It had been hard to tell how many soldiers the Nerlians had fielded to defend the castle. Ben had told Regina how to count large numbers of people in military formations, and she’d had some practice with her own swarms, but the soldiers had been mostly hidden behind the walls.

As it turned out, the number was larger than she’d first thought, probably because not all of them stood on the walls or ventured out for the sortie. They must have kept some in reserve, especially if they had expected a longer siege. Still, the battle had just cost Nerlia several thousand soldiers.

Assuming you could consider them soldiers. Just by looking at them, Regina was pretty sure most of them were local militia. Still, there were at least a thousand or so more professional ones. Men-at-arms? She wasn’t sure about the terminology. It seemed like a pretty large garrison when most of the Nerlian army was off fighting a war somewhere else, but she supposed that spoke to the strategic importance of the place.

They had clearly been commanded by the local noble. A small group of drones dragged him in front of Regina shortly after the last of his forces surrendered, and Regina looked him over curiously. The guy wore armor with silvery embellishments, but it looked actually used, and there were traces of dried blood on the breastplate. Seems leading from the front is encouraged here. He looked like he was about thirty, with dark hair and an unremarkable face.

The lord bowed stiffly as he was led in front of her, looking like the gesture took all of his self-control. “Hive Queen Regina,” he said.

“Lord Feronet,” Regina replied evenly, nodding at him. She sat on a folding chair Ira had pulled out of her hat, with Max and several other drones standing behind her and lining the walls of the room.

“I must protest your unlawful entry into this land, and demand you turn around at once,” he continued.

Regina raised an eyebrow and bit down on the urge to ask if he thought that could possibly work. “I’ll have to decline,” she said instead.

“This is an act of war,” he said.

Regina inclined her head slightly. “So it is.”

He just stared at her for a moment, seemingly at a bit of a loss. “This is an unlawful invasion that will not go unpunished,” he then said. “Attacking us in peacetime without even declaring war will make you pariahs among all.”

“Actually,” she corrected calmly, “I have sent a missive to your king.”

She’d had to rely on the elves for that, but they’d been happy to help her out. Simply sending a Winged Drone into the heart of Nerlia and hoping for the best would have been a pretty dumb move. Of course, she’d still timed it so that they wouldn’t have had enough time to muster a proper response, even if she’d technically waited with her incursion until then.

“Even then,” Regina continued, “any declaration of war would be purely superfluous. You did not declare war or even inform us of any hostile intent or make demands before you sent soldiers after me and my hive several months ago, did you?”

He blinked. “I know of no such thing.”

“I hope your king has a better explanation,” she said with a cold smile. “Either way, as I communicated to your king, we are already in a state of hostilities. After all, we have a treaty of alliance with the coalition of lords seeking to topple the tyrant in Cernlia, while your country is his ally and propping up his regime. That makes us enemies, doesn’t it?”

She watched as he took a deep breath. He still felt confused and anxious, indignant and angry. It was getting easier to pick apart his emotions. It probably helped that he was standing right in front of her in the same room. Regina was trying to learn her psychic powers better, and this kind of sensing of emotions seemed like an obvious route. It was probably the bare basics, she figured, but if she could use it as a first step, she’d need to work on it diligently.

“I understand your position, even if I find it regrettable,” he replied.

Regina cocked her head slightly. He’s not willing to commit to a firmer stance without knowing how his king will react, she decided.

“Your response to this is essentially irrelevant,” she said. “You are now my prisoner. I will offer to take your parole and to swear you will not be harmed, as long as you do not attempt to escape or interfere with my forces, as long as you answer some basic questions.”

He frowned, and she sensed an increase in the anger, as well as a tang of disgust and a sprinkle of fear. “I will not tell you anything,” he replied.

“We will see,” Regina said, deliberately keeping her voice and expression calm. She hesitated, then decided she might as well try it. “How many soldiers are left in the interior of Nerlia?”

There was a bit of confusion in him now, even as he scoffed. He doesn’t actually know, Regina concluded. That seemed like a reasonable guess. Many nobles would have their own troops, and they were unlikely to have public rosters laying around.

“How popular is your king?”

This time, there was mostly some irritation. “He is well beloved,” the noble replied.

Regina frowned. She wasn’t actually sure if he was lying here or not. The safe bet would be to say that the king’s popularity was average for his position, but she wouldn’t count on that.

“How strong is his grasp on power and his effective authority?” she continued.

He sneered again, not answering.

Regina moved on, asking several more questions about the political situation before she brought the topic back around to the military and strategic lay of the land. Unfortunately, simply reading his emotions, even if she did feel like she was getting better at it, wasn’t enough to give her a lot of information. He probably didn’t even have that much knowledge, to begin with.

“How do you communicate with the capital? How long does it take to send and receive messages?”

He hesitated a bit at this question and she felt a flicker of wariness, verging on alarm, and some bravado, like he was trying to reassure himself. Obviously, he recognized this was critical strategic information.

Regina eyed him for a moment. It was obvious even without getting an answer that he’d sent a message to the court as soon as he confirmed her forces’ approach.

We will be interrogating all of the senior prisoners and a random sample of the rest, she told several of her drones through the psychic link. I will take part in some interrogations, the Keepers will handle those they can, Attendants the rest.

Acknowledgments came back, and she got an echo of Jem turning to Ben to discuss the practicalities of these interrogations, like a forwarded message to keep her in the loop. Keepers were still better at using the psychic link than pretty much anyone else.

“Take him away,” she told the drones in the room, then smiled thinly at the man. “We will see each other again, Lord Feronet.”

He didn’t bow before walking out of the room. She considered stopping him and making him show what passed for proper manners around here, but decided to let it go for now. She could always insist on being treated as a queen the next time they talked. With some luck, she’d have something to show for it then, too.

Regina put it aside and instead went to look in on and participate in other interrogations, working her way through the senior officers they’d captured. She took it as an opportunity for practice, and didn’t expect to get much more out of it. They wouldn’t know more than their liege lord. As it turned out, she’d been wise not to get her hopes up. There were a few interesting details in there, but mostly she just got the same hard-to-interpret filler and a lot of ignorance.

“We might get more if we use some harder methods,” Max suggested quietly as they left the room of the last man Regina wanted to personally talk to.

“If we torture them for information,” Ira said. “Let’s call it what it is, Max.”

Regina pulled a face. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Ethical issues aside, torture isn’t exactly known for giving reliable information,” she pointed out. “It will be difficult to independently confirm anything we couldn’t anyway. It’ll be hard to be sure if they’re just lying to mislead us, or, if they don’t fold immediately and we really have to break them, if they’re just saying what they think we want to know to make the pain stop.”

Max sighed. “Yeah, I suppose. Could you get some information from their heads in other ways?”

“I mean, I could try,” Regina hedged. “I’m not sure how that would work or what the risks would be, though. I’m stumbling blindly in the dark when it comes to these things. We’re not that desperate for information.”

The other two nodded, and Regina turned to make her way out of the castle proper and into the yard, watching her hive at work. She was feeling frustrated about her progress with psychic magic, or lack thereof, but she wasn’t going to let that bait her into making mistakes. She wasn’t going to catch up to Madris by being reckless. Assuming that’s even possible, she thought, then made a face and pushed the thought aside. For all she knew, trying things like that might open her own mind to her presumptive victims, with unpleasant consequences considering she was the fulcrum of the hive’s psychic link.

As they stepped out into the courtyard, Regina focused on the immediate situation. Night was falling, stars twinkling in the cloudless sky. It was pretty, but cloud cover would have probably been better for her forces. Not that it would matter for a while yet, since they’d just taken out the largest concentration of enemy troops for kilometers. So she allowed herself to enjoy the night sky for a second.

What to do with the prisoners had been a hotly debated topic, and Regina still hadn’t reached a firm conclusion. She was going to leave them in the fortifications they captured, for now, guarded by some drones. Her hive had some experience with keeping prisoners by now, and the psychic link did make it easier. Further down the line, they could maybe arrange prisoner exchanges. That would get drones that might have been captured, or if not, some of Lyns’ forces, back while taking that problem off her hands. The thought of her drones being captured or dying in battle didn’t sit well with her.

Regina stood in the middle of her hive at work, breathed in deeply and felt it come alive around her. No, not come alive; it had already been alive, after all, had almost since she could remember. But there was a vitality to it now, which she had not felt before.

It was, she knew, a reflection of her own mind.

I didn’t realize I missed this. The thought came to her unbidden, but it wasn’t wrong, or something to be brushed off. Regina stood in the middle of territory she had acquired, even if that might just be temporarily, with hordes of her hive’s drones shaped as a weapon around her. In front of her lay lands she had not seen yet, behind her a hive and territory she had built up from the ground. It didn’t even matter that she was here in person.

This war would be different than the gnomes. It already was. That one had been a defensive war. It wasn’t finished yet and might turn into a war more like this one, but still … She’d been dragged into it, while this she had chosen for herself.

Regina felt excited in a primal way, in a way she knew without having to reflect came from the Hivekind part of her. She’d had her doubts, but in this moment it seemed self-evident that her people had been made for war. Perhaps not entirely for war, she conceded, the thought distant. And yet.

Maybe, a year ago, she would have pushed this away, buried the feeling under other considerations and distractions. But she didn’t feel the need now, and instead allowed herself to indulge in it for a long moment. She didn’t feel the need to be afraid of it, because this wasn’t some foreign, dangerous influence. It was just her. She wasn’t any less in control than she’d been before.

Regina opened her mind and sunk into the psychic link, and felt it unfold around her. It was another part of her she had trouble understanding to the full extent, might never if she was honest with herself. But it was so alive. It was her, the way spreading her wings to catch a current of wind under them was. It was her family, her home in a way a simple physical location could never be.

She felt the minds of her hive around her and they were such a magnificent, awesome array of paintings, a tapestry woven together from many sources and stronger for it than the sum of its part, stars in a night sky sending their light to each other no matter the distance between them and bringing it into her night.

The feeling faded after a moment, and Regina was left panting, standing in the middle of a stone courtyard. It wasn’t exhaustion, at least not physical exhaustion. Although she did, for a fraction of a heartbeat, feel somehow lessened, before she fully came back to herself and reality.

“Probably shouldn’t try to become a poet,” Regina muttered, more to hear herself speak right now than because she was upset at the poetic tint her thoughts had taken.

It hadn’t really changed anything. She knew that right away. The psychic link was still there, and it still worked the same way it always had. But something might be a little different, anyway, and she suspected it was just her perspective. She’d never felt as … alien, and yet there had been a blazing light of humanity in there, too.

She had, she realized now, gone about this the wrong way. Her psychic power wasn’t an attribute she just happened to have completely independent from her hive’s psychic link. Trying to use it while forgoing her best tool was a way of crippling or at least limiting herself. On the other hand, it wasn’t all there was to it. She was already a psychic, and a pretty powerful one at that, she suspected. Even if all of her drones were suddenly out of her range, that wouldn’t change.

Regina smiled to herself, let her gaze pass over the drones close to her, and strolled towards the outer gate, starting to whistle a song she couldn’t quite remember the lyrics of tunelessly.