The young Queen walked up a nearby hillside and, once they had crested the hill and moved into sight of a vord landscape stretching out before them, stood with her back to the little steadholt for a time. “Love is not always returned among your kind.”

“No,” Invidia said simply.

“When it is not,” she said, “it is a kind of pain to the one who has loved.”

“Yes.”

“It is irrational,” the vord Queen said—and to Invidia’s shock, there was a quiet heat to the words. An anger. The vord Queen was angry.

Invidia felt her mouth go dry.

“Irrational,” the Queen said. Her fingers flexed, the nails lengthening and contracting. “Wasteful. Inefficient.”

Invidia said nothing.

The vord Queen spun abruptly, the motion so swift that Invidia could barely track it. She stared at Invidia with unreadable, alien eyes. Invidia could see a thousand tiny reflections of herself in them, a pale, half-starved woman with dark hair, clad only in a suit of vord-chitin carapace that fit her as closely as her own skin.

“Tomorrow,” the vord Queen said, smoldering anger filling the normally empty tones of her voice, “you and I will have dinner. Together.”

Then she turned and vanished in a blur of green silk into the endless rolling waves of croach.

Invidia fought the sense of terror spreading through her stomach. She stared back down at the collection of cottages. From her place on the hillside, the steadholt looked lovely, furylamps glowing in its little town square and inside the cottages. A horse nickered in a nearby pasture. A dog barked several times. The trees, the houses, they all looked so perfect. Like dollhouses.

Invidia found herself suppressing a laugh that rose up through the madness of the past several months, for fear that she would never be able to stop.

Dollhouses.

After all, the vord Queen was not quite nine years old. Perhaps that was exactly what they were.