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HER FATE IS IN HER FLESH.
 
In an environmentally fragile world where human and animal genes combine, the rarest mutation of all—the Trader—can instantly switch genders. One such Trader, the female Sorykah, is battling her male alter, Soryk, for dominance and the right to live a full life.

Sorykah has rescued her infant twins from mad Matuk the Collector. Her children are safe. Her journey, she believes, is over, but Matuk’s death has unleashed darker, more evil forces. These forces, led by the Collector’s son, cast nets of power that stretch from the glittering capital of Neubonne to the murky depths below the frozen Sigue, where the ink of octameroons is harvested to make addictive, aphrodisiacal tattoos. Bitter enemies trapped within a single skin, Sorykah and Soryk are soon drawn into a sinister web of death and deceit.

1

An Economy of Words

When she first realized she was pregnant, Queen Sidra the Lovely decided that her child would never be safe in a world with the Morigi family in it. Oman No-Man’s many descendants had been harmless--except for one. Bad seed Matuk the Collector had been an anomaly, but it was his genetic line that concerned her. He had selected one child from each of his wives to bear the brunt of his will and uphold family law. Radhe was first but she had come to a sad end, stricken with a somatic blight and transformed into a monster. Abandoned by the father who’d murdered her mother, Radhe haunted the Erun Forest for years, prowling the perimeter of Matuk’s grounds as the dreaded Wood Beast. He’d killed her eventually, her death the result of some foul “cure” administered on the tips of poisoned arrows. Poor Radhe now rotted on the loam, a feast for beetles and the enormous sooty ravens that descended in spiraling hordes to peck at her carcass, their whirring wings blotting out the milky spring sunshine.

Next in line was Nuala, who had disappeared years ago. There was some history of her at the university in Dirinda, but she’d withdrawn during her third year and no one had seen her since. Cream-cheeked Chen rose to the top, basking in his father’s attention for a year or two before Matuk became trapped in his white marble mansion and his affection was damned like a river choked with stones.

Chen Morigi was the favored son whose name would open doors and coffers. He’d made such a show of his failed romance with Sidra! He wore his rejection like a hairshirt--a public suffering designed to elicit pity from gullible women who wanted only to salve his tender heart. Like his father, Chen did not care about restoring the rights of the country’s indigent somatics. A desire to make money and to indulge in any available sin smothered whatever genuine feeling he had. Sidra’s appeals to him had failed. She’d watched him sink deeper into a morass of corruption and knew his snubs to be deliberate. Chen’s debauchery fueled her rage. Like a glib worm in a barrel of apples, he spoiled everything he touched.

If only Soryk would come back! Then she was certain everything would be all right, but days slipped by and he did not appear. She’d not believe him safe until she held him in her arms. What a glorious and triumphant return it would be! Soryk had changed the world by dispatching a most loathed enemy. She could double her strength by crowning him king of the Erun Forest. His antler coronet would be shorter, naturally, and his rulings subject to her prior approval--at least until he’d demonstrated his capability with the scepter. Beside him, she could better face the reports of grisly dismemberments increasing in frequency and absurdity and a growing drug trade that claimed her best agents. Together they would become a fist to smash all resistance and crush Tirai Industries in its grip.

Sidra stopped walking and crouched to catch her breath. Her swollen womb bore down on her hips and she was certain that she could hear her pelvic cradle fracturing. The doctors had warned her that she must handle herself as if blown from glass, quite blunt in their assertion that her retrofitted skeleton was not built for childbearing. Hers had been an experimental surgery and the synthetic marrow in her bones could never heal a break. Giving birth would almost certainly cause her a mortal injury.

She had always been so careful--seeds were not planted; cells did not divide. Call it fate, destiny, or simply bad luck, Soryk’s arrow had hit its mark. The uterus elongated its neck during orgasm, straining downward like the beak of a honey-sipping bird to draw in seminal fluid--how her little pink pear had flexed and quivered inside her, thrilled by the oddity of sex with her very own Trader, a human man, if only temporarily. The pregnancy was a grim gift--this child the product of a chemically induced eroticism--Sidra taking Sorykah’s tart tongue into her mouth and beckoning Soryk with poetry and kisses like sweet, silver-bloomed damsons. She’d whispered Rossetti in Soryk’s ear after his change: “Did you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, hug me, kiss me, suck my juices. Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, goblin pulp and goblin dew. Eat me, drink me, love me . . . make much of me.”

Sidra had indicated the carousal in the great hall and said, “For your sake I have braved the glen and had to do with goblin merchant men.”

Thoughts of goblins, even those as attractive as Chen, made her shiver now. It had been a mistake to come out here alone. The twilight forest loomed around her. Once-sweet pines and cedars waved threatening branches, and clouds gulped down the sun. Moment by moment, the specter of death drew closed its cloak until safety and joy were naught more than the echoes of dead stars. Sidra feared for her life and the bloody dénouement creeping ever closer.

“Carac!” Her voice was reedy and insubstantial. She hadn’t seen him for hours, but his habit of trailing her ensured that he would be near. She called again but only the pines responded. That noise again--surely it was the sound of her skeleton splitting inside her skin, or far bracken snapping beneath a careless tread. Sidra fished a wooden whistle from her pocket. Carac hated its call, a piercing and urgent thing that only he could hear. It stung his ears and filled his head with the drone of bumblebees, but she needed him. She blew and Carac appeared, wild-eyed with panic and pain.

“What have you been doing?” Sidra was aghast at the sight of him, bare-chested, foamy with sweat, smears of fur and what she presumed to be blood caking his forearms and chin. She’d never seen him thus, so careful had he been to hide the signs of his occasional slaughters.

“You summoned me, my lovely.” He rubbed his hands against his pant legs, as if wiping away his startlingly human expression of guilt.

“I did.” Sidra hesitated, reluctant to admit her panic to the bloodied par-wolf before her. “I was frightened. It was nothing. A silly daydream, that’s all.”

Carac’s lolling tongue dripped a viscous dirty slime and Sidra remembered all the long winter nights when that agile red muscle had lapped over the hills and dales of her body. She shivered beneath Carac’s feral gaze. She had never doubted him before, but today the forest was the gloomy hunting ground of ghosts and every certainty was in question.

“What do you hear from the cities?” she asked. “Any news of Soryk?”

Carac shook his head. “Nothing yet, but the infestation is spreading, my queen. I suggest we repel it by sealing our borders and barring all travel.”

“That would mean we could no longer offer refuge to somatics fleeing the north. No, I cannot do that,” Sidra said. “Our Neubonne agent says poison soaks the streets, blue and toxic beneath an odor of flowers. Every little pleasure house and bar is a tap for the stuff. Bluing is hard to resist and easy to buy, and the ink trade intensifies along with it. You know how vulnerable we are to substances not of our blood.”

Opium had swept though the Sigue some years earlier, leaving many somatics addicted and ill. Sidra had been unable to treat them herself, and she knew the damage done by it. Matuk’s doing--this trafficking of drugs and somatic bodies.

Carac said, “I saw Jodhi and Monarch heading for the trading markets in Basalt.”

“Did you ask about Soryk?”

“Jodhi couldn’t spare a kind word for him, but Monarch told...