They finished eating. They took tea, a solemn, quiet time.
Community was established. Food and tea had gone the rounds. Then it was permissible to get down to bare-faced questions.
“How many of the staff survive, nadiin?” Cenedi asked their hosts directly. “One apprehends they are fairly well scattered.”
“The lodge is mostly intact, nadi,” Keimi said. “And the Kadigidi have attempted to base there, but to no good, not for them.”
That covered bloody actions, Bren thought.
And still that strange reserve.
“You wonder, do you not,” Ilisidi said sharply, “who claims the succession.” Her mouth made a hard line, and she leaned on her cane, which rested at a steep angle before her. All around the fire, eyes fixed mostly on the ground. And the cane lifted, pointing. “There is the succession, nadiin, should it come to that.” The cane angled toward the spring, and Cajeiri.
A scarcely perceptible tension breathed out of the newcomers as they followed that indication. Not an eastern claimant, then, but an heir of the central provinces, a Ragi like themselves; and no proclamation in the solemn halls of government provoked more tension or more relief than this. Bren himself found his breath stopped, and when they looked back to Ilisidi, Taibeni heads bowed in deep, deep respect.
“Nand’ dowager,” Keimi said solemnly.
That old, old divide between east and west, that had once, in the previous aiji’s death, voted Tabini into office, passing over Ilisidi: too eastern, too much a foreigner to manage the Western Association. It had been a bitter dose.
And Ilisidi knew these people, knew where their man’chi lay, and gained everything in one stroke. The whole atmosphere had changed.
“So what happened here, nadiin?” Ilisidi asked, leaning on that cane again. “And where is he?”
A small silence.
“The aiji,” Keimi said, “had come to the lodge for safety. He had intended to send Mercheson-paidhi to Mogari-nai, and he intended to follow, when news came that Murini of the Kadigidi had conducted assassinations in the legislature itself, and lords had scattered for immediate safety. Sabotage was aimed at the shuttles, and Tabini-aiji dispatched staff immediately to prevent that. He intended, himself, to go to Mogari-nai and communicate directly with Ogun-aiji up on the station. The shuttles could not launch: they were in preparation, as best we understand, but we have never heard that they launched.”
Bad news. Terrible news.
And Tabini had made a critical choice, to neglect all other matters and protect the shuttle fleet, as an irreplaceable connection to the space station, to his mission, to the ship and its business. Some atevi might not understand that, might not forgive it, in an aiji who had already committed so ruinously much effort into the space program, to join with humans.
“It was suggested by the staff,” Deiso said further, “that he be on one shuttle, and that some of us would go with him. He refused, nand’ dowager, and said it was impossible, anyway. He said that he belonged to the earth, and that he would never expect us to die for him while he sat safe in the heavens. By all we know, the spaceport is still in provincial hands, the shuttle grounded, but intact, and the crews in hiding. The Kadigidi have taken the shuttle facility at Shejidan, however, and maintain a guard there.”
A profound relief. The investment, the unique materials, the irreplaceable staff… protected, thus far. But now that the ship was back at the station, the Kadigidi and their supporters would know that the shuttle there and the one on Mospheira represented a dire threat to them. Destroying it, or taking control of it, would become a priority.
“And where is my grandson?” Ilisidi asked.
“No one knows, aiji-ma, but he left eastward—whether skirting through Atageini lands, or more directly inward, we do not know.”
A border where there was only uneasy peace, an old, old feud within the Ragi Association—not often a bloody one—that had been patched within the larger Western Association, the aishidi’tat, first by pragmatic diplomacy, then by the marriage of Tabini-aiji to an Atageini consort… Cajeiri’s mother.
And Cajeiri, with his two companions, had quietly gotten up and moved back to stand nearby, listening, lip bit between his teeth.
“The dowager proposes to go ask Lord Tatiseigi where his man’chi lies,” Cenedi said, and Bren’s heart did two little thuds.
But of course. Of course that question had to be posed, and posed face to face, if it was to have the best chance of a favorable response. Man’chi worked that way. Ilisidi could ask that question by phone, supposing they found a phone, and that would indeed shock her former lover to a certain degree, perhaps jolt him enough to get the truth out of him. But he might equally as well puff himself up and take personal meaning out of the fact that she had used the phone, not confronting him—and then the shock would diminish into recalcitrance at best. Nothing on earth would match the emotional impact of personal appearance, on Atageini land, and very little could match Ilisidi’s force if she got inside his guard. If there was anything calculated to catch the old gentleman at a disadvantage, if there was any appearance of the old regime capable of shaking him to his emotional core—Ilisidi could.
And Ilisidi with the advantage of guardianship over Cajeiri, half Atageini, himself, and destined to rule, by what Ilisidi had just declared—canny politician that she was… oh, damned right she had a hand to play.
If they lived long enough. If the Atageini had stayed free of Kadigidi forces. If, if, and if.
Granted they had set something in motion back in Adaran, and stirred things up at Sidonin. They were about to do something far, far more dangerous.
He decided on another cup of tea and kept quiet. This was an atevi matter, and not one where the paidhi-aiji owned a particularly valid theory of how to proceed. This choice depended on emotional hard-wiring, the psychology of the business—it was ninety percent psychology, where it involved convincing people to risk their lives to support an eight-year-old successor. The same way the mechieti stayed, unrestrained, where their leader stayed, this group just sitting round the fire was doing something, arguing things, exerting persuasions and enlisting arguments that human nerves might perceive, but couldn’t quite feel.
Excitement was in the air, resolution in the direction of glances, the attitude of heads, the expression in golden eyes, shimmering the other side of the small gas flame. Dusk had settled deep as they heated more water for another, easier round of tea.
The fate of the aishidi’tat was potentially being decided, right here, between one great player and a handful of lesser ones. Tabini’s choice under threat had been to come to them, and even absent, he had for months been a nebulous presence, whether dead or alive, sustaining them in their fight. With Ilisidi and the boy came an emotional pressure that Ilisidi, canny as she was, seized, directed, bent to her own purpose.
One saw how she had survived coups and assassinations—why she was alive and many of her enemies were dust.
“Tea?” one of Keimi’s people asked, and poured for him. He sipped it, feeling, despite the painkiller, the early twinges of what was going to be a truly excruciating day in the saddle tomorrow. Cajeiri had dropped down to sit with the two teens, all of them listening, questions in abeyance, feeling—God knew what.
Sometimes the paidhi’s job was best done by keeping his mouth firmly shut.
The folk of Taiben seemed at least not to forget him, in his silence. He had to refuse another serving of hardtack, but he sopped up several cups of tea before he reached capacity. And the discussion went not that much longer before Ilisidi declared she was tired and wished to sleep.
Bren was glad enough to lie down. He was unwilling for Jago to lie beside him and make their relationship that apparent to strangers—it was her dignity he was thinking of, in settling in a narrow spot, between two tree roots. But she sat with Banichi and Cenedi and the rest in a second conference with the three latest-come rangers—perhaps asking particulars of trails, quasi-boundaries, and affiliations, not to mention rumors from outside… all that sort of thing their Guild would be interested to know, on which they did their job.