She looked up at him with those beautiful green eyes, shining with tears, and her hopeless expression brightened just a little. "W-We can be a family?"
" Only if you prove to me that you've learned your lesson," he said firmly. "I'll forgive you, but only when I'm sure that you won't pull an insane stunt like this again. Do you understand?"
"I understand," she said in a little voice.
"Now you're going to answer me, and you're going to tell the whole truth. No hedging. Do you understand?" She nodded vigorously. "Did anyone help you?"
She shook her head.
"How did you find out about the blood?"
"Jula told me the story about how she became my sister."
"Did she tell you where the blood was?"
She shook her head. "Jinna Brent told me."
Jinna Brent was the Water seat, and Tarrin couldn't put any real blame on her. Odds were, she had no idea just why Jasana was asking. Jula blew out her breath when she realized that Tarrin was hunting for any possible accomplices, and there was no doubt that he would not be as gentle or forgiving with them as he had been with his daughter. "How did you get it without anyone knowing?"
"I just went down and got it when everyone was asleep," she sniffled. "Nobody ever goes down there, so all I had to do was get out of the house without Mama catching me. I thought someone may find out I stole it, so I tried to hide who took it by using magic that Aunt Jenna taught me. I hid it in my room after I took it. I knew nobody would find it there, because it didn't have any smell, and mother makes me clean my own room. She won't let any of the maids come in and do it."
"How did you get it into the potion?"
"I talked Kimmie into showing me where they were doing the magic a long time ago, before I even decided to do it," she said after a moment. "I put it in the day before you drank it. The old human was sleeping, and Aunt Kimmie was here taking a nap. I snuck out with Eron and left him in the kitchens, did it, then came back and we went down the baths with his boat."
Tarrin recalled that Jasana had turned up missing that day, and they they had been found in the baths. "Eron, did Jasana leave you in the kitchens?" he asked his son directly.
"I didn't see her go," he said in a casual manner. "Cook Golin was giving me sweetcakes."
"You and your stomach, cub," Mist growled at him, but in a loving way.
"And that's it? Nobody helped you?"
"N-No," she said.
"That doesn't sound very certain," Triana snorted.
"Well, nobody helped me," she said, looking at the floor. "But I didn't think of it myself."
"Who did?" he asked bluntly.
Jasana wouldn't look at him for a moment, then she finally did, and when she did, she looked ready to break out into tears again. "You did, Gramma," she blurted. "You and Mama and Aunt Kimmie and Aunt Mist. You were talking about ways to make Papa himself again, and when Mama said that someone should bleed on him accidentally on purpose, I remembered Jula's story about how she used Papa's blood. I promised you I wouldn't use my blood, and I couldn't get anyone else's without getting caught, so I used Papa's blood."
Tarrin levelled a very frosty stare at his bond-mother. Triana coughed delicately and gave him a helpless look. "Well, we were desperate," she said defensively. "And it was just talk. We didn't actually do it, cub."
"No, but this little eavesdropper here was alot braver than the lot of you," he replied in an icy tone.
"I wouldn't have imagined that she'd actually try it," she answered.
Tarrin realized that he'd gotten all his answers. Everything Jasana said fit in with what he already knew, and it also fit in with the way things happened as he undestood them. Despite his anger with her, he was privately very proud of her, proud that she could take an idea mentioned in passing and develop it into a marvelously well thought-out plan. If the simple fact that they used things that she had no experience in to track her down, she very well may have gotten away with it. Jasana had decided on her objective, decided on what she needed, organized things to acquire them, then executed her plan, and she did it all without anyone suspecting that she was up to no good. She was only two years old-around six or seven in human years-but already displayed remarkable intelligence and cleverness. Were it not for the fact that he was the victim of her scheme, he would have been tremendously impressed by it. He really was impressed by her, but he couldn't let her know that.
He was satisfied that that was everything he needed to know. He was confident that she had acted alone, and in his own mind, that was the end of it. The fury he'd felt before was actually starting to cool, as he heard her and understood things. He was very angry with her, but his love for his daughter had already started to nullify the blind rage he'd been experiencing, and it pulled at him a little bit to know that she would suffer through her punishment. He didn't want to see her suffer, but in this case it was an absolute necessity. If they didn't choke off this habit of hers of altering the entire world to suit herself, she was eventually going to do something for which there would neither be forgiveness nor leniency. Her turning him was a crime punishable by death, and she had to be made to understand that. It was something that just was not done, and the laws of Fae-da'Nar were explicit about it.
Taking his paw off her shoulder, he looked down at her with stern, almost cold eyes. She gazed up at him with teary eyes, her desperate fear evident on her face, as was just a glimmer of hope. "I'm not the one who's going to punish you, cub, though I'm sure you would have preferred it if I did," he told her. "Your grandmother is already chomping at the bit for it, and I'm not going to gainsay her. Besides, I think I've already punished you enough," he added thoughtfully.
Jasana threw a wild look at her furious grandmother, and it dawned on her that she wasn't going to get out this quite as easily as she was starting to think she was.
"I'm sure your mother's going to have a few things to say to you as well," he said soberly.
"Oh, you'd better believe that!" Jesmind said hotly, stalking up on them from where she'd stumbled into her seat.
"Stand in line, cub," Triana told her grimly. "I get her first."
Jasana blanched, almost unconsciously trying to sidle up to her father for protection, but he stopped her with a paw, then stood up before her. She barely came up to the middle of his thigh, and she seemed so small and defenseless. Then he reminded himself how much chaos that defenseless little child had caused.
"I'm going to leave this in your paws, mother," he told her calmly. "I'd better find Jenna and get my scolding overwith. I know she's going to let me have it over all the damage I caused. She'll probably make me fix it."
"I think she'll be happy enough you're alright," she said in a absent manner, her hot eyes fixed on Jasana.
He looked down at his child one more time, a serious, grim look, seeing her tears and fighting against them moving him to take pity on her. There could be no pity this time, or else he may lose her to her own cleverness in the future. "I'm going," he announced.
"I'm coming with you," Jula announced, moving towards him. "I, really don't want to be here for this."
"Alright," he nodded, turning his back on his sobbing child deliberately. He traded knowing looks with Triana, then padded away from her. He absently picked up the door on his way out and repaired it with a quick weave of Earth and Fire, then closed it behind him. Jasana's howls of pain started almost immediately after that, as Triana probbly put the girl over her knee, raised her tail out of the way, and proceeded to flay the skin off her backside. Tarrin considered it a necessary act. He had laid in the mental punishment, making her see just how much damage she had caused, and now her mother and grandmother were going to make her sorry she ever thought of doing it in the first place. Hopefully the combination of the terror of being punished so again and the very real threat Tarrin made to not forgive her if she ever did anything like that again would be enough for her to start thinking about the consequences of her actions before she did them.