Nuan Cee looked away from the screen, averting his eyes.
“I had seen the shape of my poisoner. It was short. Short like a lees. Then you showed up with an antidote to a poison that couldn’t be found even in the Arbiter’s extensive database. One of your people tried to kill me.”
“It wasn’t sanctioned.”
“The inn marked my poisoner.”
Nuan Cee winced.
“Why did you do it?”
“It wasn’t done on my orders and I will punish the one responsible. Someone used my image disruptor, but I don’t know how. It is very expensive and I am the only one who has one. It was completely secure and it is untouched in my quarters. I had used it only once.”
He’d used… “You took the emerald?”
“Yes. I was wearing the disruptor that night under my clothes. Everyone was so busy, it took mere seconds.”
“You’ve abused my hospitality.”
Nuan Cee sighed. “We did. We are indebted to you.”
I was so sick of trading favors. “Let him go.”
“No.”
“Nuan Cee! You owe me. You broke the rules of hospitality. You broke your people’s treaty with the Innkeepers of Earth. You should’ve healed me anyway. Sean didn’t know this, and you took advantage of him.”
“Yes. His bargain with me is separate from your bargain.”
“Let him go.”
“I can’t. Anything but that.”
“Why?” I snarled.
Nuan Cee spread his paws. “There were forty-two Turan Adins since the war on Nexus began. Some lasted mere days. He’s been on Nexus for a cycle and a half. You don’t even know how special that is. He’s too good. He lasted longer than even the original one. I was terrified because he refused to sign another contract. He said he would walk as soon as we found a replacement. But now he will stay. All will be well.”
“All won’t be well. The Nexus is killing him.”
“It will eventually. But until then, he will lead our defenses.”
“Release him. This is what I want.”
“No. Ask anything else.”
“Damn it, don’t you have a crumb of conscience? Is there any drop of kindness in your soul, or is it all just cold dark greed?”
Nuan Cee bared his teeth. “There are three thousand of our people on Nexus. There are families and children. He is keeping them alive.”
“What the hell were you thinking, putting children on Nexus in the first place? Move them out.”
“Don’t you think I would if I could? They have no place to go. They are not welcome anywhere.”
The realization hit me. The Kuan lees, the cast outs. He had staffed Nexus colony with the exiles.
Nuan Cee turned away and waved at the screen, his paw limp. “Archive number ten twenty-four.”
A long procession of foxes appeared on the screen, moving one by one into a shrine, carrying little lanterns.
“In our society, family is everything. Clan is everything. When I look back, I should see the line of my ancestors stretching through time, long and unbroken. It is they who give us strength and wisdom. Our clan. Our pack. Our past and the wealth of our clan’s deeds. When one of us commits a crime, when he or she is found weak or unworthy, they are cast out. Such is the way of the forest. Only the strong and the useful survive. The cast outs are cut off from their clan. They have no shrines. They can’t pray to their ancestors. They can’t ask for solace or guidance. Their children grow up adrift, not knowing where they come from, branches severed from the tree of their clan and family forever. Some don’t even know their fathers. They have no home. They’re not welcome anywhere. My father was a Kuan. He was a criminal and the son of a criminal.”
Grandmother stepped out of the shadows and came to sit on the couch, quiet as a ghost.
“And when my mother fell in love with him and her clan paid a fortune, the worth of a small planet, to include him into our clan, he had a choice. He could go with my mother and cut off all ties with his clan or he could stay an outcast. My father’s mother told him to walk away from her and his sisters and to never look back. His own mother. She gave up her child so he could have a better life.” Nuan Cee’s voice shook. “I don’t know my other grandmother. She is gone now. Her soul is floating out there, lost and gone, crying out for the light and I can’t even light a candle in a shrine to help her find her way. I am a cripple. I have not been able to bring myself to sire children, for they will be crippled like me. They will not know half of their family.”
He swiped the tears from his eyes. “It took me decades to wrestle away the rights to Nexus. It is rich. I had offered a third of the profits we’ll reap to the Clans Assembly. A royal sum. In return, they let me settle the exiled ones on Nexus. They let me forge them into their own clan. They will receive dispensation to raise their shrines.”
His eyes shone. “Their children won’t have to wonder if they are just specks of dust in the nothingness. They will be connected. They will light their candles and speak to those who passed on. That’s why the exiled ones volunteered to come to Nexus, knowing they could never leave and that for the rest of the Galaxy, where time moves slower, they will be dead long before anyone else they know. They left what little they had behind and trusted me to bring them there. They cannot leave now, because they have no place to go.”
He had brought thousands of his people to Nexus and now they were stranded.
“I must have peace to turn a profit. And now the peace treaty is dead and the least I can do is keep them safe for as long as I can. You cannot have Sean. Ask me anything but that.”
He would never let Sean go. Sean would return to Nexus and die there. I had to save him. I had to do something. Anything.
“What if there is peace?”
“There won’t be. The otrokari are ready to leave and the Anocracy is torn by their feud.”
My mouth had gone dry. I licked my lips. “Here is my bargain: you owe me. If I get the peace treaty signed, you will let Sean go.”
Nuan Cee shook his head.
“You’re wrong,” Grandmother said, her voice quiet.
I nearly jumped, I’d never heard her say a word and almost forgot she was there. Nuan Cee turned, startled.
“We have caused her an injury,” Grandmother said. “We owe her a debt. We owe her parents a debt after everything they have done for us.”
Nuan Cee bowed his head. “As you wish. If the peace treaty is signed and upheld, I will release Sean Evans from my service. That will wipe the slate clean between us. You have my promise.”
That was the best I could get. I had to find a way to bring them together and convince them to end this insane war. Desperation wrapped around me like a noose. How in the world would I do that? I didn’t even know where to start. I was numb and terrified at the same time. I had to move, go, do something, but all I could do was sit. Everything else seemed too hard.
We sat in the quiet gloom watching the procession of foxes at the shrine.
“There is only one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did you take the emerald?”
Nuan Cee sighed again. “Because I was young once and foolish, so I did what my father had done to me to save me from myself. It is a thing within the clans that adults know and children learn when they become adults. The young are so rash, so desperate to make their own money and leave their mark on the Galaxy. Couki is very bright and that keen intelligence will get him into trouble. He will inherit a sum of money when he comes of age. He will use it hoping to prove that he has what it takes to be a Merchant. The bazaars of the Universe are full of greedy sharks and he is smart, but too inexperienced to swim with the worst of them. The brighter they are, the faster they lose the money. Left on his own, he will become bankrupt within months. It will take him another five cycles or so after he reaches the age of maturity to pay back the emerald and the interest. Time enough for him to learn and mature and for the clan to absorb his small mistakes and keep him from ma
king big ones.”
“Nuan Cee was a very bright child,” Grandmother said with a smile. “He almost bankrupted the entire clan twice before his twentieth birthday.”
They trapped their young adults, forcing them to remain with the family. “Do you do this to every smart child?” I asked.
“Yes,” Nuan Cee said.
I rose. I had a couple of things I needed to verify.
Chapter 15
The full enormity of my task mugged me right outside the Merchants door. I made it midway down the curving staircase and sat down right there on the stone steps. How the hell was I going to fix this?
I wished desperately that my parents were here with all of the intensity of a terrified five year old in trouble. I wanted advice. I needed reassurance. What do I do, Mom? Dad? How do I handle this? They all want peace but can’t bring themselves to actually agree to it, and now Sean would die on some hellish planet fighting a war he never wanted to win. He’d signed his life away to save me. Looking into his eyes was like watching ashes rise from a funeral pyre. The vampires hid in their rooms, the otrokari were getting ready to leave, and the Merchants tried to poison me.
How do I fix this mess…
A pressure built in my chest, a dense insistent ache. A tear wet my cheek, made of distilled stress. I fought it back, but the pressure ground on me from the inside. I was ready to burst. Either I cried now or I forced it down, which meant I would have to cry later, probably at exactly the wrong moment.
I was alone. Nobody would hear.
I took a deep shuddering breath and let it go. The damn inside me broke. All of my stress and pain came out with the flood of tears. I cried and cried. I cried because I didn’t know what to do, because I almost died, because Sean sacrificed himself for me, and because I wanted my parents to hug me.
Gradually my sobs began to die down. I felt tired, but light. My head was clear.
A thin tendril slid out of the wall and brushed my cheek. I looked at it. A tiny white bud formed on the tip of the thin branch and opened into a little star of a flower with tiny turquoise stamens in the middle. A faint honey-sweet aroma drifted up.
The poor inn was trying to make me feel better.
I inhaled the aroma. It washed through me, sweet and delicate. That’s right. I was an innkeeper. I had seen the universe and I survived it. I would survive this too. I would fix this.
I stroked the branch with my fingers and whispered, “Thank you.”
If only all of them were as sensitive as Gertrude Hunt. The inn always felt what I felt…
It hit me like a freight train. George, you bastard. You conniving, manipulating bastard.
He knew. The Arbitrators’ database was one of the most comprehensive in the entire Galaxy. He did his research, figured it out, and then he set about finding an innkeeper he could manipulate into doing it. He must’ve approached some of us straight on, which is why everyone turned him down. No innkeeper would do this unless their back was against the wall and mine was.
Was Gertrude Hunt even strong enough? Was I strong enough?
I needed information. I had only seen it done once in my whole life and that was when my mother used our inn to get a murderer to confess. There had to have been others. I got up and went down into my lab.
Two hours later I had my answers. The good news was that Gertrude Hunt was definitely powerful enough to handle it. The inn’s roots were deep. It was possible. But it would have to go through me. I was the weakest link in this chain. As long as I held up long enough, it was possible. My books didn’t cover the last eighty years, but it did reach back three centuries from that point. The bad news was that four out of six innkeepers who tried it during that time went mad in the process.
Lousy odds.
I tried desperately to find another way. Any other way at all. I came up empty. It was this or failure.
If I did it, I would have to do it fast. The otrokari would leave tomorrow evening and everything had to be ready by then. All of my guests would actively resist it, too. All the favors I collected wouldn’t be enough. I had to restore my influence and authority as an innkeeper, or they would never submit to the process. Right now I was an innkeeper who was poisoned in my own inn, like a bartender who got his ass kicked in his own bar. I had to solve my own poisoning, hit him with it fast, and then dump the rest on them before they had a chance to really think about the possible consequences.
The identity of the poisoner wasn’t the problem. I could assemble all of the Merchants together, turn out the lights, and the guilty party would light up like a Christmas tree. But that wasn’t impressive. I had to figure out who had done it and why, so the big reveal would be an icing on the cake.
Twenty one centuries ago Lucius Cassius, censor and consul of Rome, had asked, “Cui bono?” To whose benefit? Every crime had come to pass because someone had something to gain by it, whether it was money, fame, or emotional satisfaction. I had to figure out who benefited from my death.
I found a pen and a piece of paper and began writing it down.
Guests who wanted peace had nothing to gain. If I died, the negotiations would end. This included the Arbitrator. His ultimate goal was peace as well.
Guests who wanted war had nothing to gain either. The negotiations were in shambles as it was, and my death, while it definitely would put a final nail into the coffin of peace talks, carried risks. It would be investigated and the guilty party would be barred from Earth. Why risk it when the summit had broken down so completely?
The Holy Anocracy had no reason to want me dead either. First, Arland and Lady Isur liked me. I was an instrument of Robart’s punishment shortly after his arrival, but he had much bigger concerns right now. I wasn’t directly involved in the brawl that took place in the dining hall either.
The otrokari owed me a favor, but it wasn’t enough of a burden to risk my death, especially not so obviously, by serving me tea. Not to mention that sharing tea was a scared tradition. Poisoning it spat on one of the cornerstones of their society.
The Merchants owed me a favor too, and more importantly, they wanted Sean to sign away his life. But Nuan Cee had no way of knowing that Sean would offer to trade his life for mine. We had no contact in this past six months, except for that one time at Wilmos’ shop. Sean never reached out to me, never sent me any letters, and never expressed any feelings for me. The only way Nuan Cee would be aware of Sean’s possible motive for sacrifice would be if Sean told him that he cared for me. I didn’t know Sean for very long the few ways that we did spend together put us through a pressure cooker and I knew him well. Sean wouldn’t share his feelings. If he truly loved me, he would keep it secret.
I stopped and squeezed my eyes shut. Sean Evans traded his life for mine. That probably meant he loved me. Okay, I would have to deal with that later. Not now. Now I had to save him.
I looked at my paper. Unless Sean confessed his love for me to Nuan Cee in a heart to heart talk – and Sean just wasn’t that kind of a guy – the Merchant had nothing to gain through my death. Even if Sean did betray his feelings somehow, there still wasn’t any guarantee that putting me in danger would get the Merchants their lifetime contract. If I did die and the Merchants’ involvement would be discovered, the Nuan family would be barred from Earth and that was a hefty price tag. Killing me simply didn’t make financial sense.
I stared at my paper. Nobody had anything to gain from me dying. I was an innkeeper, a neutral party. It’s not like I was some criminal mastermind or a former tyrant with a constellation of bounties on my head…
Oh.
Well. That made complete sense.
***
I walked into the kitchen wearing my innkeeper robe. Beast shot out from under the table and bounced around my feet. She must’ve abandoned Sean, because he was alone in his room. Orro slumped motionless in his chair. He saw me, and then my world turned dark and furry, and powerful limbs squeezed all air out of my lungs.
“Let her go, dear,” Cal
denia called out. “You will crush her.”
Orro released me and I sucked in a hoarse breath. Quillonian hugs weren’t for people with weak bones.
“Wonderful to see you moving around,” Caldenia said.
Orro retreated to the chair and turned away, suddenly embarrassed.
“Did you save the kettle?” I asked.
Her Grace raised her eyebrows. “Do you take me for an amateur?”
She stepped to the island, where a cake stand waited covered by a metal hood, and lifted the cover. The kettle still filled with ruby tea waited on the stand.
“Sadly, we are still unable to identify the poison,” Caldenia said. “But the Khanum provided us with another pot and I can tell you that there are definite chemical differences between the two liquids.”
“So the entire kettle was poisoned?” Just as I thought.
“It appears to be so. This was either very calculated or extremely sloppy.”
Or due to inexperience or desperation. “Thank you.”
“Whatever I can do to help, dear.”
I went to George’s quarters and knocked on the door. He opened it. Behind him Sophie sat on the couch next to Gaston. Jack leaned against the wall in his favorite pose, one foot propping him up.
“I know,” I told George.
An understanding showed in his eyes. “It is the only way,” he told me.
“You are despicable.”
“I will have to live with that,” he said.
“Yes, you will. We’ll revisit this later. I need to know when the Merchants were notified that the peace summit would be held here, in Gertrude Hunt.”
“On 2032, Standard,” he said.
The Standard galactic year had four hundred “days” or twenty five “hours” each. The days were divided into four “seasons,” each a hundred days long. The first of the four digits identified the season, the next three identified the day. Today was 2049 Standard. “You didn’t give them much warning.”
“No,” George said.
“Good. I will be back in a couple of hours. Keep the peace while I am gone.”