"You sent spies among them?"
"Just so."
"But before we learned much of anything," Sire Neen proceeded, "one of our agents was found out and captured. He, in turn, was convinced to betray other agents. Several were captured and… questioned."
"How many?" Corinn asked.
"Oh…" Dagon pursed his lips as if the exact number were of no consequence, but then he produced it. "Twenty-seven."
"Twenty-seven? Are you mad?"
Neen fondled his gold neck collar, fingering the dolphin shape embossed there. "It is a large territory. One or two spies would have told us nothing. It would have been a waste and still a risk at that. Our spies were finely trained, disciplined, and looked perfectly the part of grown slaves. We were all shocked when one was caught and shocked that he gave up the others so thoroughly."
"It seems," the other leagueman said, "that the Lothan Aklun took possession of them. They have very persuasive forms of torture."
Corinn tapped her fingernails against the hard wood of the armrests, waiting for more. "So you've been caught spying? How have the Lothan Aklun responded?"
"Put simply," Sire Neen said, "this has placed us in an awkward position. What we believe will help is a direct entreaty from yourself. We will make our own apologies directly to both parties, but if you could stand strong with us, while avowing complete innocence in the matter, it will strengthen our position. The Lothan Aklun need to know that the league and the Acacian crown are two fingers of the same hand."
"You want me to tell them you're my preferred middlemen, is that it? But what if they can offer better terms?"
Both men looked aghast, though she knew it was a show. Nothing surprised men like these. Sire Dagon said, "Majesty, you can have no idea what sort of mistake that would be."
Corinn smiled. "Why don't you tell me, then?"
Sire Dagon showed her the palms of his hands, his long fingers crooked. It was a rather odd gesture that she had yet to understand fully. "You and the next several generations of Akarans would waste your lives trying to learn all the many branches of Lothan Aklun duplicity. They are vile, completely without conscience; and they would seek to cheat you in every way possible. They huddle on the isles of the Barrier Ridge, scheming new treacheries. It is only because we-the league-have dealt with their every scheme over the centuries that you are spared such things. They would love nothing better than feasting on your ignorance of their ways."
"And," Sire Neen added, once more showing his ghastly teeth, "the league owns the Gray Slopes. Without us you can no more get to the Aklun than they can get to you. Only we have successfully navigated that great ocean and all its dangers."
"So I've been told time and again."
"If you like," Sire Dagon said, "you could see for yourself, with your own eyes. We have permission from the League Council to offer you transport across to meet with them. Nothing would impress upon the Lothan Aklun the strength of our partnership like seeing you stand beside us."
Corinn looked between both men, trying to read them while not betraying how shocked she was by the proposal. In all the years of the quota trade, no Akaran had met with the Lothan Aklun. The league had guarded their exclusivity jealously. If this offer was genuine, they must really be worried. "I cannot leave Acacia right now," she eventually said, "but I will send my brother, Prince Dariel, with a message from me to the Lothan Aklun. He should be returning to Acacia in a few days. He will appease them and then get on with business."
She could not read whether or not they were happy with this pronouncement, but for them being hard to read was as essential to life as breathing. Rising, she dismissed them formally, promising to sort out the details with them in the coming days.
Alone once more a few minutes later, the queen again stood over her desk, trying to recall each word spoken and the gestures that accompanied them. Of course, the leaguemen had not told her everything. They would never do so anyway, but they likely hid some aspects of the affair that she would do better to know about. She would have Rialus send out his ears, his rats, to see what more they could learn. As for her brother, perhaps he really should accompany them. There were surely things to be gained. It was an opportunity best grasped before the league found a way to squirm out of it.
She heard somebody enter the room. She felt a flare of annoyance, but it vanished just as quickly. She knew-from the rapidity of his steps and the lack of a whistle to announce him-exactly who it was before he had begun speaking.
"Mother, watch this," a child's voice said. "See what I've learned."
Corinn straightened, looked up, and watched her son, Aaden, dash into the room. He carried a wooden training sword, a small, light version designed for children. Appropriate, for a child of eight was what he was.
"Watch," he ordered. "I'll do the first part of the First Form."
Without waiting for affirmation, he set his legs and brought the sword to ready position. He focused on the imagined foe standing before him. Corinn grinned. Her little Edifus at Carni, already imagining carnage. He had never known a day of hardship in his life, and yet he already hungered for conflict.
The boy moved with the awkward, intense concentration of the young. He stepped and swung, parried and turned on the balls of his feet. He wobbled a few times and corrected missteps on occasion, seeming so focused that he barely breathed through his tight lips. Watching him, his mother paid little attention to the Form itself or to his performance of it. She simply stared at him, amazed at the act of creation that had brought him to life. She had made this child! This complete, exquisite human being. How was it possible that she possessed the power to draw that small mouth and fill it with those perfect, tiny teeth? And his eyes… well, they were gray flecked with brown, almost too large for his face. But he would grow into them, and when he did, they would melt all whom he set them upon.
Had she done all this?
The boy spun in a sudden flourish, his long wavy hair sweeping around him. Corinn always felt she should have it cut short, keep it trim and close to his scalp, neat. But she never had the heart to order it done. In his infancy, she had held this boy and stroked the hairless crown of his head and run her fingers around the soft indentations in his skull and pressed her palm over the spots. He had seemed so vulnerable then. He had remained so for nearly a year before his hair began to thicken and lengthen. Part of her had feared the prospect of his having straw-blond Meinish hair, but as it grew in she loved the look and touch of it. How could she help but adore it? It was her son's hair.
True, he was Hanish Mein's son as well. The proof was there in the gold highlights of his brown hair, in the already-sharp line of his jaw, and in the shape of his mouth. His features often had something of Hanish's dreamy quality, a mirthful expression that had often disguised his true thoughts and intentions. Yes, he was Hanish's son. Corinn lived with awareness of that fact every day. But he would not bear that traitor's name. He was officially all Akaran; Corinn was all the parent he needed. If one sought to name his father-she had once snapped at an ambassador impertinent enough to question her on the child's parentage-look no further than the line of Akaran itself. That's what Aaden was! The child of Edifus and Tinhadin and every other Akaran who had ever walked across the Known World. He was named after Tinhadin's firstborn son. Corinn thought that appropriate and, hopefully, prophetic.
Corinn found it disturbing that there were no words to adequately describe the love a parent feels for a child. Before she'd become a mother she'd known so little. All those years she had understood nothing of what her mother and her father must have gone through raising four children. It rankled her to think how foolish she had once been. It was a strange, unpleasant emotion to follow so quickly on her adoration. It concerned her that she might, at some point in the future, look back from a place of greater wisdom and again find that the self she now was-at thirty-three, the mother of a single child, the widow to a lover who had planned her murder, a sister to two living siblings and one dead, an orphan who could no longer look to her parents-had been ignorant on some matter of import.