The two of them stood in Alazon's office in Calirath Palace, surrounded by her collection of horses as they gazed out the windows. The lamps were turned low, the sun had set hours ago, and a silver moon drifted over the palace gardens. It was a serene and beautiful sight, utterly at odds with the chaos and confusion which had enveloped the people who lived and worked in the Palace.
'You just don't want to admit that she was right,' Kinlafia continued.
'Right?' Alazon stared at him in stark disbelief. 'Gods, Darcel! She's seventeen! And she's a Ternathian!
The youngest of that bastard's sons is twenty-nine, and they're all just as bad as he is! Can you imagine what will happen to her when she marries one of them? Especially after humiliating his father the way she did this morning? Why not just invite him to rape her on the floor of the Conclave and be done with it?!'
'Yes.' The word came out harshly, but Kinlafia met her angry eyes levelly. 'I can imagine exactly what will happen. Vothan! Do you think I like the thought? But that doesn't change the fact that she's right.
That we've got to unify, and that we don't have time to give Chava the opportunity to reopen the entire unification debate.'
'Yes we do!' Alazon protested. 'And if Chava's going to open the door then I say we should use the opportunity he's given us to delete that entire subsection from the Act!'
'You know better than that.' Kinlafia regarded her sternly. 'In fact, I know you know better than that-
you've been the one teaching me to think in strategic political terms for the last two weeks! Do you really think Chava would have opened this entire subject if he wasn't prepared to announce that Uromathia would use the pretext of Janaki's death and the 'invalidation' of the Act to justify refusing to accept unification after all unless it's revised once again? This time to give him more power, more room to spin his webs? And do you think he waited until after the Emperor detailed his requirements by accident? He wanted every member of the Conclave to accept, gut-deep, just how serious the threat is.
And then he issued his demand.
'He wanted them to know how big a pistol he was prepared to hold to all of their heads. If he claims the Act is nullified, if he refuses to acknowledge Zindel's rightful coronation, then what happens to all of the preparations we need to make? Do you think for an instant that once that sack of snakes was untied, there wouldn't be enormous pressure from other members of the Conclave to give him more of what he wanted in the first place if that was the only way to get him to sign back up quickly now that the Arcanans have proven they're a genuine, immediate threat?
'He might as well have handed us a written memo about his new strategy, Alazon! The way he saw it, he won either way. Either he got to name Andrin's husband under the terms of the Act, or else Zindel told him to go straight to the Arpathian hells before he gave one of Chava's sons his daughter. And if that happened, if Zindel refused to honor the Act's terms, then Chava could declare that Zindel's decision to invalidate the Act absolved him of his agreement to surrender the sovereignty of Uromathia to Zindel … and that would have given him all the leverage in the world, unless we chose to fight that very civil war the Emperor told me last night he wanted to avoid!
'It's obvious from the Voice reports and print articles you've had me Watching and reading ever since I got back that Chava never really regarded the original Arcanan massacre as a genuine threat. He was doing his best to game the situation then, and he's doing exactly the same thing now. He's just changing technique, using the threat everyone else sees as genuine to frighten them into conceding the points they refused to give him before. If he can simultaneously frighten the other members of the Conclave badly enough and appear sufficiently intransigent, he'll get at least some of his demands-maybe even most of them. And he won't give a good godsdamn how long he delays unification, how much damage he does to our ability to deal with the Arcanans, as long as there's a chance of improving his position.'
'But-'
''thinspace''But' nothing, love,' Kinlafia said softly, sadly. 'You know that's what would happen. And so does her father. My gods, Alazon, you know how much he loves her, and you saw as well as I did what he was prepared to do out there today! Yes, it was her decision, and I know as well as you do that she never even warned him she was going to do it. That she deliberately didn't give him time to think about ways to stop her, or for the father in him to find some justification-any justification-for keeping her from doing this. But if he hadn't realized in the end that she was right, he would never have let her get away with it. Never.'
'But there has to be another way.' Alazon was no longer protesting or denying. She was almost pleading. 'We can't just let her do this, Darcel. We can't!'
Tears glittered in the Privy Voice's eyes, and Darcel put his arm around her and hugged her tightly.
'I don't see how we can stop her,' he said, and in the back of his brain he saw once again the image of Andrin weeping. 'I'm finally beginning to understand-really understand-what sort of price being born a Calirath can exact. She's going to do this. The only person who could stop her is her father, and he won't-he can't. He'll do everything he can to protect her, but this is the one thing he can't stop her from doing.'
'It will kill her,' Alazon said softly. 'Maybe not physically-not quickly. But it will kill her.' She looked up at Kinlafia, and a single tear broke free and trickled down her cheek. 'I never really knew her until this entire impossible crisis just exploded in our faces. But now that's changed. And if she marries someone like one of Chava Busar's sons, it will just destroy her inside.'
Kinlafia nodded, hearing the pain in her beautiful voice. That pain, he knew, was the reason someone with Alazon's sharp intelligence and grasp of politics could insist that Andrin had to be stopped. And gods knew she was right. If there'd been any way to avoid this … .
'We're just going to have to hope she's stronger than that,' he said. 'I've read the entire Act since you gave me a copy. If I could see any way for her to-'
He paused suddenly, and Alazon stiffened in the circle of his arm as she Felt a sudden, incredible cascade of thoughts and emotions tumbling through him. Then he inhaled sharply and looked into her eyes.
'Gods!' he half-whispered. 'That's it.'
'What?' Alazon demanded.
'I've just had an idea,' he told her. 'My gods, it's what Janaki Glimpsed!'
'What's what Janaki Glimpsed?!'
'We've got to go find Andrin,' Kinlafia told her. 'And be sure you bring your copy of the Act!
Epilogue
The sun had set hours ago.
The slider car raced up what should have been the valley of the Razinta River almost silently, but for the rush of wind. It was a cloudy, moonless night, cold and still … and very, very empty.
The Arcanans called the Razinta the Kosal, and they'd traveled almost eighteen hundred miles across the face of the universe they called Lamia to reach it, racing steadily southwest towards the next portal in their endless journey. From the maps Jasak had shown them, that portal lay some miles south of Usarlah, the capital of the province of Delkrath back in Sharona, almost in the center of the Narhathan Peninsula.
But this Usarlah lay almost a hundred thousand miles from the Usarlah Shaylar had visited as a young university student so long ago.
I've come almost half the distance to the moon from home, she thought, staring out into the darkness, and that's as a bird-or a dragon-might have flown it. Half way to the moon. She shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around the sheer distance involved. And we still have almost forty thousand more miles to go.
'You seem … pensive tonight, Shaylar,' Gadrial said, and Shaylar turned back from the window.
The Ransaran magister sat across the small table from her, shuffling the sixty-card deck with slender, adroit fingers. She'd been teaching Shaylar and Jathmar an Arcanan card game called Old Basilisk. The rules weren't all that complex-certainly not any more complicated than several Sharonian card games Shaylar could think of-but the deck had five twelve-card suits instead of the three eighteen-card suits she was accustomed to, which made keeping track of exactly what had been played challenging. Or would have, if Voices hadn't had photographic memories, at any rate.
'I feel pensive,' Shaylar admitted. 'We're such a long way away from everything I've ever known. And it's so …
