I caught myself just before I would have looked around. Of course Nahadoth would choose not to appear. The Enefadeh had pledged to help me, after all, and having the Nightlord looming behind me like an overgrown shadow would have undermined what little authority I had in these men’s eyes.
But Nahadoth was there. I could feel him.
“I have come,” I said. “Not entirely alone. But then, no Arameri is ever fully alone, is she?”
One of his men, almost as richly dressed as Gemd, narrowed his eyes. “You’re no Arameri,” he said. “They didn’t even acknowledge you until these last few months.”
“Is that why you’ve decided to form this alliance?” I asked, stepping forward. A few of the men tensed, but most did not. I am not very intimidating. “I can’t see how that makes much sense. If I’m so unimportant to the Arameri, then Darr is no threat.”
“Darr is always a threat,” growled another man. “You man-eating harlots—”
“Enough,” said Gemd, and the man subsided.
Good; not wholly a figurehead, then.
“So this is not about the Arameri adopting me, then?” I eyed the man Gemd had silenced. “Ah, I see. This is about old grudges. The last war between our peoples was more generations back than any of us can count. Are Mencheyev memories so long?”
“Darr claimed the Atir Plateau in that war,” Gemd said quietly. “You know we want it back.”
I knew, and I knew that was a stupid, stupid reason to start a war. The people who lived on the Atir didn’t even speak the Mencheyev tongue anymore. None of this made any sense, and that was enough to make my temper rise.
“Who is it?” I asked. “Which of my cousins is pulling your strings? Relad? Scimina? Some sycophant of theirs? Who are you whoring for, Gemd, and how much have you charged to bend forward?”
Gemd’s jaw tightened but he said nothing. His men were not so well-trained; they bristled and glared daggers. Not all of them, though. I noted which ones looked uncomfortable, and knew that they were the ones through whom Scimina or another of my relatives had chosen to work.
“You are an uninvited guest, Yeine-ennu,” Gemd said. “Lady Yeine, I should say. You are interrupting my business. Say what you’ve come to say, and then please leave.”
I inclined my head. “Call off your plans to attack Darr.”
Gemd waited for a moment. “Or?”
I shook my head. “There is no alternative, Minister. I’ve learned a great deal from my Arameri relatives these last few days, including the art of wielding absolute power. We do not give ultimatums. We give orders, and those are obeyed.”
The men turned to look at one another, their expressions ranging from fury to incredulity. Two kept their faces blank: the richly dressed man at Gemd’s side and Gemd himself. I could see calculation in their eyes.
“You don’t have absolute power,” said the man beside Gemd. He kept his tone neutral, a sign that he was uncertain. “You haven’t even been named heir.”
“True,” I said. “Only the Lord Dekarta holds total power over the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Whether they thrive. Whether they falter. Whether they are obliterated and forgotten.” Gemd’s brow tightened at that, not quite a frown. “Grandfather has this power, but he may of course choose to delegate it to those of us in Sky who have his favor.”
I let them wonder whether I had earned that favor or not. It probably sounded like a sign of favor that I had been summoned to Sky and named a fullblood.
Gemd glanced at the man beside him before saying, “You must realize, Lady Yeine, that once plans have been set in motion, they can be difficult to stop. We will need time to discuss your… order.”
“Of course,” I said. “You have ten minutes. I’ll wait.”
“Oh for—” This was from another man, younger and bigger, one of the ones I had marked for an Arameri tool. He looked at me as if I were excrement on the bottom of his shoe. “Minister, you cannot seriously be considering this ridiculous demand!”
Gemd glared at him, but the silent reprimand clearly had no impact. The younger man stepped away from the table and came toward me, his whole posture radiating menace. Every Darre woman is taught to deal with such behavior from men. It is an animal trick that they use, like dogs ruffling their fur and growling. Only rarely is there actual threat behind it, and a woman’s strength lies in discerning when the threat is real and when it is just hair and noise. For now the threat was not real, but that could change.
He stopped before me and turned back to his fellows, pointing at me. “Look at her! They probably had to call a scrivener just to confirm she came out of an Arameri cunt—”
“Rish!” Gemd looked furious. “Sit down.”
The man—Rish—ignored him and turned back to me, and abruptly the threat became real. I saw it in the way he positioned himself, angling his body to put his right hand near my right side. He meant to backhand me. I had an instant to decide whether to dodge or reach for my knife—
And in that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal.
That this analogy occurred to me should have been a warning.
Rish swung. I held still, tense for the blow. Three inches from my face Rish’s fist seemed to glance off something no one could see—and when it did, there was a high hard clacking sound, like stone striking stone.
Rish drew his hand away, startled and perhaps puzzled by his failure to put me in my place. He looked at his fist, on which a patch of shining, faceted black had appeared about the knuckles. I was close enough to see the flesh around this patch blistering, beading with moisture like meat cooked over a flame. Except it was not burning, but freezing; I could feel the waft of cold air from where I stood. The effect was the same, however, and as the flesh withered and crisped away as if it had been charred, what appeared underneath was not raw flesh, but stone.
I was surprised that Rish took so long to begin screaming.
All the men in the room reacted to Rish’s cry. One stumbled back from the table and nearly fell over a chair. Two others ran over to Rish to try and help him. Gemd moved to help as well, but some powerful preservative instinct must have risen in the well-dressed man beside him; he grabbed Gemd by the shoulder to halt him. That turned out to be wise, because the first of the men who reached Rish—one of the Toks—grabbed Rish’s wrist to see what was the matter.
The black was spreading swiftly; nearly the whole hand was now a glittering lump of black crystal in the rough shape of a fist. Only the tips of Rish’s fingers remained flesh, and they transformed even as I watched. Rish fought the Tok, maddened with agony, and the Tok grabbed Rish’s fist in an effort to hold him still. Almost immediately he jerked away, as if the stone had been too cold to touch—and then the Tok, too, stared at his palm, and the black blotch that was now spreading there.
Not merely crystal, I realized, in the part of my mind that was not frozen in horror. The black substance was too pretty to be quartz, too flawless and clear in its faceting. The stone caught the light like diamond, because that was what their flesh had become. Black diamond, the rarest and most valuable of all.
The Tok began to scream. So did several others of the men in the room.
Through it all I remained still and kept my face impassive.
He shouldn’t have tried to hit me. He deserved what he got. He shouldn’t have tried to hit me.
And the man who tried to help him? What did that one deserve?
They are all my enemies, my people’s enemies. They should not have… they should not… Oh, gods. Gods.