“Reasonable!” Dawn said. “How are two dead guests reasonable?”
“For the last time,” Brian Rodriguez recited, “Nobody died. Everyone is alive. Nobody sustained permanent injuries.”
“And we’re just supposed to believe that?” Frank demanded.
“Yes.” I sank some steel into my voice. “I am an innkeeper. My word is sufficient.”
“That remains to be seen,” Frank said.
“How about my word?”
I felt cold magic bloom behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony’s red ad-hal robe ripple as if touched by wind.
Frank clamped his mouth shut. That just annoyed me even more. I’d been an innkeeper for years now and apparently the only way my word counted was if I had an ad-hal to back me up.
“Help,” Sean whispered in my ear. He was down in the oombole enclosure.
“Urgent?”
“Somewhat.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“What I want to know is—” Dawn started.
“Enough. This is my inn. I determine what is reasonable here. I don’t need you to hold my hand. I don’t need you to tell me how you would have handled it. Mind your own business.”
There was a moment of shocked silence.
Aiyo Iwata clapped. “Finally.”
Manuel Ordó?ez clapped as well and muttered something in Spanish under his breath. It sounded a lot like “estúpido.”
“Finally, what?” Frank demanded.
“Finally, someone shut you two up,” Aiyo said. “It is her inn. You are not her supervisor.”
“We all know why we’re having this meeting,” Brian Rodriguez said. “The two of you were contacted by the Dominion with an offer to host this selection and you passed.”
“What are you implying?” Dawn asked.
Brian leaned into his screen. “I am not implying, I’m saying it. This is sour grapes.”
“You were offered a chance to do it, you declined, she did it, and she did it well.” Magdalene Braswell crossed her arms on her chest. “You don’t get to complain about it. She went a week with twenty Dushegubs in her inn and they all left alive.”
“Oh, they can complain about it,” Aiyo said, “but it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to waste any more time listening to it.”
“I have a legitimate point!” Frank pounded his fist onto his desk.
Magdalene snorted. “Bless your heart.”
“Remind me, Frank,” Tyrone Brightwell said. “Who made you king? I didn’t vote for you.”
“Ahahaha!” Aiyo cracked up. “I see what you did there!”
I looked at Tony, who had shifted back into his regular clothes. He nodded. We quietly switched places, and I hurried through the inn to the oomboles. I’d had it up to my ears with the Innkeeper Assembly and its branches.
We had modeled the oombole section after massive observation aquariums. The walls of their connected tanks were transparent, and the tanks themselves stretched fifty feet high. Walking between them was like strolling on the bottom of the sea.
The entire oombole delegation swam in a school inside the largest tank, the size of an Olympic swimming pool. I found Sean on the side by one of the smaller tanks connected to the larger one by a narrow channel. He was watching Oond. The spousal candidate was making tight counterclockwise circles.
Uh-oh.
I approached the transparent wall. Oond ignored me.
“How long has he been like this?” I murmured.
“Forty-five minutes,” Sean answered. “He keeps circling, secreting stress pheromones, and urinating.”
Everything about this was bad. The oomboles were not solitary. They didn’t go off by themselves, and they didn’t swim in small circles. They were foragers, which was why we had to make a giant tank for them. Oond was in acute distress. A guest in our inn was having a nervous breakdown. My parents would be aghast. I had shamed the family.
“Why is he swimming in his own piss?” Sean asked.
The oomboles were extremely fussy about their bathroom habits. We had had to redo their latrine area three times just to make sure it was aesthetically pleasing and private enough.
“It makes him feel safer. It’s his equivalent of curling into a fetal ball. Have you gotten him to respond at all?”
“No.”
I sealed off the small pool. “Let’s try a lower temperature and soothing light.”
Gertrude Hunt’s massive temperature-regulating pumps came online, sending cool water into the tank. I dimmed the lights. The water plants inside the tank fluoresced gently.
“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.