“I take it things didn’t go well?” Lady Barb waved her to a chair and poured them both mugs of bark tea. “What happened?”
Emily grimaced. “The rebels presented their terms, which were rejected; the royalists presented their terms, which were rejected, too. Both sides made threats, promising total war... neither side backed down.”
She stared at her hands for a long moment. “And Dater implied I’d been spending too much time with a rebel,” she said. “He...”
A surge of pure rage shot through her. How dare he? It hadn’t affected her as much as it should... she knew the suggestion wasn’t just wrong, it was absurd. Aiden wasn’t a man... not, she supposed, that would have made too much difference. Dater - she ground her teeth in fury - had crossed the line and... her lack of reaction had probably made things worse. She hadn’t thought... of course she hadn’t thought. She’d known Aiden wasn’t a man.
And if I were a man and she were a man in female clothes, he’d still find a way to throw it at me, she thought, tiredly. Damn the man.
Lady Barb sat facing her. “The White Council has formally terminated the mission,” she said. “I’ve been ordered to Whitehall, to assist with the security measures for the conference. Your credentials have been revoked, effective midnight. They haven’t quite ordered you out, but they’ve cancelled your authority to speak on behalf of the council. I imagine they expect you to leave before midnight...”
“They organized that quickly,” Emily muttered, sourly. She looked up. “Master Lucknow?”
“Prince Dater - King Dater - made a formal complaint,” Lady Barb said. “If that happens, common practice is to suspend the mediator and provide a replacement, even if the accusation is proven groundless. There’s no way the accused can continue. But... yes, right now, it’s possible someone on the council laid the groundwork for the complaint to be acted upon as soon as it arrived. It normally takes a few days for the council to agree to react.”
“And that means someone knew what was going to happen,” Emily said. “It has to be Master Lucknow.”
Lady Barb cocked her head. “Do you have any proof?”
Emily glared at her hands. “No. Not yet.”
“Until you do, you cannot make any accusations,” Lady Barb said. “Master Lucknow is extremely well connected, as you know. He could not be charged, let alone convicted, without very solid proof. And, if he is the one behind the whole affair, he will have made sure to cover his tracks. His agent or agents within the city might not even know who’s issuing the orders.”
“Of course not,” Emily muttered. “That would be too easy.”
She remembered Simon bursting into flame and shuddered. If he’d been working for Master Lucknow... what was the point? The whole affair made no sense. Master Lucknow was one of the prime movers behind the conference, one of the people who’d put their reputations on the line to try to hammer out a post-war accord before it was too late. Why would he work at cross-purposes to himself? Was he that desperate to nail her? Or... she shook her head. The plot, whatever it was, had started a long time before the end of the war. It had just been updated...
“Perhaps the idea is to cause chaos, then step in,” she said. She felt a burst of frustration. “Why...?”
Lady Barb met her eyes. “Why what?”
Emily shook her head. “Why can’t everyone be reasonable?”
Her thoughts churned. The royalists and the rebels could have come to an agreement. Both sides were smart enough to know they needed to come to an agreement. And yet, they’d thrown away any hope of peace by making preposterous demands... she groaned, inwardly. She’d tried to offer more moderate suggestions, only to have them rejected by both sides... she cursed under her breath. They could have called a halt to the war. Instead, both sides were so convinced they’d win they were committing themselves to total war.
She allowed her expression to darken. She could nuke Dater’s camp. It would be so easy to blow the royalist army to hell. It would save thousands of lives. She knew where the camp was and... she didn’t have to break through the wards to set up and detonate the nuke-spell. There’d be no need to slip through the wards or duel with the royal sorcerers... she could just blast them into orbit. But... her blood ran cold. She’d slaughter thousands of helpless conscripts who’d been unlucky enough to be half-drunk when the recruiting sergeants came around. And... many of them, if Althorn had been telling the truth, were actually rebels. She couldn’t kill them all.
And if I do, she thought coldly, I’ll risk the secret getting out.
The thought terrified her. There were sorcerers in the royalist camp. One of them might get a good look at the spell, then teleport out before the blast wiped him from existence. And then... even if they didn’t, it would be hard to conceal what she’d done. There was no convenient necromancer to blame for the explosion. Master Lucknow would guess she’d caused the explosion and then... and then what? Figure out what she’d done and duplicate it? Or devise a whole new way to blow up thousands of innocent people?
She shook her head, knowing - even as she did - that she might be making a mistake. Perhaps someone else could condemn thousands of people to death, in the hopes of saving hundreds of thousands more. Cold logic insisted the good of the
