Anden found it ironic that what had once been a disgraceful blemish on his past—refusing jade at his graduation from Kaul Dushuron Academy and leaving the country in exile for some time as a consequence—was now cited as evidence of his upstanding moral character at a young age. Voters apparently admired the way that, given his mother’s tragic death from the Itches, he’d turned away from violence and shine use despite prodigious jade abilities and severe pressure from family and society. Anden sometimes wished he could travel back in time to reassure his eighteen-year-old self that he would find his own way after all—but then again, it would’ve been cruel, at that age, to learn of all the other struggles and sorrows that were still to come.
Early on a cool but sunny Seventhday morning, the day before he was to be sworn into office, Anden walked into a small, secondstory apartment in an unremarkable building in Little Hammer. He passed three guards along the way, Mountain Green Bones loyal to the Koben family—one posted at the building’s entrance, one outside the door to the apartment, one inside the small unit itself. They recognized Anden of course—who else could he be?—and when he produced the letter from Kaul Nikoyan, Pillar of No Peak, bearing the insignia of the clan, the guard at the door grumbled, “About time,” and let him enter.
Ayt Madashi sat cross-legged on the only sofa in the apartment, watching the news on a small television. Anden was shocked by her appearance. Ayt’s undyed hair was coarse and gray and she was hunched, as if she were very cold, inside a baggy turtleneck sweater with long sleeves that drooped all the way to her fingers. Anden had never seen Ayt with her arms covered. He knew that beneath the bulky fabric, they were bare. The silver coils of mounted jade that Ayt had worn and proudly displayed for so many years were gone. After surrendering herself to Koben’s people and ordering her loyalists not to fight, she’d been stripped of her jade and confined under house arrest in this unknown safe house. Although she’d made it through the ordeal of jade withdrawal, Anden could not help but marvel at how much less she seemed to be. One of the most formidable Green Bones of her generation—now a weary, thin, jadeless, sixty-six-yearold woman.
Ayt switched off the television and turned her head toward Anden. Seeing the pity in his expression, her mouth flattened into a line and some of the old fire flared in her eyes, a flash of the ruthless iron will that had been the bane of the No Peak clan for decades.
“Are you surprised to find me still here, Emery Anden?” Ayt asked, a touch sardonically. “Perhaps you thought I’d follow Iwe’s example?”
“The thought occurred to me,” Anden admitted.
“As it did to me.” Ayt’s shoulders slackened. “But I seem incapable of taking the easy route in anything. Survival is a habit, it seems, one that’s hard to break.”
“So is jade,” Anden said, looking steadily at her. “So is power.”
Ayt uncrossed her legs and set her feet down but didn’t rise from her seat. “Koben Ato hasn’t come. Not that I expected him to. He always was a coward who shrank from tough decisions, letting others make choices for him. Even knowing that I whispered his name, he would rather avoid the distasteful problem of executing his own aunt by foisting the task onto No Peak.” She sounded disappointed and regretful, as if she wished she’d been proven wrong in her assessment of the young man who she’d attempted to have killed. Ayt narrowed her eyes at Anden. “However, I’m surprised your nephew waited so long. It’s been three very dull months. I would’ve thought the new Pillar of No Peak was greener than that.”
“If it were up to some members of the clan, you would’ve already been publicly executed, beheaded, and buried without a grave,” Anden said. “But Kaul Niko wanted to wait until after the dust settled, after the elections and the holiday season, when people would’ve stopped thinking about you.”
Ayt looked past Anden, as if expecting to see other people behind him, but there was no one else. “And then he sends you alone. He won’t even face me.”
Anden said, “You’re nothing to him, just a defeated enemy. He’s not like other Green Bones in that way. You’re responsible for the death of his father—fathers, the one by blood, and the one who raised him—but he doesn’t care for personal vengeance and won’t let it determine his decisions. He doesn’t want to see you or speak to you. He only wants you gone.”
“So you’re here,” Ayt said. “Dr. Emery. I should say, Councilman Emery. To speak for the No Peak clan and deliver the justice of the Kaul family.”