'What if you'd gotten killed yourself?' Belton asked.
'If I had failed, there would have been other Shin'a'in who would have come after me who would have succeeded where I failed. I just had the right to try to do the job first.' She nodded as his eyes widened. 'I also knew that they had probably murdered plenty of other people in the past, and would do so again in the future -- and there is one sure thing you can say about destroying a murderer, and that's that he won't be around to kill again.'
Belton pondered her words silently; she waited for him to say something, but he remained silent.
'However--' she held up a cautionary finger '--revenge for an insult, for a purely personal wrong -- that's no reason for revenge. And I'll tell you why; you don't teach a piece of scum a lesson by serving out to him what he served out to you, all you do is give him a reason to heap your plate with more of the same. Slime doesn't learn lessons; it just stays slime.' She took a long, deep breath. 'Don't fool yourself, don't try to tell yourself you intend to teach your enemy a lesson. You won't. Revenge on slime is not education, it's got to be eradication -- or at the very least it has to accomplish the task of making absolutely sure that the slime can't ever commit that particular act again.'
The boy blinked at her, as if he couldn't quite believe that she had said that. 'But what about -- what if someone arranged -- hired someone else to do his dirty work for him?'
'When someone is low enough scum to buy a bully-boy to hurt or kill someone you care about, just who do you intend to get your revenge on?' she asked bluntly. 'The bully-boy? Granted, that piece of garbage won't be taking on any more jobs, at least for a while, but the perpetrator won't care, he'll just hire someone new.'
Belton chewed his lip a little more. 'No, no -- it would have to be the one who did the hiring.'
'So, you want to take on the scum himself?' She saw a fire leap into Belton's eyes and again raised a cautionary finger. 'Think it through. Can you prove that he bought the bully? Obviously you can't, or you or your family would have brought him up before the King's Justice on charges.'
The boy's face tightened up. 'You're right,' he said harshly. 'We can't prove anything.'
'I'm going to be saying this a great deal, Belton -- think this through, every aspect of it. What if he really didn't do anything? What if you're wrong?'
'But-' Belton began.
She shushed him. 'Humor me. What if you're wrong? You try to hurt an innocent man. Well, maybe not innocent, but certainly one who isn't guilty of that particular crime. I don't know what your religion says about that, but I know that the King's Justice will certainly catch up with you, and their punishment here on earth is bad enough.'
His face looked like a mask, but at least he was still listening. 'Yes, but-'
'I know, I know, it's easier for me to say this, to think about it, because I wasn't the one who was wronged. Belton, your father is powerful, and powerful men have more than one enemy. It is possible that some other enemy did this -- even deliberately staged things to make it look as if the person you suspect did it, knowing that in seeking revenge on the so-called innocent, you'd get yourselves into even more trouble. Isn't it?'
He paled a little, and nodded. 'But-'
'But assume you're right, and he did the dirty deed. Whether you fail or succeed in killing him, he wins.'
Belton's mouth fell open in shock. 'How can you say that?' he cried, his voice cracking.
She spread out her hands. 'Simple, friend. Think it through. You can't prove that he did the thing, that's a given. So, if you succeed in killing him, since you are not going to take your revenge by hiring another assassin -- or if you are, you aren't going to be as practiced at it as he is -- you're going to get caught. Your family is disgraced, and you die as a murderer, executed, and your family is impoverished in paying the blood-debt to his. Or, if you fail, your family is disgraced, and you die at his hands, or the hands of his bodyguards, which amounts to the same thing. You're still dead, and he is still sitting fat and happy on his ill-gotten goods.' She cocked her head to the side, and regarded his glazed eyes. 'Doesn't seem like justice, does it? You've been wronged, and trying to make things right will only make them worse.'
Slowly, he shook his head, and despair crept into his expression. 'So what do I do?' he asked bitterly. 'Let him go on gloating because he killed my cousin and got away with it?' The pain in his voice tore at her, but she knew that giving him sympathy at this moment would only allow him to wallow in feeling and keep him from thinking.
'Oh, absolutely not!' she replied. 'But you have to have an eye to the long view. What's the goal?'
'Get him!' Belton replied passionately. 'Make him pay!'
'Then plan,' she said shortly. 'Use your mind -- he's certainly using his against you, and that's the way you can catch him.'
