Free Queen of Stars by Dave Duncan

starting to work, but a refill would be welcome.
    Tyl smiled. “My job all last year was seancing Earth, looking for pretty girls who slept alone. Just about every night, V extroverts there and rapes one or two. None of them can resist his magic. None see him as he truly is. Even if he only visits a girl once, there’s another department of the Family who keeps watch to see if she bears a halfling child. Miscegenation is rarely successful, but he harvests a few halflings a year. They’re exchanged for mudling babies from Phegda.”
    “That’s the old legend of changelings come true,” Rigel commented as the waiter delivered the antipasto and an ice bucket.
    Tyl drained his lager. “And then the mudling mother and her foster baby are moved to the crèche at Unukalhai, one of his subdomains. When the child is five, the mother is sent away and the child is reared by its half sisters and later half brothers.”
    There was a pause.
    Avior was quite certain that she was being manipulated and this was payoff time. “You told me that the Family ‘seances’ the world, if that’s the right term, for halflings.”
    Tyl nodded. “And we’re distinctive. Once you’ve seen one of us, you can’t mistake the rest—something about the eyes. Once in a while one of V’s victims moves away and the supervision squad loses track of her. So unless she aborts the fetus, she will bear a halfling child unknown to us. Unknown to the Family, I mean.”
    “We found you,” Rigel said, “because Tyl knew that the Family had located a halfling in Saskatchewan, but was just ignoring her. It took us a couple of months to find you. The Family had still done nothing about you. We decided, if you will pardon the insult, that you did not look sufficiently savage for their needs. You had missed out on their monster training.”
    She found that funny, or perhaps the rum did. The boys at art school had called her the black widow, although she was neither black nor a widow. Or the Dragon Lady. Many had accepted her challenge; most had gotten much more than they’d bargained for.
    Rigel looked puzzled by her amusement, but when she did not comment, he went on. “Now I suspect that Hadar was trolling you as bait for me, and I bit when I decided to rescue you.” He paused expectantly.
    There it was again, and not very subtle, either.
    “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you. Very briefly and just once. I have no idea who my father was. My mother belonged to a rich ranching family in Argentina. When she became inexplicably pregnant, they quickly married her off to a visiting Venezuelan, who could have given your Vildiar lessons in sheer nastiness. I was born in Caracas. So, yes, Halfling Tyl, I may very well be one of your half sisters. As far as I am concerned, I have no family whatsoever. And I will not discuss it again.” After a lifetime of trying to forget, she would not start digging up corpses now. She lifted her glass with a shaky hand and remembered it was empty.
    The waiter appeared with the champagne and three flutes.
    Tyl nodded sadly. “It’s very likely. What V has been doing is a major crime. He ought to have been sent to the Dark Cells for it a thousand times over. No other starborn does it.”
    “Tell her about your childhood,” Rigel said. “What she missed.”
    Avior protested. “I don’t want to hear!” She drained her champagne.
    “You don’t,” Tyl agreed. “The three Rs taught at Unukalhai are Ravishing, Reliability, and Ruthlessness. The insufficiently vicious are used for practice.” He reached for a handful of olives. “About twenty years ago, V decided his army was large enough, and the slaughter began.”
    “They killed these Naos people?”
    “Some faded, a few may have died in genuine accidents, but the others were all killed except for Talitha and Izar—and Vildiar himself. V never orders a criminal act, you understand. He can still proclaim his innocence on the Star itself. Hadar and Botein