Taro, apparently keeping an eye on Marcus as he worked, tossed his pendant aside and knocked along the sides of his box.
Marcus resumed his place by his own.
Taro ripped out some kind of black cloth that had been attached to either the bottom or the side of his box. He pulled out another pendant. He looked at it carefully before rising to his feet. And then he strode to Fiona, holding out the pendant.
Marcus was perhaps two paces behind when Fiona accepted Taro’s pendant. “Shintaro Ivor Cear Karish wins the test, and therefore the Suitor’s Run.”
Oh gods. I closed my eyes. Thank Zaire. Thank Taro. Good, good man.
“Marcus!” Cars hissed.
Marcus was pale. His last chance was gone.
“Do you know what you’ve done to us?”
Of course he knew, idiot. Just look at him.
Without a word, Marcus turned on his heel and headed to the nearest door. That didn’t grant him any relief, though. His father followed him, berating him the whole time.
My mother hurried off after the Prides. I couldn’t think why. I hoped it wasn’t to gloat. It didn’t seem like her.
I jumped at Taro and threw my arms around him, knowing I looked ridiculous but feeling too happy to care. “You brilliant, brilliant man.” How dare anyone think he was anything less than intelligent?
He leaned down and pressed his forehead against mine. I closed my eyes and wallowed in a feeling of contentment I hadn’t experienced since this whole mess had started. I took a long breath and let it out slowly. Thank Zaire.
All of a sudden, there was a ruckus from the front foyer, and someone shouting for Fiona. We all followed Fiona out of the room.
Fiona’s largest footman was cradling Tarce in his arms. Tarce’s face was bloody, especially around the nose and mouth, and one of his eyes was swelling shut. He appeared insensible, hanging limply from the footman’s hold.
“What happened?” Fiona demanded.
“My lord felt Lord Kent should know Your Grace has the support of the family,” said the footman. “And that his entrenchments weren’t going to be allowed to continue.” He choked briefly, then cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, my lady. They dragged us away. There was nothing we could do. When my lord was brought back to us, he was—” He swallowed, unable to finish.
Kent was insane. There was no other explanation. How could he think he could have the brother of the titleholder beaten and get away with it?
And oh my gods, this was my fault. I had taunted Tarce about his lack of assistance to Fiona, so he had gone to challenge Kent. I felt sick.
Fiona was flushed with fury. “Get the healer,” she ordered. “This is ending today.”
Chapter Twenty-four
“Daniel,” Fiona snapped out to a nearby footman. “Take a horse and talk to every land tenant you can find. Find Youko and Evan and send them out, too. Bring all the adults here. Ilya, you get all the whalers and fishers.”
“What do we tell them?”
“Nothing. Just get them here.”
That seemed a little risky. And kind of arrogant.
“Tell them to bring shovels, mallets, anything they can swing and jab. Anyone who’s got a horse has to bring it. Go.”
She charged toward her office. I followed her. We picked up my family along the way. Marcus and Cars came, too, looking a little more composed. None of us really had a right to be there, but Fiona didn’t seem to mind. From one of the shelves in the wall she pulled out a large rolled map, which she flattened on her desk. “This is my best map of the area,” she said. “This is the boundary between Westsea and Kent. I’m going to have everyone gather there.”
“To do what?” my mother asked.
Fiona glanced at me before she answered. “I’m going to arrest Kent.”
“You can do that?” Taro sounded as shocked as I felt.
“Aye.”
“Then why didn’t you do that before?”
“We didn’t have the right kind of evidence that he was doing anything at all. But this time, he assaulted my brother. An aristocrat and the sibling of the highest titleholder in the region. I don’t know what all the circumstances are yet, but it’s enough for me to go after him.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“He’s too high a titleholder for me to make judgment on. I’ll hold him here and send word to the Emperor. He should send Imperial Guards for him.”
“But why do you need to assemble all of the tenants?” I asked. I could understand why she didn’t want to attempt to arrest Kent on her own, he might resist, but surely she needed only a handful of others to get the job done.
“It’s likely Kent’s either expecting a response from me, or will learn of my approach before I can reach his house. His tenants might try to stop me.”
“So you want your tenants to hold them off.”
“Aye.”
“You anticipate a fight.”
“Only if he forces one.”
I rubbed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at anyone. This was insane. I felt like I’d been transported back a few generations. This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen anymore.
Why hadn’t anyone changed the law books? Did they not have to read them once in a while? Why would they not, when they saw a piece of legislation that clearly was no longer relevant, simply strike out the inappropriate clauses?
“This is just stupid.”
Oh. I’d said that out loud.
“What do you expect me to do, Dunleavy?” Fiona demanded. “Just let all these attacks continue?”
“There has to be more reasonable methods.”
“Using reason against the unreasonable is naive and dangerous. Am I supposed to wait until he kills someone?”
That was the thing. It hadn’t gone that far yet. There was a huge leap from beating someone to killing them. There had to be a more moderate way to accomplish what Fiona wanted.
“My dear,” I heard my mother say tentatively. “I don’t know how these things work, but I fear you might start something with enormous consequences that you can’t predict. This could turn into a real nightmare.”
“It already is a nightmare,” Fiona snapped. “Did you see Tarce? I don’t need to be a healer to know his survival is not certain. I’m not going to let that go.”
I hadn’t realized he was that badly injured. “I . . . It’s my fault,” I admitted. “I was teasing him because he didn’t seem to be doing anything to help you with all this.” When would I learn to just shut up?
Fiona glared at me. I prepared myself to be verbally sliced. I deserved it.
“I don’t know that you’re one of the few people whose opinion can influence his behavior,” she said testily.
“I spoke to him last night and he went to Kent this morning.”
“Maybe yours was the pebble that sank the wood, but he had to have been thinking of doing something for a while.”
“But you think my words might have been what tipped him over the peak.”
“My brother doesn’t always think things through.”
Perhaps her brother wasn’t the only one with that particular flaw.
“If my tenants feel I can’t look after my own family, they’ll feel I can’t look after them, either. And they’ll be right. This must be done.”
I understood her reasoning. I agreed something had to be done. Just not this.
“So you’re going to start some kind of battle between your tenants and his?” Taro demanded.
“I doubt it will come to that,” she said. “I just want a lot of numbers so no one will want to interfere with us. It’s just a precaution. There isn’t going to be any kind of battle.” She layered the last word with sneering sarcasm, as though Taro were ridiculous for using it. “I doubt his tenants feel any real loyalty to him.”
“That’s a risky assumption,” my mother warned her.
“I believe I may know better than you how my tenants feel. How the people of this whole area feel.”
So my mother could just mind her own business.
“And if any of Kent’s tenants do try to oppose us, I’ve got some lots free. I’ll offer land to them.”
“You would take tenants loyal to another titleholder?” Mother asked incredulously.
“If they join me they won’t be loyal to him, will they?”
“But how could you trust them?”
“I’ll treat them far better than Kent ever did. That buys a lot of allegiance.”
This was giving me a thick feeling of foreboding. Maybe Fiona knew exactly what she was doing, but it didn’t feel like it. And this had the potential to go very, very badly. I wanted no part of it. I didn’t care if I looked like a coward for saying no. Hell, I didn’t care if I was a coward for saying no. I should say no.
And yet, I couldn’t say no. Perhaps that made me a coward, too, just a different kind of coward.
“The Emperor will not let this stand,” my mother told Fiona.
“The Emperor is a problem that will have to wait.”
There was procrastination, and then there was deliberate blindness. This was the latter, I feared.
“Wait a moment.” She pointed at Taro. “I saw what you did to Lila. With your—I don’t know—you made her sink into the ground.”
Ah hell. There were more and more people finding out about this, but I would have preferred that the Prides weren’t among them. What would they do with that information?
“Could you do something like that with everyone in Kent?”
“Of course not,” Taro answered.
Hm. I wondered if he could. If he came across them a group at a time. He had sunk a small group all at once not long ago.
“Why would you even want me to?” he asked.
“To keep them immobilized. Kent’s the only one I really want.”
“That’s beyond my abilities.”
“Damn it.” Then she turned to me. “Or maybe I should be asking you? You’re supposed to be the smart one.”
“That is an inaccurate and stupid thing to say,” I snapped. Yes, she was under enormous stress, but there was no reason to slander Taro, who had done nothing but support her.
Taro glowered, he was angry, but he chose not to respond.
She didn’t apologize. Neither did I. Moving on.
“Browne and her casters have been developing some spells that might protect the estate from further attack,” I said. Were we still pretending Browne wasn’t a caster? Was that possible without being ridiculous?
“How about something that works as an offensive?”
“I know nothing about that.” I was aware that the circle had been developing spells while I had been elsewhere. No one had told me what those spells entailed, what they did.
“All right, then,” Fiona said with impatience. “You know, you all need to leave. You’re all just distracting me.”
“Fiona . . .” Taro began.
“Seriously, just get out. All of you.”
We reluctantly trailed out of her office, but collected just outside her door. “We have to stop her,” said Dias.
“How are we going to do that?” Mika demanded. “Lock her in her office?”
We all looked at the door in contemplation.
“Locks from the inside,” Taro reminded us.
“Yes, but we could put her somewhere else.”
“We can’t restrain the titleholder,” my mother murmured.
“It’s for her own good,” Dias suggested.
“And who are we to decide that?” Mother asked.
“And how long are we supposed to hold her?” I asked.
“Until she cools down,” said Dias.
“I think confining her will only make her burn hotter,” I said.
“We have to do something,” Dias insisted.
“It’s not our place,” said Mother.
Dias looked appalled. “Not our place?”
She gave him a hard look. “Not our place. We are merchants. We know nothing about the demands and rights of titleholders and their tenants. It is one thing to try to talk her out of behavior we think she’ll regret. To actively interfere with her prerogatives as a titleholder, that may set off a series of consequences we don’t like, that we can’t deal with. And it’s entirely possible we’re wrong.”
“So we just wait here and drink tea,” Dias complained.
“No. We go with her. We try to remind her who she is. But we don’t try to stop her.”
That felt to me like we were merely abdicating responsibility.
On the other hand, none of us were responsible for Fiona. It was arrogant to act as though we were.
So we waited. I felt useless. I felt like I was in the way. I wished I had some nervous habits so I could indulge in them.
A short while later, Browne came striding down the hall. She looked grim. “How’s Tarce?” I asked.
She ignored me, rapping sharply on the door. “It’s Nab, my lady.”
“Come.”
She entered, and I resisted the urge to follow after her. And then the urge to press my ear against the door.
We waited some more. It wasn’t long before Browne was out again. “Please come with me, Shield Mallorough.” And she was off again, not looking back.
I didn’t care for being ordered about, but I followed her. “Tell me Tarce’s condition.”
“He’ll live,” she answered sharply. “But he has an injury to his knee I couldn’t completely fix. He’ll limp the rest of his life.”
I caught myself before I could say he was lucky. He wasn’t lucky. He’d been badly beaten. He would be impaired for the rest of his life. It wasn’t enough that his life had been spared. He had a right to his life. It wasn’t lucky that he’d been able to hold on to it. It should never have been threatened in the first place.
“So what do you need me for?”
“First, we’re going to call the other casters. We’re going to bring them here.”
“We can’t go racing all over the place to get them here.”
“No, we’re going to call them here.”
“A new spell.”
“Yes.”
“I thought we needed them to be spread out over the estate.”
“Aye, but I want them all to have as many of the cave crystals as possible. The more they have, the better they can barricade the estate. Which is why we’re going to the cave to chip out as many crystals as we can.”