“Yes.” Buttons chewed his lip. “Apparently this fellow had invited himself to Sirialis. The servants say he was paying court to Mother. She had been up at the snow lodge, and he announced himself while she was gone . . . she’d just come back to the main house when he arrived. Anyway . . . he wanted to fence with her. Apparently he’d fenced with her long ago, before she married Dad. He insisted on using those old weapons out of the case in the hall.”
Into Brun’s mind came the memory of her father, standing by that very case, leaning on the wall, and talking to Kevil Mahoney. She had been—what? eleven or so?—and her father was saying, “The thing about Miranda, Kev, is that people simply can’t recognize what she is. They see the porcelain figure of elegance, the beauty, the gracious behavior . . . and fail to recognize that she’s deadly as any of these blades.” Her father had tipped his head toward the case. “I’m just the front for her ambitions, really . . . as a swordsman is just the means for the steel to strike. She wields me skillfully, so skillfully no one notices.”
Kevil had shaken his head, but smiled, then said, “I hope to God you have the scans off, Bunny.”
“Well . . . I’m not a fool either,” her father had said, and then turned to Brun. “And as for you, Bubbles, it’s time you fizzed away to bed.”
She had argued, she remembered, and lost the argument; she’d heard the tail of one of Kevil’s comments as she flounced away to the main stairs. “—your instincts? Or Miranda’s?” and her father’s answer, which she’d paused, just around the corner of the stair, to listen for. “Both, Kev. Though at the moment she seems nothing but fizzy bubbles, she’s got a brain in her head.”
“Mother killed him?” she asked Buttons now. “Herself?”
“It was an accident, apparently,” Buttons said. “The old blade broke, and Pedar was wearing an antique mask as well—and the metal was brittle.”
“They didn’t test it before—? No, they wouldn’t, of course.” Brun tried to put her scrambled thoughts in order. “When did this happen, Buttons?”
“Local time on Sirialis . . . perhaps four days ago, or five. Lady Cecelia was there, by the way. She’d come visiting—why I have no idea, it’s not anywhere close to hunting season. Mother’s gone off with her, to the Guerni Republic.”
Lady Cecelia, who seemed to think of nothing but horses, but had the same lightning rod effect on things as she herself, Brun thought. Lady Cecelia, who could see through a brick wall at the worst possible moments. At least she was a Barraclough too.
“It’s going to look bad,” she told her brother. “Just Hobart alone would have looked bad, but this—”
“It was an accident,” her brother insisted. “Old weapons, brittle metal . . .”
“It will still look bad,” Brun said.
“But you don’t think . . .” Buttons’ voice trailed away; his face was taut and strained.
“I don’t think our mother managed to connive at the deaths of a Speaker and one of his Ministers at the same time, and if she had, she certainly wouldn’t have gone fencing with one of them with faulty equipment.”
That seemed to satisfy him; his face relaxed slightly. It did not satisfy Brun.
“What are we going to do?” Buttons asked, almost plaintively. “I can’t very well come back now—we’re in the midst of some ticklish negotiations—and even if I did, it’d be weeks before I got back to Castle Rock.”
“Stay there,” Brun said. “I’ll deal with whatever happens here. Did Mother ask for help?”
“No—”
“Then we’ll assume she settled things on Sirialis.”
“But Brun . . . can you do it alone?”
“We’ll find out,” Brun said, more cheerfully than she intended. “They’re going to hold a Council meeting to try to ram something through. I don’t know what. I have to go.”
“Well . . . I guess there’s nothing I can do from here. I’ll contact the committee and see if they’ll let you vote my proxy, but if they’re convinced we did it, they won’t . . .”
“That will help, Buttons. Thanks. I’d better go now.”
Brun let herself out of the combooth, reset the controls, and went back to the breakfast room.
“More trouble?” asked Kevil after a quick look at her face.
“That was Buttons,” she said. “You remember Pedar Orregiemos? Hobart made him a minister.”
“A blot,” Kevil said. “Your father disliked him very much.”
“Well, my mother just killed him.” She could not resist pausing a beat to see the result of that remark. The Lone Star Ranger choked on her muffin; Kevil blinked slowly, his mouth tightening. “By accident,” Brun said then.
“So I would hope,” Kevil said. His glance flicked sideways to the other woman. “Did Buttons give you any details?”
“Only that they were playing around with the old fencing gear and something went wrong,” Brun said. She wanted to chatter; she must not chatter. In lieu of chatter, she picked up a muffin and buttered it, then spooned on a dribble of apple-blossom honey. Around a mouthful of sweetness and crumbs, she added, “Lady Cecelia was there.”
“Why?” asked Kate, before Kevil, his mouth already open, could ask the same thing.
“I don’t know.” Brun took another bite of muffin, slowing herself down. She felt that her brain was beginning to spin out of control. “I don’t think Buttons knows; he said he was surprised because it wasn’t close to hunting season.”
“Perhaps she wanted to look at your bloodstock,” Kate said. “She’s the one who’s so crazy about horses, right?”
“Yes . . . I suppose that could be it.” Brun was aware of a warning look from Kevil, and took another bite of muffin.
“By the way, I’m coming to the city with you.”
“You don’t have to,” Brun began, but Kate waved her to silence.
“I’m coming, because you may be in danger. If these Consellines really believe you engineered Hobart’s death—”
“I have security staff,” Brun said.
“Yes, but they’re just security.” Kate grinned, that wide insouciant grin that made her seem so harmless. “I’m a Ranger, remember.”
“I suppose you’re going to wear your badge?” Kevil asked.
“On this occasion, yes.”
“I think I’ll come,” Kevil said. “I haven’t been back, since—” Since they had brought him to Appledale, out of his poverty, out of the clutches of that most suspicious male nurse.
“To the house?” Brun asked. She wiped her mouth and rang for staff, sending the first for her briefcase and the second for her car.
“No—but I’ll check with the banks in person. That might loosen their memory. I can also find out when my new arm might be coming out of the bins. They said next week, but I might be lucky . . .”
“Fine, then. Let’s get going.”
On the drive to the city, they reviewed possibilities. Brun updated her personal comp with the whereabouts of all the Seated Family members; she was sure there would be an emergency Grand Council meeting that day or the next.
Brun did not ever remember seeing the Benignity ambassador before. She knew they had one—she knew which building in Embassy Row belonged to the Benignity of the Compassionate Hand, a big gray stone building like so many in the city. Now, in the Grand Council chamber, she stared like everyone else at the man of middle height, dark-haired and green-eyed, who wore a perfectly conventional dark suit. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but Sr. Vadis Unser-Marz, as his name appeared on her monitor, looked too ordinary to represent the fabulously wicked Benignity of the Compassionate Hand.
So far news of Pedar Orregiemos’s death hadn’t reached the news media; reporters outside the chamber had asked only for a reaction to Hobart Conselline’s assassination, and she had expressed shock, and her condolences for his family. “I know what it’s like to lose a father,” she had said, and they had gone looking for another victim.