“One is relieved.” He let go a breath. “One should not have left him. Even here.”
“Oh, he has been on his own all evening. And he could not have gotten out the door unremarked,” Tabini added with a little wry humor. “My whole staff has their instructions. My son has entirely understood the current difficulty, and he has stayed very well within bounds.” A sharpening of focus, and a frown. “My grandmother. Did she plan that?”
That the aiji had to ask him what Ilisidi was thinking . . .
“One does not believe so, no, aiji‑ma. One believes she was quite taken by surprise, reacting to your honored wife’s choice of colors this evening.”
“It was Damiri’s choice,” Tabini said somberly. “Her father has left her none. But these are not easy days in the household.”
“One well understands, aiji‑ma.”
“Have you heard anything in the room?”
“Nothing regarding that matter, aiji‑ma.”
“Come aside a moment.”
“Aiji‑ma.” He followed Tabini to the far side of the room, through the door and into the deserted dining hall, tracked, at a slight remove, by Tabini’s bodyguards.
Servants, working at polishing the table, withdrew quickly. Two of Tabini’s bodyguards went across the room and shut those doors. The other two, from outside, shut the dining room doors. The likelihood of eavesdroppers on the aiji’s conversation outside this room had been very scant: nobody crowded in on Tabini without a clear signal to do so. But clearly there was something else, something that could not risk report. And they were in as much privacy as could be had.
“They have put a public patch on the matter,” Tabini said quietly. “But be aware Damiri is entirely uneasy, and unreconciled. She does not trust my grandmother, and I worry for my son’s impression of the situation. You talked to him. Was he upset by it?”
“Not discernibly, aiji‑ma.”
“Were you warned?”
“Aiji‑ma, I had no forewarning.”
“She planned it,” Tabini said, with utter conviction.
“Aiji‑ma, one would tend to agree she had intended some discussion on the Ajuri matter–which I think it may have been. But she had not planned it tonight. Not that I know.”
“Damiri has said–” Tabini drew a careful breath and let it go. “You well know, paidhi, that Damiri has lost one child to my grandmother, and she has requested me to promise not to put this next one in my grandmother’s hands for any reason of security. She has bluntly said, this very evening, and I quote, ‘I am forced to choose my uncle. I have your grandmother on one side and her lovers on the other. They control my son and now they are the only relatives I have. I shall never concede my daughter to them.’”
“Aiji‑ma.” What could one say? Damiri had lost her son’s man’chi through no fault of hers. The separation had broken the bond, when Tabini had sent Cajeiri away to space for protection. He had bonded to his great‑grandmother. Intensely so. And he felt deeply sorry for Damiri.
But not sorry enough to take her side over Tabini’s, and not sorry enough to regret his own part in bringing up Cajeiri. The boy was alive. And he might not be, if he had stayed with his parents through the coup. If they had had a child in tow, they might themselves not have survived the constant moving and the hiding in wilderness conditions.
And, damn it all, if Damiri had never slipped into her father’s orbit last year, however briefly, and if Damiri had been less openly antagonistic toward Ilisidi once Ilisidi brought the boy back–
“Damiri declares,” Tabini said, with a muscle standing out in his jaw, “that she still has man’chi to Ajuri clan. But that she has no man’chi now to her father. She says she will take the lordship of Ajuri herself, before she settles to be Tatiseigi’s tributary.”
My God. “Can she muster support to do that, aiji‑ma?”
“Possibly. I think it has one motive. She views it would set her on a more equal footing with my grandmother.”
Clan lord or not–it was not likely lordship of Ajuri was going to set anybody equal to Ilisidi. But he didn’t say that.
“Will you back her in that, aiji‑ma?”
The muscle jumped. Twice. “Ajuri swallows virtue. That her father killed his brother‑of‑a‑different‑mother to get the lordship, one is all but certain. How the late lord himself got the lordship was also tainted. My wife wants to be lord of Ajuri–in her father’s place–and no, it is not a good idea, and not something I support, or will even tolerate, while she brings up my daughter–even if, in every other way, it would solve the threat Ajuri poses.” Tabini folded his arms, leaned back against the massive dining table. “I have a problem, paidhi. She is too proud to be Tatiseigi’s niece, in Atageini clan, even were he to make her his heir–which might happen, and which I would accept. She feels no kinship with them. Would she consent to become Ragi?” That was Tabini’s clan; and Ilisidi’s clan only by marriage and the bond of a son born in it. “I have invited her to take those colors. She is, I think, struggling with that idea. She cannot seem to attach.” Attach in the clan sense. In the atevi emotional sense. In the husband‑and‑wife sense. A human had no idea, except to say that Damiri was not at home among Ragi, didn’t feel it, couldn’t get her mind into her husband’s clan–
–And that said something disturbing about the tension in that marriage.
“A human cannot offer advice here.”
“I do not court advice, paidhi. I know exactly where I am, and where she is. But your bodyguard outranks all but my grandmother’s, and they are back there right now discussing how to manage a situation I have created.”
A slight hesitation on that unusually personal I.
“Your bodyguard, aiji‑ma?” Bren guessed.
“My bodyguard–and my wife. Ajuri poses a more serious threat than one might think: I have been directly briefed, and my bodyguard has not. That is only one of our problems. Then there is this: if my wife does not recognize the increasingly grim situation with Ajuri, and is naive in her thinking, then she is too stupid to be my wife. If she does know it, and is attempting to involve herself in this clan’s longstanding politics, it can lead to much worse places–danger to her, naturally–danger to the aishidi’tat itself from her associations within that clan, and temptations to actions which are–what is the human expression? On the slippery slope ?”
“One understands.”
“I do not believe she would harm her own son to set her daughter in his place. And she knows our son is too stubborn to change his man’chi. But she has possession of another Ragi child, the one she is carrying. And this is what I have told my grandmother’s bodyguard, and indirectly, yours. You need to know. My grandmother may well know. In fact I am sure she knows. This approach of my grandmother this evening was not in ignorance of the situation. Hence its troubling timing.”
“I understand.” Not one understands, the formal, rote answer that equaled yes, sir. But I understand. I am hearing and agreeing. And he did understand. Far too much to be comfortable at all. “I am at your orders, aiji‑ma. They take precedence over hers . . . though I shall try, by your leave, to find a course where both work.”