The Eccentric Entomologist is Now a Queen's Consort

Predators love statues. They gave it a river instead.

The effect was a strange kind of peace. Movement became a soft ripple that never resolved. Ankles wrote tiny essays about where weight belongs. Hips made a language of small compromises. Hands adjusted straps and folds by instinct that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with living another hour.

Mikhailis caught the beat like a coin tossed in a bar—late enough to prove he was watching, early enough to prove he wasn't just copying. He wanted to whisper something foolish—We are a school of fish with good taste—and did not. He watched the shadows instead. If it wants pauses, don't give it pauses. Give it grammar with no period.

The marsh helped. It made their joints quiet even when they moved in a pattern that should have squeaked. It filled the tiny lies in their gear the way water fills cracks and makes them smooth. He disliked the stuff. He also wanted to kiss it, which was a strange desire to have about a gel sleeve.

The ribs around them felt closer. Sound came back from the bone in little, late answers. Her patience burned faster for the effort. She could feel the ache building in small muscles—the ones you don't notice until they fail. The ones that keep people from falling. Her jaw set. She relaxed it by force. A tight jaw is a drumhead the wrong hands will drum on.

The micro-shifts ran down the column, neat as a string of beads. A lich at the rear slipped once, toes catching the lip of a crack. Its crown flared a finger-width out of shame and then dimmed. Thalatha didn't turn. She lifted two fingers half a hand and flattened them with her palm. The gesture flowed back and the line thickened around the weak point, hiding it the way a flock hides an injured bird without changing direction.

A long, low inhale rolled through the vault. It felt like being watched by something polite. The Lux Anchor's rind thinned to a hair. On its exhale, they all moved as if the room were pulling a string tied to their spines. It made the predator's breath stutter. Thalatha heard it in the way the ribs stopped answering for a heartbeat, like the building was holding a cough.

Her tongue tasted metal and mint. Not panic. Fatigue, she told herself, and counted three clean cycles with her eyes closed so the world would remember to be small again. When she opened them, Mikhailis was already looking away, pretending he had not been looking at her to make sure she still had enough air. She was grateful in a way that did not need to be named. She refused to name it anyway.

"Rodion?" he breathed, not expecting comfort.

<Counter-breath receding. Maintain micro-shifts for thirty-two more counts. Then return to exhale-only gait. Hydration recommended in six minutes if conditions permit. And no, I will not remind you again to drink.>

Bossy glow-worm, he thought, and his mouth almost smiled. He kept the smile folded. It tasted too much like relief.

They passed unseen, but her patience burned faster for the effort. The ribs around them felt closer. Food thoughts crept in, the way they always do when danger asks you to hold your breath.

____

Two watches of strength left if she split the cakes. She did the math twice, the way she always did when stubborn hope tried to fiddle the numbers. It didn't change. Water beads sweated in skins like guilty thoughts clinging to a lie. Her ledger tightened around her heart. She had allowed the chair so her voice could reach; she would not allow hunger to make them stupid.

She checked the line without turning her head. Ankles moved fine. Bows steady. The lich with the narrow jaw had started guarding its breaths, spacing them like coins. Not good. Hunger makes timing sloppy.

Mikhailis glanced at her profile and, of course, understood the jaw. He always read the hinge first.

"Two options," he whispered, voice low enough to be mistaken for air. "Chew leather and pride, or we hunt what won't ruin the spring."

Her eyes stayed on the walkway. "Ethics first. Nothing that keeps the Brake Choir honest. No elvish bone. No Choir fauna that does important work."

He didn't argue. "Agreed."

<Recommend Eel-stag. Non-acidic variant. Finlets, cartilaginous rack. Detoxtime minimal with base gel. Sound footprint low if taken on a down-breath. Probability of retaliation cascade: 0.08.>

Showoff, he told the light. Also, thank you.

Thalatha weighed risk against the faces in front of her. She didn't love mixing retreat with hunting; fights invited cousins. But hunger would invite worse. Better to choose a fight than let a fight choose them.

"Pick your deer, Prince," she said. "Bring it down without teaching the neighborhood our names."

He almost smiled. The almost was better than the grin; it meant his noise lived under control. "Yes, General."

The captains watched their hands and pretended not to listen. That helped too.

Rodion painted the overlay in his lenses, thin and neat, a diagram laid over darkness. Thalatha didn't need the lines; she read the vault with knees and shoulders, the way a horsewoman reads ground without seeing it. The Eel-stag washed along a ley-gutter two shelves down, a shadow-blue deer that had traded velvet for finlets and antler for a long, jointed rack. It pulsed wrong if you looked with ears. If you looked with patience, its rhythm had a kind of order: a tide that kept forgetting which moon it loved.

"Constraints," she breathed, and the word brought bricks. No smoke. No shout. No flecks of sound that bounce and tell stories. Zero waste. They were stealing a dinner, not winning a war.

Ankles scribbled a low stepping script along the ledge: step here, not there. Marks so small only trained soles would feel them. Tangles pre-hung two retrieval lines from rib to rib, angled so they'd pull with the Anchor's exhale: one for the head, one to catch the rack if it tried to argue. Silk slung a fall-quiet hammock under the ambush perch, thread woven to drink shock instead of sing about it. Slime dabbed grip dots on treacherous patches, dull coins underfoot that turned pride into traction.

She kept her voice dry. Dry sticks burn clean. "Bites. Mikhailis nets head and finlets. Scurabons insult the knee-fins. Just taps. Archers pin the rack if it bucks."

"Copy," he breathed. Don't be clever. Be exact. Don't embarrass her count. Do not love the throw more than the silence.

He opened the net with slow hands, not the swaggering snap he used in training yards to make boys clap. The mesh looked like nothing—dull, soft, wrong for glory. Good. He looped two fingers through the lead rings, tested the Anchor's pulse against his wrist, and half-smiled at the way the world lined up when it acted like an instrument.

The formation settled into readiness the way a cat settles into grass: low, patient, uninteresting. A Scurabon flexed its sickle wrist and then, remembering, checked the dull back, not the edge. The archer with the polite posture laid two shafts along the forearm—pins, not heroes—barbs smeared with base gel so they would sit and behave.

Thalatha raised two fingers. Wait. The Lux Anchor widened on the vault's inhale, and she felt the Eel-stag's pulse answer inside the stone—curious, wrong, regular in its own stubborn way.

Two breaths.

The Anchor exhaled. The vault sighed. The Eel-stag slid into the window like a thought you almost forgot to think.

"Now."

Mikhailis threw on the down-beat, net wide and low, not at the crown but at the line where finlet met jaw. The mesh kissed cartilage with a soft complaint and sank as if it had always known that job. Scurabons moved like shadows taught to be polite—tap, tap—insulting the knee-fin joints without cutting. The body argued with its own movement and lost rhythm. Two pins hissed and tucked into the rack, angling not to break but to make turning expensive.

The Eel-stag convulsed, a ripple running from head to tail like a wrong chord. Once. Twice. Then the fall-quiet took the weight with a patient creak and lowered the creature into the hammock as if tucking a big, ugly baby to bed. No thrash. No scream. Only a shiver that turned into a sigh.

Thalatha let a breath out through her nose. Approval, rationed. He felt it and didn't turn his head. Keep it by not looking at it, he told himself, and looked at knots instead.

"Lift on exhale," she signed. Tangles answered with two tidy hums. The body rose, then swung under control toward the knife-slot she'd chosen three breaths earlier while everyone else watched the hunt. Choosing space early was how you kept luck from becoming law.

They moved in the old measured way, making the kill disappear faster than a rumor. Rodion wrote small numbers into Mikhailis's lens—weight, detox time, safe cuts. He replied in the only language that left no trail: doing exactly what the numbers wanted.

The path to camp bent under a rib's belly and then bit into a cleft that had the mean shape she liked: narrow, windless, rude to large things. The knife-slot was the size of an argument between friends—too tight for pride, perfect for survival.

Security grew out of habit and an old appetite for not dying. Hypnoveils hung a forgetting shimmer at both mouths, a thin wrinkle in air that told the brain boring and it obeyed. Tangles threaded alarm hairs across the outer dark so fine a fly would be ashamed to brush them. Silk hung a detachable veil-door that would pop like a bubble if the wrong shove came, saying you have one breath to decide.

She pointed once at a scatter of loose femurs and ulnas half buried in dust. Bones stacked to the side became small wind baffles, nothing fancy, just kindness for the ember later. She refused to think of them as furniture. Furniture implies staying.

"Chair," she said.

The chair wedged in as a bench, angled so her outline would look like a trick of rock to a quick eye. She sat. She did not make jokes about thrones. Jokes feed hunger and she would not.

The Lux Anchor dimmed to ember-mode and breathed like a sleeping animal, light thinning and thickening with the vault. That breathing had calmed her since the first day she met Rodion's work. She would never say it out loud. Not to him. Not to anyone.

Her stomach made a sound like a rude bird. If anyone asked under oaths later, she would deny it and make them feel silly for caring.

Mikhailis set the net down with the care you give instruments, not meat. He rolled his sleeves past his forearms, clean, efficient turns. He tied his dusty hair back with an ugly piece of string that had belonged to something else in a better life. The motion showed the scar that crossed his left brow, the one she had catalogued in the sling and filed without comment. His face, when he worked, lost its tilt toward performance. It sharpened and got quiet.

He turned into a person she realized she did not know well at all.

He knelt by the carcass and hovered his hands for one count, not touching, the way a reader hovers above a page before committing to line one. Ask permission before every cut, ran under his breath, not as a rule she'd given him, but as a drill he wanted to be good at.

"Stage it," she said, not to rush, but to force the air to accept a plan.

He nodded once. He marked a small safe zone on the rock with ash, then had Silk lay down a thin catch-cloth so stray fluids wouldn't travel. Slimeweave made ready, dull little plates crawling into a half-circle like obedient beetles.

He looked up at her once, not asking, just checking that her eyes were on the same page. They were. She gave a short tilt that said proceed.

He went to work.