Her followers were scattered, and wouldact after her death, breaking up into smaller associations difficult to track and possibly attracting others due to the different chemistry of the sub-associations. That was the protection high lords always had against assassination: kill them and you had not one large problem but twenty smaller ones, harder to track.
But so did Tabini have that defense. More so. Direiso only thoughtshe could ride the waves Tabini’s fall would generate. It was a time when atevi, threatened from the skies, could least afford to be indecisive, and most of the lords of the Western Association knew that Tabini was the only leader saving them from civil chaos.
He truly wished the Direiso matter were settled. He didn’ttrust any stated changes of direction or belief on her part. Even if atevi emotion andpolitics made it instinctually natural for her to make such changes, he wouldn’t believe them. He’d never met the woman but he knew he didn’t likeher or any one of her followers.
Another psychological warning flag. Hecouldn’t feel it as natural, hecouldn’t judge in his own blood and bone what was natural for any atevi to do, and he couldn’t help but think how very, very delicately poised the whole of human and atevi survival was right now.
Lose Tabini? There’d be a bloodbath the like of which the world had never seen.
Let the conservatives on Mospheira get out of hand?
Same result.
He was just outright shaken by today’s events. He admitted it to himself finally. He’d been riding a fierce downhill course, and leaping from point to point to point until it was damn well no good mapping out where he’d been: where he’d been didn’t exist any more. There was no going back to the atevi state that had existed, once upon a time. There was no dealing with the government on Mospheira that had sent him. The people he was loyal to hardly had any power left.
The plane was a pure, unheralded, no-damn-reason accident. Near accident. He was safe. So was a very chastened teenager.
His fingers were wrinkling. He had to go out and breathe air again. Problems were not his problems tonight. Supper was waiting. A very fine supper, prepared by a cook who accommodated his needs quite expertly.
He shut the water down and exited into the cooler air outside, wrapped instantly in a thick towel, a comfort and luxury of having servants which he did enjoy; and which by his order to this all-female staff was the job of one of the older, more—motherly—women.
But a blink of water-hazed eyes showed him not a maid who had flung it about him, but Tano, continuing the personal attendance Tano had given him on the trip. He told himself he should decline Tano’s attendance: the man had worked harder today than he had by twice.
On the other hand, since it was Tano, he was able to ask him—
But no, dammit, no. He wasn’t going to ask about the content of the other messages that might be disasters awaiting his return. He’d been near a radio, and within reach of security communications, and his staff (forty-seven secretaries and a skilled supervisor devoted to such problems) would have known how to call him if there were anything amiss, including unreadable foreign language telegrams or phone calls. The one bombshell he’d picked out of the basket he’d chosen precisely because it was a telegram, and by that criterion urgent and newly arrived.
There couldn’t be any more surprises. Peaceful dinner. Quiet sleep. Back to routine. It was all he wanted. Parsing verbs at Jase. A walk in the gardens—suitably guarded.
He let Tano wrap him in more warmed thick towels, a human vice grown harmlessly popular among atevi, although some still used the traditional sheeting. He accepted an informal and human-sized pair of drawstring trousers, a shirt, and a short, wide-sleeved lounging-robe which was adequate for an intimate dinner in the private dining room. He let his hair, toweled to a residual dampness, rest on his shoulders, as a gentleman or a lady could, in private and before a trusted staff.
A shadow turned up in the tiled doorway, along a row of several such showers.
Jase, coatless, dressed in a dark shirt. His dark hair just barely, in half a year, grown long enough to braid, was tied back and still falling loose around his face. The servants would not have let him out of his room without a coat. Or he’d been—troublesome thought—ignoring the servants.
“There you are,” Bren said cheerfully, trying to ignore the glum look Jase gave him. “One wondered about your whereabouts, nadi.”
“I don’t know where else I’d be.” Jase hadn’t spoken in the Ragi language. There was no cheerfulness on his face. But it was a homecoming. One supposed. “How was the trip?”
“Fine,” he said, persisting in Ragi and in cheerfulness. Jase wasn’tsupposed to speak the human language. Jase had agreed to follow the regimen by which he’dlearned: no Mosphei’ at all. “How have you been, nadi-ji?”
“Fine.” Jase switched to Ragi. “I hear there was trouble in the peninsula.”
“Saigimi. Yes. Correct noun choice, by the way.—So you did hear.”
“Not that much,” Jase said. “But the staff was worried.”
“Security was in a little hurry to bring me home. But nothing serious.—And you, nadi-ji? Nothing wrong, I hope.”
A hesitation. And in the human language: “Welcome home.”
Welcome home.
A little edge to that, perhaps. A little irony. Or friendliness. He wasn’t sure. It was a term they’d had to discuss in Mosphei’. Jase hadn’t understood what homewas in relation to thisplanet, one of the myriad of little human concepts that had somehow not made it back from the stars unchanged. Hometo Jase’s original thinking was a world. Homewas Earth. Homewas, equally, an atevi star neither Jase nor his parents had ever seen, to which they’d returned from wherever they’d gone for nearly two hundred years.
And whatever homemeant, Jase had never in his life been out of the steel world he’d been born to, until he’d entered a tiny pod and plunged into this world’s atmosphere.
“Home, yes, nadi.” Bren gave the ends of his hair, which reached the middle of his back when it was loose from its braid, a final squeeze of the towel. Tano was still standing there, along with two of the female servants. Jase had been practicing disconnecting the face and the tones of voice from the content, but it wasn’t appropriate here. Or there were other interpretations. Jase had a temper. He’d seen that proved. But he wasn’t going to light into Jase with lectures. “Relax. It’s staff. Is there a problem?”
“No.”
Which meant Yes, in that leaden tone of voice.
Fine. Disasters. He saw it coming. There’d been a crisis in the household.
But it didn’t need to preface supper. Dammit, he refused to have it before supper. Not unless there’d been bloodshed.
“Can it wait until after dinner, nadi?”
Jase didn’t answer him. It was a sulk. It was aimed at him.
He was in the witness of atevi, both servants and security. He was under a noble roof. He was getting angry—as Jase could make him angry, with a human precision no ateva quite managed. And, dammit, he wasn’t going to argue. He made his tone smooth and his expression bland. “All right, if it can’t wait, let’s go to the library.”
“All right,” Jase said in that same dead tone.
He led the way. Jase walked with him quietly down the short curving hall from the baths to the main hallway and back to the isolation of the lady Damiri’s private library, mostly of antique, fragile books.
Tano followed. Tano, having it unshakably in his atevi mind that Jase wasof a different leader’s man’chi, would notallow him alone in Jase’s presence, or at least not far alone in Jase’s presence when Jase was acting like this. It was well possible that, species aside, Tano picked up some of the same signals he did, of hisanger, and that he wasn’t damned patient at the moment for one of Jase’s tempests in an atevi teapot.