No, he would just as soon not see the Queen replaced by a girl with no more idea of how to govern properly than a goat. At the least, it would mean a period of terrible chaos, and no one would prosper then. At the worst, the freedmen would take her accession to the throne as a time of weakness, and revolt. Hundreds, thousands would die, property would be destroyed, and even though Xylina and her Mazonite troops would win, the country would be years in recovering.
He should point out this option of his to the Queen. It would be a way to negate Xylina without killing or exiling her. He did not think that Adria had realized this. Of course, given the revulsion with which most Mazonites regarded a liaison with one of his kind, perhaps the option had never even occurred to her.
He rose from his impromptu couch with his plans firmly made. He would go to the Queen and begin his attempt to influence her. Xylina would, of course, attempt to raise the rest of the payment. At the end of the moon, they would see who had succeeded.
Perhaps, he thought with a smile, they both would. Then she would have another year, during which she would struggle to raise the money, and the Queen would attempt to ruin her. The game would be prolonged. That would make his quest to win her all the more of a challenge. He loved such a challenge; the longer Xylina managed to win, the more desirable she would prove herself to be. He almost hoped she would manage to prevail against the Queen and raise the money in a moon. Certainly she would not endure to the end of the full term; the Queen would see to that.
Xylina sat at her desk, and gazed at the total in her account books with a sinking heart. Despite help from Lycia's friends, many of whom sent their slaves to be trained by Faro withno prospect of ever needing slaves that were trained as bodyguards, the total was the same.
Forty-one coronets, seven circlets, and two silver sheaves. Not forty-five coronets. Not even close.
She had lost her bet. Her only choices now were bankruptcy and exile, bankruptcy and debtors prison, or-
Or the unthinkable.
She shuddered. That was no answer, for even if she swallowed her revulsion and gave in to that-creature-it would only delay the inevitable. As soon as anyone found out-if there were even mere rumors that she had taken a demon as a lover-she could face not only exile. It was possible that she would be stoned from the gates. Such things had happened in the past, although she could not recall anything of the sort in her lifetime. Still, if her enemy was that powerful, Xylina might find herself facing the full force of an antique law.
But the very notion of yielding-no. It was not possible.
She put her aching head down in her hands. Her throat was tight and her eyes burned, and yet she could not weep. She was acutely aware of everything around her: the distant voice of Faro as he shouted at his clumsy new pupils, the crack of wood on wood as he drilled them, the scent of fresh bread from the kitchen, the harsh texture of the wood under her elbows, the faint movement of air through the ventilation slits in her office.
So she knew the moment something changed; felt the presence of someone else beside her, before he even moved and closed the door.
She dropped her hands to her desk and glared, but she had known whom it was the moment he entered so silently, unheralded. Only one creature could simply appear in her office like that. Only one had any reason to.
The demon called Ware.
And it was, indeed, he.
Today he made no pretense at being anyone's slave. He wore garments of black silk, artfully draped, and richly embroidered black-on-black about the hem, clasped with a belt of chased silver in the shape of a serpent that held its tail in its mouth. Beautiful and deadly, and she wondered how it was that the Queen held such power over his kind that they obeyed her. She could not imagine anyone controlling him, even with his consent.
"Tomorrow," he said simply, once again leaning back against the door of her office with arms folded over his chest. He looked absurdly out of place, so elegant amid the crude furnishings. "And you do not have the payment."
He made it a statement, but she knew better than to try and bluff him. His sources of information had been completely accurate before, and she saw no reason why that should have changed. She simply nodded, and stared at him, mouth a thin line of tension, every muscle and nerve taut as harp-strings.
"The option is still open," he said, delicately. He did not have to say which option.
"I will pay you," she snapped, wondering if she could borrow a half-coronet from each of Lycia's circle of cronies-just enough to make this payment. They could spare that, and she could pay them back a half-coronet each week, agreeing in advance what the order would be of repayment. That might save her this time-
"There will be more payments," he said, as if he were reading her mind. "Three more, to be precise. If you borrow from others, you will only be increasing your debt, and decreasing the amount you can save toward the next payment. And you will not be able to make the next payment. This I know."
"I wouldn't be so certain of that!" she snapped. "Business is better than ever-"
"Only because it amuses your enemy to allow you to think that you succeed, just before she brings another blow down upon you," he interrupted severely, like a teacher chiding a student for not having an answer she should have known. "Have you not thought this through? Your enemy is still your enemy, and will continue to be so. You have prevented her from burning your dwelling down a second time; now she will go on to more subtle means of destroying you. You will find yourself levied with strange fines, odd taxes. At every turn you will face another regulation which you are violating, for which you will have to pay. For every coronet you bring in, you will lose half in fines alone. She will leave you enough to give you the illusion that you are prospering, but it will be as much of an illusion as conjured gold, and it will disappear as quickly when tested."
She stared at him, mouth agape. Such power-who in all of Mazonia had such power? To change the very laws themselves to work against one specific woman-
"That-that's ridiculous!" she stammered. "That's impossible! Why, to do all that, this enemy of mine would have to be the Quee-"
She paled as he nodded, smiling a little. This time he looked like the teacher whose student had finally given the correct answer.
"No-" she whispered, heart struck as still as a stone, stomach sinking, throat tight. If the Queen was against her, she was surely doomed! But why her? "No-that can't be. Not the Queen-"
"Adria was rivaled only by your mother in power," Ware told her, his strange eyes utterly still for once, and dark as a gathering storm. He recited this dispassionately, as if it were some kind of lesson from remote history. "She feared your mother, but seeming fate took Elibet out of her path for her. I promise you, if the earthquake had not killed your mother, Adria would have eventually found another way to rid herself of a dangerous rival. Adria permits no rivals, dangerous, or otherwise."
Xylina stared at him, wondering how he knew all this. The same sources of information that had so accurately reported her inability to pay her debt? Or something more than that? And his reference to her mother-
"How could the Queen summon an earthquake?" she asked disbelievingly. "No woman has magic like that!"
"No woman," he agreed.
Xylina was aghast. "The demons? They have magic like that?"