Kiem realized his leg was moving restlessly, but the movement felt wrong in Vaile’s delicately arranged apartment, so he made himself stop. Vaile was a politician through and through; that had been obvious since she was fourteen. Kiem accepted that she knew more than him, but however he tried to make the puzzle pieces fit, there were still some missing. He could feel rusted parts of his brain trying to move. “So they’re renegotiating,” he said. “But—we don’t have a Minister for Thea, do we? The Thean Ambassador told me.”
“Poor old boy,” Vaile said briefly. “Faculties failing even before he retired. I met him last year.”
“So who’s doing the negotiating?” Kiem said. “How can Thea get different terms if there’s no one in that post?”
Vaile hesitated. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. There was a layer of careful politeness over it. Vaile had always been able to turn her various manners on and off like a switch. Kiem used to know how to get past it to her unfiltered self, but he seemed to have lost the knack as they grew older. “I haven’t paid much attention to Thea. I assume the Emperor has it in hand.”
That was a nothing answer if Kiem had ever heard one. “So you can’t help,” Kiem said, more of his confidence draining away. He’d been relying on her more than he’d realized. “Well, can you … I don’t know, recommend a lawyer for Jainan?” There was already a list of lawyers on his wristband; Bel had left it there ten minutes after he’d told her what was going on.
Vaile picked up her coffee cup and ran her finger around the curve of it. “There are many fine legal firms that work with the palace. If you think about it, though, it might be better to distance yourself from the entire thing. Have you both considered a holiday? The north wetlands are quite bearable at this time of year, if you don’t want to go off-planet.”
“Vaile,” Kiem said, cajoling. “Come on, you don’t really think the wetlands are nice.”
“They have a certain bleak beauty.”
“Vaile.”
She made a soft, frustrated noise and pushed her cup away with a clatter. “All right, Kiem. If you want my real advice, dearest cousin, you won’t go near a lawyer with a ten-foot pole.”
“Why not?”
“Kiem,” Vaile said, with a bluntness that meant Kiem was finally getting a real reaction. “The treaty is on a knife-edge. Whoever is playing games—and I honestly don’t know who is, but I suspect it’s everyone—knows these are high-stakes negotiations that won’t come around again for another twenty years. We will sign a treaty, or the Resolution will step back and we’ll find some real empire like the High Chain swarming through our link before the year is up. Nobody should be willing to go that far. But the moment—the moment—you engage a lawyer without consulting Her Majesty, you are setting yourself up in opposition to the Emperor. She has the legal system, the police, the secret agencies, and to some extent Parliament under her command. What political base do you have?”
Kiem automatically took a gulp of his floral coffee. It was syrupy and tasted of dead plants.
“Exactly,” Vaile said. “The only advice I can give is this: sit tight and don’t make waves. It will sort itself out. If you want to do something, get Count Jainan to write down everything he remembers. He may need it for his defense.” A discreet chime came from her wristband. “Bother. I have to go to Council.”
“Ugh. Okay, okay, I get the point.” Kiem felt rather like he’d just been slashed up with an ornamental hatpin, but he had asked for it. He swung his legs back to the floor. “No dramatics.”
“I’m not sure you could get by without dramatics,” Vaile said. “But be careful, Kiem. The water gets deep very fast.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to make trouble,” Kiem said. He got to his feet as Vaile’s aide poked his head around the door to end the appointment. “I just want some answers, and nobody’s given me any yet.”
CHAPTER 13
There were fifteen days before Unification Day, and Jainan was sleeping badly again.
He was aware he was a liability, though Kiem was polite enough not to voice it, and he was also painfully aware he could do nothing about it. Internal Security would continue to investigate him whatever happened. Until they cleared him, the Auditor presumably wouldn’t instate either of them. He could only imagine the Emperor had discussed the possibility of replacing him, replacing Kiem, appointing a whole new couple—but that would change nothing. Prince Taam was dead, and Thea was unhappy, and until Iskat produced some answers, the Auditor wouldn’t instate anyone.
Jainan still had the College project to complete, and part of him held on to the vain, quixotic hope that showing Operation Kingfisher an easy way to fix their mechanical problems might calm some of the tensions between Iskat and Thea. And Kiem had indicated it was good social capital for him personally: at least Jainan could be useful there. The day after the disastrous quarterstaff practice, when Kiem and Bel were out, Jainan moved his research into the main room. He’d spent long enough on the pure mathematics. It was time to go into the Kingfisher files.
The data coin Gairad had handed him at the embassy contained an absurd amount of raw material. Professor Audel had asked Operation Kingfisher for their unclassified materials, as the Imperial College was traditionally permitted to do, and the military had responded by burying them in a mountain of largely useless information. Jainan knew this was Empire politics. The military didn’t like to be questioned.
On one level, Jainan knew he had been putting off this work because it was more complicated. He moved the file dumps around the desk, trying to make some sense of the material. Professor Audel wanted him to go through and see what he could find out about the extraction methods the military was already using, because she wouldn’t be able to make the case for her new method without that. Gairad thought she could reconstruct them if she could just find a plan of Kingfisher’s spaceside refinery; Jainan was meant to try other angles. It would be detailed, painstaking work, but he had done that sort of work before.
The other reason he had been putting it off was that this was Taam’s operation.
The files mentioned Taam a lot. He was somewhere on every major document, usually on the clearance list. Seeing his name gave Jainan a minor jolt every time, as if someone’s hand had just brushed against the back of his neck.
He was in the middle of a particularly tricky calculation when the door slid open. “Wait a moment,” he said with some exasperation.
The door shut. It took only a split second for him to realize he had just snapped at someone. Jainan’s heart hammered as he reflexively cleared the wall and turned around. It wasn’t Kiem, but it wasn’t much better: Bel was watching him quizzically. She said, “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“I thought you were at that school fete with Kiem,” Jainan said. Bel was carrying a large cone of cotton candy and a novelty balloon. Jainan took a moment to register them.
Bel looped the string of the balloon around a chair arm and gingerly placed the cotton candy cone on a side table. “He won the raffle,” she said. “Be glad he found someone else to donate the twenty boxes of smoked fish to.”