Neb swallowed. Suddenly, he felt afraid and alone and uncertain. “You know that I would do anything for you, Father.” He wasn’t sure why he’d slipped into the older, more familiar term. Perhaps because he’d heard Isaak use the same. Or perhaps because over the last nine months, the man had played the role.
Petronus nodded again. “Very well then.” He handed the note over to him. “I am rescinding your status in
the Order.”
Stunned, Neb took the note but did not open it. “If this is about-”
Petronus shook his head. “It is not about you.” Their eyes met. “The assignment in Windwir and your
work here were only intended to be.
te.mp.orary.”
They meant to protect us.
It made sense now. The Androfrancines had ever considered themselves the shepherds of yesterday, guarding the New World from itself and from a past they feared might be repeated.
They meant to protect us .
He felt the tears now, pushing at his eyes, and his thoughts turned suddenly as that greater strategy took form before his very eyes. Someone out there had penetrated Vlad Li Tam’s network of sons and daughters or his closely shielded staff. They had somehow maneuvered the rescripting of the golden bird to implicate Vlad Li Tam in the Desolation of Windwir. A savvy player of queen’s war, when the consort was threatened, would have moved him to a point on the board as far removed from that threat as possible. Vlad Li Tam, dismantling his vast network, had done so.
But who was the other player, that Vlad Li Tam would remove himself utterly from the New World, transferring his wealth to the Androfrancine Order and donating his holdings to the new library, leaving nothing behind but his daughter?
Someone beyond the Named Lands . Petronus felt his knees go weak.
The Androfrancines had known this, at least some part of them. And they had feared it even to the point of seeking out the terrible song of Xhum Y’Zir to protect the Named Lands from this invisible threat.
In the end, their best intentions for the light had nearly extinguished it.
Perhaps his actions had been justice. Perhaps they had been mercy. Either way, Petronus had done what he had done. Sethbert lay dead and the Order lay dead alongside him. He thought of Grymlis and the Marsher village so long ago.
He put papers in the pouch and put the pouch with the small pile of things he intended to take back with him to Caldus Bay.
By the time he’d finished packing, the tears had already begun.
Jin Li Tam
In the pandemonium that followed Sethbert’s execution, Jin Li Tam slipped from the pavilion. She’d seen something unexpected there-one of the younger Androfrancines looked surprisingly like one of her many siblings, and when their eyes met, he had looked away, and then vanished through one of the three wide entrances.
She followed.
She felt no anger over Sethbert’s death. He would’ve died regardless, she realized. A?€he realind despite the years she spent with him, at no time had she forged any kind of bond with the man. She had
no more doubt that he had brought down Windwir than that her father’s hand was intricately tied to all of these events, right down to the execution that for all practical purposes ended the Androfrancine Order’s legitimacy. Certainly, those few who remained-the Remnant-could try to come back from this, but it would never be successful. And what could they come back to? She had no doubt that Petronus had wrapped the Order’s loose strings before disqualifying himself from the Papacy by wetting his hands with Sethbert’s blood.
She wondered if that were her father’s work as well.
The thought of her father brought her back to the moment, and she pressed her way through the gathering crowd. She caught sight of the young Androfrancine moving quickly ahead of her and she quickened her pace. But when she caught up to him, it wasn’t her brother after all.
“I’m sorry,” she said, slipping back into the crowd and looking around.
You want to see someone from House Li Tam, she realized. She thought about this. Why? Over the past few months, her anger had ebbed and flowed like the tidewaters of Tam Bay in her home city. When the anger rolled out from her, the sand in her heart filled in with grief to the point that she longed for the anger’s return. Inevitably, the wave crashed back to enrage her all over again.
But suddenly, now, at the end of it all, it was as if both her anger and her grief toward her father had vanished beneath the tip of Petronus’s knife. Rudolfo had told her once that people spent their lives living with a thousand insignificant injustices, and that sometimes seeing justice served on one great evil could move them forward from the path where they’d been stuck. That sudden death, both of Sethbert and the Androfrancine Order, left her hollow and spent, thinking only of the better world she hoped to give her baby.
She took her time returning to the manor. She knew she should wait for Rudolfo, but she felt a sudden craving for solitude, and knew that his work for the night was just beginning. There would be uproar to quell, fears to assuage and assurances to offer to what little remained of P’Andro Whym’s lineage.
It was near dark when she approached the hidden doorway near the rear garden, and she stopped. The door was open, and a figure stood in the shadows of the concealed passage. She drew closer and stopped again, suddenly afraid and uncertain and alone.
Her father broke from the shadows, dressed in a deep gray archeologist’s robe. He said nothing, his face unreadable and hard though his eyes were soft. She said nothing, certain that her own face matched his own and equally certain that her eyes did not. She thought she would feel the anger again at the sight of him, but absolutely nothing stirred inside of her.
Their eyes met, and he nodded once, slowly. Then he moved ?€Then he past her, his shoulder brushing hers as he went. She turned around to watch him go, and she thought he walked more slowly and with less confidence.
She considered calling after him, but she did not know what to say. Instead, she watched him walk away, and after he’d gone, she went into her new home and closed the door. She had a life to build with
Rudolfo and their unborn son.
She did not find her father’s note until much later. She had not thought to look for it, though she could not remember a time when he’d ever failed to leave word for her. It was simple, scrawled quickly and
without code.
For my forty-second daughter, the title read, upon the celebration of her nuptials and the birth of