“Let’s wait,” I said. “Have you had breakfast?”
“No.”
I reached into the pocket of my robe, pulled out a cookie in a plastic bag, which I had stolen from the kitchen earlier, and passed it to him. He wolfed it down.
Oond kept swimming.
Humans carried an instinctual fear of the deep sea. Even if we knew that the body of water was perfectly safe and had no predators, swimming in dark water, where the bottom was too far to reach, awakened a primitive anxiety in most of us. The oomboles had an instinctual fear of terrestrial predators. At a certain point in their development, they were prey to massive reptiles and terrifying birds that dove into the water from great heights. Their tolerance for terrestrial violence was very small. It frightened them beyond all reason.
“Did you get a chance to talk to Miralitt?”
He nodded. “She liked the recording. She’s onboard. I took it to Derryl. She’s thinking about it.”
“Will she go for it?”
“The offer is there if she wants it. She’ll take it or she won’t.”
Oond was slowing down. The cold water was working.
“I’ve read the contract,” Sean said.
Last night before going to bed, I had shown him the recording the inn made of my conversation with Lady Wexyn. She thought the selection would be voided, and I had been too wrapped up in her story to ask why. Sean decided to review our contract with the Dominion as soon as we got some sleep.
“She’s right. They will likely void the selection. “
“Why?”
“The spouse can’t be selected by default. There must be at least two candidates, so the Sovereign can choose one.”
“I bet they put that provision in to keep them from killing each other. If only one of them is left standing, nobody gets to be the spouse.”
Sean nodded. “If she withdraws tonight, that leaves only Oond. The selection is automatically canceled.”
“Ugh.”
“It gets worse.”
I stared at him.
“If they void this selection, we’re on the hook for hosting the next one.”
“Galaxy, no. No. Absolutely not. Never again.”
“We signed it.”
“No.” I realized it wasn’t a rational response, but it was the only one I could come up with.
He hugged me.
We both agreed that in a perfect world Kosandion would marry Lady Wexyn and have many hyper-intelligent, beautiful, and physically enhanced babies. Unfortunately, nothing indicated that such a match would be happening. Last night Orata started polling the Dominion’s population regarding the best date for a new selection if the current one was canceled.
“I’m so tired,” I whispered into his ear.
“I know, love. I know. I’m sorry I got us into this.”
“You didn’t get us into this. We held hands and jumped off this cliff together.”
When we were talking and thinking about doing it a week ago, it hadn’t seemed so…so…so big. So difficult. Galaxy, it had only been a week. How…
“It’s like this bottomless hole and we keep throwing time, magic, and resources into it, and it just keeps getting bigger,” I told him.
“I just want it to be done. I want this shit to be over with. I want everyone to fuck off out of our inn. They all need to go somewhere else, and we need to go get Wilmos.”
I groaned and bumped my forehead against his shoulder. “And we don’t even know what we’ll find on the other side of the Karron portal.”
We stood together for a few minutes. Sean stroked my hair.
“If they void the selection, they won’t have another right away,” I said. “It might take years to set one up again.”
“Maybe he’ll do us all a favor and marry the fish.”
“I can’t,” Oond’s mechanical voice said behind us.
We turned. He had stopped swimming and was hovering near the transparent wall.
“I can’t do it. It’s too dangerous. I’m not brave enough. I cannot go to the Dominion. I cannot stay there. I cannot be the spouse. Someone will kill me. Someone will kill my offspring. It will all end in tragedy and death. So much death.”
“Well, there goes that idea,” Sean said under his breath.
“I am so sorry. I am a failure. I have failed my people. I have come here for the minor ask. The survival of my people depends on it. If I withdraw, we leave with nothing. But I have no courage. I have no strength. I am miserable.”
A slightly opaque cloud of water spread from him.
I hid a sigh. “I will speak to the Sovereign on your behalf.”
Oond’s fins fluttered weakly. “You will?”
“I will. You are our guest. Your wellbeing is important to us. I’m sure some solution can be found. Rest and try not to worry.”
I took Sean’s hand for moral support, before I lost it and peed myself too, and the two of us went back upstairs.
“I don’t understand.” Miralitt frowned at me. “The oombole does not want to be the spouse? Does he think we can’t protect him?”
I sighed. Around me Kosandion’s private balcony was a flurry of activity. Right after the Game Day assassination attempt, Kosandion had requested a private portal. Considering that a civil war in the Dominion was looming, refusing seemed unreasonable. The big portal was shut down most of the time anyway, so we completely closed it off, and opened a smaller one right on the balcony. It could only transport one person at time.
As soon as the portal was opened, Miralitt’s guards came through and positioned themselves all around the balcony, ready to respond to any threats. Normally I might have taken that as an insult, but if I balked, Miralitt would’ve had an aneurism, and we needed a favor from her. This whole affair was a lesson in learning to compromise.
With the opening of the portal, the balcony transformed into the Sovereign’s remote office. On one side, Orata sat surrounded by translucent screens, scanning their contents and issuing brisk commands to a small pack of her staffers. On the other side, His Holiness was in an identical position, with the screens and a throng of aides. He was pointing to the screens and delivering instructions in short confident bursts like a general in the middle of a battle. Kosandion sat at his table, closest to the rail and the water, reading and signing things, while Resven hovered nearby with a small army of staffers. Periodically he would single one out, and then the staffer would take off at top speed and vanish into the portal.
Tension vibrated in the air. The balcony sparked with it, as if the molecules that made it had somehow acquired a charge.
“A spouse hasn’t been murdered for the last 70 years,” Miralitt said. “It won’t happen on my watch. I guarantee it with my life.”
“It’s not personal. It has to do with their evolutionary origin,” I said. “Sapience evolves in many ways across a myriad of life forms, but the fastest and the most common category of sapient beings are either predatory omnivores or omnivorous predators that come from the middle of the food chain. For intelligence and problem-solving skills to develop, it helps if you are both a hunter and the hunted. Earth’s humans are predatory omnivores. The vampires of the Holy Anocracy are omnivorous predators. The omnivorous quality is important because organized hunting, animal husbandry, and crop cultivation are essential progress milestones.”
“The oomboles are also predatory omnivores,” Miralitt said.
“Technically,” Sean said.
“Their diet consists of plants and several species of crustaceans, all of which have evolved to be sedentary,” I explained. “Their protective shells are attached to the ocean floor. They don’t move.”
“Why is that important?” Miralitt asked.