I approached as cautious as a mouse, keeping my eyes on the floor — if venom was spilling down, I didn’t want to step in it. For all I knew, it might eat a hole straight through my boot. Not that venom is usually acidic, but you can never tell for sure.

It’s strange, dangerous stuff, queen’s venom, especially to humans. Sometimes a teeny droplet on your skin is enough to kill you… like when it contains nerve toxins that garble up signals going to and from your brain. Your heart stops beating because it isn’t getting the right instructions anymore. Other times, though, venom isn’t lethal after all; it just gives you hallucinations… or a rash… or a crusty patch on your wrist, at which point the doctors cut off your whole arm.

(That happened once to a human maid at the palace. Queen Verity said the spill was just a terrible accident.)

The thing about venom is it runs through a cycle, over a full Troyen year. Queens are milked every day, and each batch has slightly different properties. The local biochemists have filled up dozens of confidential databases, keeping track of what you get at each point in the cycle, not to mention what happens if you milk a few hours early or late. It’s all gigantically complicated, and the scientists were always struggling over the fine details; during my time as consort, they were constantly finding new trace chemicals that turned up for maybe half a day in the cycle, then vanished for the rest of year. But everyone on Troyen understood the basic principle of what venom did: it made queens.

If a Mandasar female of six years old started suckling on a queen during the right week in spring — and if she was allowed to suckle whenever she wanted, day or night, big sips or small, throughout the year — by the next spring the little girl lobster would be a junior queen. The constantly changing mix of chemicals mutated her body; one day’s feeding multiplied her brain cells, the next day stimulated a gland, the next made her muscles grow. Soon she’d be bigger, smarter, stronger, and lots more regal than other girls her age. (Provided she didn’t die or go mad. Things like that happened now and then. There’s a reason it’s called venom.)