“A word, Lady Wexyn?”
The doors swung open in front of me, pulled back by two veiled attendants. I strode in, with Beast trotting by my feet. Nothing had changed since my last visit. A clear stream still curved around a courtyard of brown stones, gently flowing into a wide pond. The yellow-leafed Fortune trees washed their long branches in the water. Even Lady Wexyn was in the exact same place, reclining on a chaise inside a wooden pavilion at the pond’s edge.
I approached her.
“Please, sit,” she invited.
I sat down in a cushioned chair. Beast jumped onto my lap and flopped.
Lady Wexyn gazed over the water, her expression serene.
“You have questions,” she said.
“So many.”
She nodded. “I’ll do my best to answer as a thank you for your hospitality.”
“Let’s start with the simplest one. The flying?”
“Tuhl Gravity Disruptor. A tiny single-use gadget with an inaccurate name, since it doesn’t really disrupt gravity, it simply creates a powerful lift for about 7 seconds. I had it attached to my right shoe.”
“It doesn’t sound safe.” Using anything with “Tuhl” in its name meant taking your life in your hands. Tuhls made genius tech that killed them with depressing regularity.
“It isn’t. It requires a lot of training and explodes about 25% of the time. Really, strapping anything that causes a subatomic reaction to your body is a terrible idea. I do not recommend it.”
“It was very impressive,” I told her.
“Thank you.”
“Did Kosandion hire you?”
She nodded. “In a manner of speaking. He spoke to Clan Nuan, and Clan Nuan suggested I would be an excellent solution to his problems.”
“So you’re a bodyguard?”
“Not exactly.” She looked over the water again. “When people think of desires, they usually think of love or lust, depending on how cynical they are. But there are many other desires. Wealth. Power. Freedom… Revenge.”
She gave me a sweet smile. Suddenly she seemed wrapped in power. It suffused her, an unyielding merciless energy, contained yet ready to be weaponized at any moment.
Cold dashed down my spine.
“Some say that the need for revenge is the second strongest desire. Some say it’s the most powerful one. I, like my mother before me, am a Priestess of Revenge. When the supplicants pray before my altar, they lay their grudges bare, and if their cause is worthy, I do what they cannot. Sometimes I am justice, but mostly I’m vengeance.”
She had walked toward Prysen Ol like an unstoppable elemental force. She hadn’t said a single word during that fight. She showed no emotion. It wasn’t personal for her. Looking at her must’ve been like staring Death in the face.
The half-forgotten teachings of the Temple floated up from my memory. The priests and priestesses of the Temple taught that unfulfilled desires created an imbalance in the universe. The deeper the desire, the greater the imbalance. Correcting that imbalance was their sacred mission.
“Harmony,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes.”
Amphie and Prysen Ol had conspired to assassinate Kosandion. His death would have thrown the Dominion into chaos. “Was today vengeance?”
“Today was one of the rare times when I stopped a future tragedy from happening. My contract with Kosandion put no limits on me. He didn’t ask me to guard him. He simply asked me to enter the selection and to act if I judged my intervention was needed. If Amphie hadn’t pulled the trigger, I would’ve continued to play my chosen role to the very end, taken my minor ask, and departed with no one the wiser.”
“What’s your minor ask?”
“A very generous donation to the Temple. I had to stay in character. A woman dripping in gold would ask for more wealth, of course.”
“I thought you would ask for Clan Nuan to become the preferred partner of the Dominion.”
She chuckled. “That is the major ask. A change like that would require reworking the Dominion’s entire interstellar trade. It’s all moot now. Don’t worry. Clan Nuan knew it was a very long shot. They are satisfied.”
The Temple would get their donation, Clan Nuan would drastically improve their trade with the Dominion even without the major ask, and Kosandion would look like a flawless ruler, who both anticipated threats and neutralized them. Declining the protection of the inn during the assassination was the ultimate power move. An overly poetic guest once described being inside of the inn as “being held in a god’s palm,” with your every need met in absolute safety. Even life’s little accidents like tripping and hitting an elbow on the counter didn’t happen inside the inn. Kosandion had showed to the Dominion that even in a god’s palm, he would make his own contingency plans.
I looked at her. “That seems like a lot to leave to chance. Did he help you move up? What if you’d been eliminated in one of the earlier rounds?”
She laughed. It was a light, melodious laugh, warm and infectious. “Kosandion has his faults, but he would never insult me.”
Even if he had manipulated public opinion in her favor, there was no way to fake the trials. She had done well in the debate, wowed in the talent portion, and then she effortlessly won the game. And when Prysen Ol’s sword-whip hurtled at his face, Kosandion didn’t even flinch. He had complete confidence in her skills.
“Kosandion and I are similar in a way,” she said. “Both of us trained from birth to walk the path predestined for us. We are both good at what we do. He understands empires. I understand people. The biggest worry was that Amphie might have been eliminated too soon. There are limits to how much public opinion can be swayed in the face of abject failure.”
“When did you begin to suspect her?”
“From the beginning. So did Kosandion. Behoun has grown prosperous over the last century. It is a kind of aimless prosperity without a clear direction. It breeds greed and laziness. They have systematically avoided all calls to contribute on the federal level. Of all the planets, they send the least troops, share the least resources, and exploit the most tax loopholes, and yet they scream for aid every time they have a minor disaster. They are content to be a part of the Dominion as long as nothing is asked of them, and all of their efforts are aimed at preserving the state of things just the way they are.”
Not surprising. In the US, each state liked to think of itself as a small country. If the states were separated by thousands of light years, that kind of thinking would only become deeper.
An attendant appeared and deposited a tray with snacks and tea on the table.
“Thank you,” Lady Wexyn murmured.
The attendant nodded and withdrew.
She poured two cups of tea and offered one to me. I sipped it. It was a delicate aromatic brew, with notes of peach and jasmine.
Lady Wexyn took a sip as well. “The previous Sovereign ignored Behoun because he had bigger worries. They mistook the lack of attention for weakness and grew more and more brazen. Kosandion is much harsher than his predecessor. His father was infected by his political opponents and arranged his own murder, his aunt threw away an empire and killed her own brother, and Kosandion had witnessed it all, knowing it was done for his sake. It hardened his heart.”