It took him a few seconds to realize that what he was looking at was the skeleton of an Icheloe adult.
It took another few seconds, and Tuffy wandering through the light cone, sparkling as he did so, before Wilson realized which Icheloe’s skeleton it was likely to be.
“Oh, shit,” Wilson said, out loud.
“Harry?” Schmidt said, suddenly cutting in. “Uh, just so you know, I’m not alone on this end anymore. And we have a bit of a problem here.”
“We have a bit of a problem on this end, too, Hart,” Wilson said.
“I’m guessing your problem isn’t Ambassador Waverly looking for her dog,” Schmidt said.
“No,” Wilson said. “It’s oh so very much larger.”
There was an indignant squawk on the other end of the line; Wilson imagined Schmidt putting his hand over the PDA’s microphone to keep Wilson from hearing ambassadorial venting. “Is it Tuffy? Is Tuffy all right?” More squawking. “Is Tuffy, uh, alive?”
“Tuffy is fine, Tuffy is alive, Tuffy is perfectly good,” Wilson said. “But I’ve found something down here that’s none of those things.”
“What do you mean?” Schmidt said.
“Hart,” Wilson said, “I’m pretty sure I just found the lost king.”
“Do you hear that?” Ambassador Waverly said, pointing out the window of one of the many sitting rooms of the royal palace. The window was open, and in the distance was a rhythmic chittering that reminded Wilson of the cicadas that would fill the midwestern nights with their white noise. These were not cicadas.
“Those are protesters,” Waverly said. “Thousands of Icheloe reactionaries who are here to demand a return to royalty.” She pointed at Wilson. “You did that. More than a year of background work and persuasion and angling to get us a seat at the table-more than a year to line up the dominoes just right for us to position this negotiation as the first step to make a legitimate counter to the Conclave-and you blow it all in two hours. Congratulations, Lieutenant Wilson.”
“Wilson didn’t intend to find the lost king, Philippa,” Ambassador Abumwe said, to her counterpart. She was in the room with Wilson and Waverly. Schmidt was there, too, pulled in because he was, as Waverly put it, an “accomplice” to Wilson’s shenanigans. Tuffy was also present, gnawing on a toy ball volunteered by the palace staff. Wilson had discreetly separated Tuffy from the royal bones long before they both had exited the cave. The crown remained with the dog; it had somehow attached itself and refused to be removed. All five were awaiting the return of Praetor Gunztar, who had been pulled into emergency consultations.
“It doesn’t matter what he intended to do,” Waverly shot back. “What matters is what he did do. And what he did was single-handedly disrupt a long-running diplomatic process. Now the Icheloe are back on the verge of civil war and we are to blame.”
“It doesn’t have to be as bad as that,” Abumwe said. “If nothing else, we’ve solved the disappearance of the king, which was the cause of the civil war. The war started because one faction blamed the other for kidnapping and killing him. Now we know that never happened.”
“And that simply doesn’t matter,” Waverly said. “You know as well as I that the disappearance of the king was just the polite fiction the factions needed to go after each other with guns and knives. If it hadn’t been the king going missing, they would have found some other reason to go at each other’s throats. What’s important now is that they wanted to end that fight.” Waverly pointed again at Wilson. “But now he’s dragged up that damn king, giving the hard-liners on both sides a new pointless excuse to go after each other.”
“We don’t know that will be the outcome,” Abumwe said. “You had confidence in the process before. At the end of the day, the Icheloe still want their peace.”
“But will they still want it with us?” Waverly said, looking over. “Now that we’ve unnecessarily disrupted their peace process and added complications to it? That’s the question. I hope you’re right, Ode. I really do. But I have my doubts.” She turned her gaze back to Wilson. “And do you have any thoughts on this subject, Lieutenant Wilson?”
Wilson glanced over to Abumwe, whose face was neutral, and at Schmidt, who had preemptively gone pale. “I’m sorry I unnecessarily disrupted your process, Ambassador,” he said. “I apologize.” In his peripheral vision, Wilson could see Schmidt’s eyes widen. Hart clearly wasn’t expecting deference from his friend.
“You apologize,” Waverly said, walking over to him. “You’re sorry. That’s all you have to say.”
“Yes, I think so, ma’am,” Wilson said. “Unless you think there’s something else I should add.”
“I think your resignation would be in order,” Waverly said.
Wilson smiled at this. “The Colonial Defense Forces isn’t generally keen on resignations, Ambassador Waverly.”
“And that’s your final comment on the matter,” Waverly said, persisting.
Wilson glanced very briefly at Abumwe and caught her almost imperceptible shrug. “Well, except to say that I know what to do the next time something like this happens,” he said.
“And what is that?” Waverly said.
“Let the plant keep the dog,” Wilson said.
Praetor Gunztar opened the door to the room before Waverly had a chance to explode at Wilson. She whirled toward Gunztar instead with such sudden ferocity that even the praetor, who was no great reader of human emotion, could not miss it. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Of course, Praetor Gunztar,” Waverly said, tightly.
“Very good,” Gunztar said, barreling through before Waverly could launch into anything further. “I have news. Some of it is good. Some of it is less so.”
“All right,” Waverly said.
“The good news-the great news-is that leaders of both factions agree that no one was responsible for the killing of the king, except for the king himself,” Gunztar said. “It was well-known the king was a heavy drinker and that he would often stroll in his private garden at night. The most obvious explanation is that the king was drunk, collapsed into the kingsflower planter, and the plant pulled him under. When he awoke, he tried to escape and followed the tunnel to his death. The garden was part of his private residence and he was a bachelor; no one looked for him until his staff went to wake him in the morning.”
“Didn’t anyone at the time think to look inside the plant?” Abumwe asked.
“They did, of course,” Gunztar said. “But it was not until much later, when more obvious places were searched. And by that time, there was no trace of the king. It seems that he may have wandered down the tunnel by that time and was either dead or too injured by the fall into the cave to call for help. The bones show his spine was shattered in several places, consistent with a fall.”
Wilson, who remembered Tuffy chewing on at least a couple of other bones aside from the rib, kept quiet.
“This is good news because one continual sticking point between the factions has been finding some way to finesse the disappearance of the king,” Gunztar said. “The question of blame and responsibility are still sore subjects. Or were. Now they no longer are. During our discussions, the head of the pro-king faction provisionally apologized for blaming the agitators for killing the king. The head for the agitator faction provisionally expressed sorrow at the death of the king. As long as it sticks, the job here has become substantially easier.”
“Wow,” Wilson said. “And here I thought that the disappearance of the king was just a convenient excuse already warring factions were using to go after each other.”
“Of course not,” Gunztar said, turning toward Wilson and thereby missing the flush that drove itself up Waverly’s neck and face. “To be certain, the factions were ready to fight. But our civil war would not have lasted so long, nor have been so bloody, had one side not accused the other of regicide. And so the Icheloe owe you a particular debt of thanks, Lieutenant Wilson, for what you have done for us today.”