off planet, because I’ve covertly scented all the unmated females on Timbur and confirmed that none of them are my future mates.
Cannibal bursts out laughing at something Roxy says to him, causing food to fly out of his mouth.
I grin and shake my head.
These humans have enriched our lives. The Fever Brothers were demoted to the worst domicile on the settlement, the one at the dead end of the road that looked abandoned from the outside. After our parents were murdered and Daxon was banished, this is where they put us. They tried to bury us here, and yet we grew.
I am happy for my brothers; I want to be clear about that. I’ve helped carry furniture into new rooms, held squalling newborns in my claws and become close with the seven human females who are now my sisters-in-law. I wouldn’t be upset to also find that I had a human bride…but it does seem impossible that all of us would mate with humans, right?
“So Kryzon’s moved,” Scar suddenly comments.
Chief grunts in response. “When did that happen?”
“Yesterday. He was transferred from the peacekeeper facility to the prison colony on Arkell-Seven. Two hundred rotations, no parole.”
“Good,” Heavy mutters.
I half-listen while they go over it all again, the way we’ve gone over it a hundred times since the night of the attack. Kryzon won’t give a name, a faction, or a single Chronos contact. The peacekeepers have offered him everything and he refused all of it, which tells you exactly what you need to know, that whoever he answers to is more frightening than two hundred rotations on a prison rock.
“You’ll spend the rest of your lives hunting someone you’ll never find.”These were Kryzon’s last words to us. I had him cornered against the rock outcropping at the tree line when he said it, and I remember thinking that he wasn’t afraid of me, or of any of us. He was instead afraid of someone we couldn’t see.
“And Grytel?” Cannibal asks through a mouthful of food.
Every eye goes to Ines, ready to hear her update on the happenings of the CEO of Timbur Minecorp.
“He’s still cooperating,” she responds. “Fully. Grytel has been briefing me for the next article and briefing Scar separately. He’s not our enemy.” She glances at Chief. “He wants to know what happened to your parents as much as you do now.”
Chief’s jaw works. It is still hard for all of us, giving up the idea of hating the male we’ve mistrusted for rotations. My brother nods in acknowledgement. “Then we work with him.”
“It’s so weird,” Lila comments. “I thought Grytel was the enemy and now he’s suddenly our ally?”
“The Four Sectors is a weird place,” Ines shrugs, and lifts her glass. “You never know when everything can suddenly change, hopefully for the better.”
