“Ooh. Our retirement plan is very singular. There is oonly one way to retire.”
Donovan did not ask her what that one way was. “You forget Those of Name discarded us.”
“Then when you join with us you may take your revenge for that, and sweet will be the taking, I think.”
“Very sweet, but I had it in mind to watch from the sidelines. Revenge is a dish best served cold—and by someone else.”
Olafsdottr shook her head. “No sidelines this fight.”
Donovan wiped up the last of his sauce and stuffed the naan in his mouth. He had gotten hints of this last year from Billy Chins. “How many of you are in it?” he asked around the bread.
“Almost half have lit the lamp.”
“Almost half…” He swallowed. “Oh, that’s encouraging. Half the Lion’s Mouth against a regime in power for centuries, with total control of the police, the Protectors, and the … What of the ‘boots,’ the military? Where do they stand?”
Ravn cocked her head. “We conduct this war as we always have—with stealth, with intrigue, with assassination. Some boots,” she allowed, “may know a civil war is broken out. But there are no bloody battles; no planets bombarded. No great stupid mobs rushing about shooting at one another … and missing.”
“Not yet, anyway.” Donovan tossed his napkin into the fresher and took his dishes to the sink, where he scraped the remnants into the recycler. He turned abruptly and faced her. “Why me?” he said. “What good would I do the rebellion? I’m one, broken old man.”
“Not so old as that; and broken pieces have the sharpest edges.”
A facile response, Donovan thought. That her people meant to use him in some manner, he had no doubt; but in what manner, was as yet unclear. Perhaps as no more than a knife thrown by one side at the other.
“You think on what I have told you, Donovan,” Olafsdottr said as she marched him back to his nominal prison cell. “You will see it is the right thing to do, and you and I will be famous comrades.”
That argument, more than any of the others, planted caution in the heart of Donovan buigh. For he had never heard an agent of Those of Name cite “the right thing to do” as an argument in favor of anything.
Cengjam Gaafe: The First Interrogatory
Méarana strikes the arm of her chair with the flat of her hand. “I knew it! He was coming here, after all. To see you, Mother. You know what that means?”
Bridget ban tosses her head. “That he’s a masochist?”
The harper makes a moue. “He wanted a second chance.”
“He’s had that already.”
“A third, then. What difference does the count make?”
Bridget ban sets her face and turns to her. “This is something we can discuss later.” And a motion of her eyes indicates both Olafsdottr and Graceful Bintsaif.
The harper shrugs. “As you will. But I think there are no surprises for the tale-spinner.”
The Hound gives her attention back to the—Prisoner? Guest? Visitor? “Tell me,” she says, “how you can know the thoughts of Donovan buigh, when I doubt even he knows them so well?”
The Confederal smiles. “You must grant me two things. The first is many weeks of conversation between us, in which he may have revealed his mind to me.”
“That would be quite a revelation as I understand things. And second?”
“And second, you must grant me some poetic license.” Olafsdottr nods at the glasses of nectar that stand before each of them. “You have not drunk from your glass. Do I take that as evidence that the glass set initially before me was tinctured with sooth juice? Oho! I have not heard Graceful Bintsaif behind me lift her glass, either.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” says the harper. “Here!” And she drinks from her own glass and then reaches across the table to hand it to the Confederal. Bridget ban hisses, but the agent makes no move to snatch her daughter. It might come to a struggle later—at some point they must all give thought to whether and how Olafsdottr would leave the Hall—but for now she has come merely to talk.
The Shadow swallows the rest of the nectar. “Ooh. Very tasty. Stoorytelling is dry work.”
“How much of the story so far has been true?” asks Graceful Bintsaif.
Olafsdottr turns to look at her. “Soo untroosting, you are. All of it true. Perhaps not all factual.”
The junior Hound snorts. “A contradiction.”
“On the contrary! What is factual is what is done, accomplished. A verdict. But what is true is what is faithful, and loyal. Perhaps all facts are true, but not all truths are fact.” She turns to face Bridget ban and the harper. “A story may be true to life.”
“Verdict,” says the harper, “means ‘to speak truth’ in some ancient tongue.”
The Confederal tilts her head sideways. “Does it? Oh, there are languages older than the oldest tongues! Why do you not fetch your harp? He toold me how well you play, how well you improovise on a theme.”
The harper looks to her mother. “I think she tells the truth. The Donovan she describes is a man I recognize. If she has embellished his thoughts, she has not done so falsely.”
Bridget ban considers this for a time. She folds her hands flat together and tucks them under her lips, and her eyes grow hard and distant. Her lips move, just a little. Finally, she makes a sign with her right hand and lays both hands flat on the arms of her chair. “I will be no barbarian. You came to us unafraid. You may remain in the same manner. Mr. Wladislaw, bring Miss Lucia’s harp to the sitting room, please. And…” She nods to Olafsdottr. “May I serve you some coffee?”
The Confederal’s eyes widen; then she laughs. “Of course. I come expecting to drink more than that.”
“And bring coffee, also,” the mistress of the Hall tells the Ears through which her butler listens.
“I don’t understand,” Méarana says to the smiles she sees on the other three women. “What is so funny about coffee?”
Olafsdottr answers. “It is what we say in the Confederacy, lady harp, when we bring someone in for questioning. Cengjam gaafe. ‘Invite in for coffee.’ There are other phrases—samman, kaowèn, or worst of all duxing kaoda. La, we have more ways of asking questions than we have questions to ask. Ooh, here come faithful retainer with harp and coffee!”
Mr. Wladislaw accomplishes this Herculean task by carrying the harp in his own hands. It is a clairseach, a lap harp of the old style, with metal strings played with the nails. It is draped in a velvet cloth of royal purple and Méarana believes she can hear the strings singing to her. Likely, it is the breath of the air passing through the chords as the butler carries it; but Méarana prefers the poetic to the mundane. The passage of air explains how it sings; it does not explain that it sings.
The coffee is brought in a more pedestrian manner by the butler’s assistant, who wears white gloves of all things and pushes before him a gravity cart with a silver coffee service upon it. If the Confederal wonders that the coffee has already been waiting to be fetched, and that Bridget ban has orchestrated the meeting to achieve this gesture, she does not show it on her face, which is as cheerfully concealing as ever.
“You smile too much,” Bridget ban tells her.
Olafsdottr’s grin broadens. “I will try to be more dooleful as my tale unwinds. Most people, I think, would wish more opportunity to smile than what their lives give them.”
“A man may conceal with a smile more effectively than with a great stone face. The stone face may not reveal much; but it will always reveal that it is not revealing. The smiling face appears open, which makes it the greater lie.”