by K. B. Wagers
I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by that but didn’t like the way my gut twisted, or the possibilities flooding my brain with her words.
I noticed Mia first as I came into the room. The Shen leader was dressed in a suit of pale green, dark buttons running the length of the long skirt on one side and her hands covered by a pair of darker green gloves that reminded me of the forests of Basalt IV. Her hair was loose, the curls spilling over one shoulder and down her back. “Your Majesty,” she said, folding her hands together and bowing, all the while keeping her stone-gray gaze on me.
Portis had always teased me about being a sucker for a pretty face.
“Empress,” Aiz said, pulling my gaze from his sister and executing an elegant bow of his own. He moved toward me, only to be brought up short by Emmory and Zin closing rank in his way. Alba immediately filled in the space Emmory had left at my side, and somehow my chamberlain reached out and squeezed my fingers without anyone seeing.
Her words about meeting Aiz like a gunrunner rang in my ears and I only just managed to keep from backing up even though the sound of rushing water filled my ears, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood before it disappeared.
“I have an additional requirement for you, Aiz Cevalla,” Emmory said. “You will stay a meter away from the empress at all times. If I see the slightest gesture that makes me think you’re going to put a hand on her, I will kill you.”
“There is no need for such hostility, Ekam,” Mia replied, putting a gloved hand on her brother’s arm. “We are here because we want peace.”
The other two Shen stared, stone-faced, at my Ekam, but Aiz merely smiled as he allowed Mia to tug him back a step. It was a slow curving of his lips that made me think of a snake about to strike. He looked past Emmory and his smile grew.
“We are thankful you chose to assist us in these negotiations, Empress, and we will gladly follow any rules that are set forth. You know my sister. May I introduce my comrades?”
“Proceed,” I said, heading for the front of the room, my movement breaking the standoff between my BodyGuards and the man who could kill them with a touch.
“I’m afraid we don’t have fancy titles like our counterparts,” Aiz said. “I present to you: Kag and Thiago.”
The Shen were as varied as the Farians I’d met an hour ago were similar. The two men standing behind Aiz were both taller than him; Thiago had the same dark hair and eyes as most Shen I’d seen, while the other—Kag—had blond hair and pale blue eyes.
I realized that both Farian contingents had only one man in their group, while the opposite was true for the Shen, and I caught myself curious as to how much power Mia had in the Shen. I had no clue about the power distribution among either race, but thinking back on it almost all the Farians I’d had contact with were women.
Was that purely because of how much time they’d spent courting Indrana?
“Mia. Gentlemen.” I inclined my head in their direction. “Have a seat.”
Aiz seated his sister at the other end of the table and then took the seat on her right, the other two Shen pulling out chairs on the other side and sitting with the same easy grace I’d seen from the Farians earlier in the day.
“For the record, Empress, we are both here only because we trust Indrana to keep us safe. Should something happen—”
“Nothing will happen.”
“The last time you were at a negotiation the Saxons blew a large hole in a planet.”
“Not my fault,” I muttered while Aiz grinned and held up his hands.
“I am teasing, please continue.”
Folding my hands over the tablet in front of me, I threw out my carefully laid-out plans and looked at Mia. “Tell me a story,” I said with a smile.
It threw them into confusion, this departure from what they expected of me.
“A story?” A frown appeared on Mia’s lovely face.
“Tell me about the Shen. I’ve heard from the Farians how you came to be. I’d like to hear it from you.”
Aiz crossed his arms over his chest and stared at me. “What did the Farians tell you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to hear it from you.”
“It’s an unpleasant tale, Your Majesty.” Mia shook her head. “One of oppression and sacrifice.”
“I’ve heard a number of them,” I replied. “Indulge me.”
“We were Farians once,” Aiz said after looking at his sister and then down at his gloved hands. “Their gods were cruel, capricious things. They liked to see us suffer. They liked to send us out into the black as sacrifices. Those sacrificed weren’t reborn. They were lost forever. Our brothers and sisters thought it was a small price to pay for the protection and favor of the gods; but then, they were the ones with the protection, so why wouldn’t they think that?”
“What changed?”
“A group of sacrifices came home—my father and mother and I—a handful of others. They pretended to be glad to see us. We pretended to be glad to be back, and lied about a glorious thing we had discovered.”
“It wasn’t a total lie,” Kag spoke up.
“True. We did find something out in the black. Knowledge of how to manipulate this gift.” Aiz snorted and held up his gloved hands. “This gift from the gods. A gift that they’d given us but throttled and constricted under layer after layer of laws and lies. It wasn’t a true gift; it was just one more chain wrapped around our throats.”
All of them vibrated with barely contained anger. Even Aiz, who’d been so controlled the few times I’d seen him, was tight-jawed, his eyes full of fire.
Then he smiled at me, a terrible, cold smile.
“They held a feast for us. I suspect the gods were planning to kill us in front of the others as a lesson to future sacrifices not to come home. Instead, we killed them. Slaughtered, the Farians would say, but to us it was a legal execution of war criminals, a justice meted out for eons of oppression.”
“You and your father murdered them in the streets and drank their blood.”
Aiz snorted a laugh. “A Farian story told to keep their people in line. Don’t question, don’t put a toe out of step, or the Shen will come and drink your blood.” He waved his hands in the air in mock panic. “Please, Your Majesty. What possible reason could we have to drink the blood of the gods?”
His dismissal was too quick, too practiced, too smooth, and his sister didn’t react at all. Why he’d just chosen to lie to me about something that happened so long ago I couldn’t fathom, but he had, and it was enough to make me wonder why.
“Fine,” I said with a dip of my head in his direction, my face carefully expressionless. “A Farian … fairy tale, as it were. But you did kill them.”
“All but two,” he confirmed, and I resisted the urge to tell him his numbers were wrong. The truth would come out once I presented the Farians’ demands at the open session tomorrow. “Our aim was to save the Farians from the gods and from themselves, but we failed in that.”
“Tell me,” I asked, steepling my fingers in front of me. “What is it you want out of these negotiations?”
“That’s easy, Your Majesty. I want my father’s soul back.”
“Excuse me?” I couldn’t keep the shock out of my voice and off my face. After the Farians’ demand earlier that afternoon, I’d thought nothing else about these negotiations could surprise me.
It looked like I was wrong.
“Aiz, ibkeito na perisperar,” Mia said in Shen; judging from the poorly restrained urgency in her voice, I wasn’t the only one shocked.
“Das,” Aiz hissed back. “Ya queríthel na perisperar. Tha syneguiré.”
I cleared my throat and when the pair looked at me, I smiled. “There seems to be some disagreement? Do we need to take a break?”
“We do not, Your Majesty.” Aiz answered me after a moment, and I wondered again just how even this joint leadership of the Shen was. At the present, it was clear Aiz was the one in command. “My apologie
s.”
“So, you would like the return of your father’s soul. Is that everything? Or—”
“We do have more, Your Majesty.” Mia slid a tablet down the table. Emmory intercepted it and passed it to Zin. She did not shrink from my Ekam’s glare, nor the one coming from Aiz.
I chuckled and said, “Emmory will likely shoot you also, Mia. I would be careful.”
Mia’s smile was fleeting, vanishing into a solemn look. “Men are impatient creatures, are they not, Majesty? I sometimes wonder how much we could accomplish in this galaxy if all places were run as Indrana is.”
“It does not seem to me that your main fight with the Farians was caused by a gender complaint,” I replied.
“True.” Mia lifted one slender shoulder and smiled. “But Fasé and I get along well enough, and I like you—”
“Mia.” Aiz practically snarled his sister’s name, and my BodyGuards tensed.
She slid a sideways look at her brother, briefly rolling her eyes upward before returning her gaze to me. “Read the list, Your Majesty. I think you’ll find most of it quite reasonable. Even the return of our father’s soul, though it may seem strange to you, is not going to surprise the Farians much.
“We are here because we love our people. I feel like you can understand that love. I carry it with me as a reminder of this burden and will do whatever is necessary to secure a future for them.”
I couldn’t look away from her. Whatever these new and tangled feelings for the woman across the table from me were, it hadn’t escaped my attention that Mia said her people’s future, not their peace, and the determined fire in her eyes made me certain these negotiations were going to be even more difficult than I’d feared.
38
It was well past sunset by the time I made it back to the quiet of my rooms. Emmory and Zin followed me in, my Ekam stopping at the doorway to speak with Indula for a moment before he closed it, leaving the three of us in private.
I wandered over to the bar. “Ooo, Yamazaki!” My coo of delight was met by a snicker from Zin. “Hush, you.”
“My apologies, Majesty.”
“This is rare shit,” I said, pouring a drink and sipping at it with a sigh. “Alba, do you want a drink?”
“After that? Yes,” she replied. “I’ll get it myself, though; you go change.”
“Call Ambassador Zellin also, will you? I’d like her input on this.”
I set the glass on the ornate table on my way to the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind me, more so Zin wouldn’t have to heave a beleaguered sigh and follow me to close it than out of any sense of propriety, and stripped out of my uniform. I smiled at the comfortable gray pants and top Stasia had laid out on the bed and pulled a heavy wrap of darker gray from the nearby chair before heading back into the main room.
“Look at this mess,” I muttered, tapping several keys on the nearest console to bring up the demands from the Shen and from both Farian groups side by side on the large screen on the wall. “It’s like they want to keep fighting each other.”
Zin came to stand at my side, passing me my drink and crossing his arms over his chest. “Even Fasé’s request of the dismantling of the Pedalion is just this side of impossible. We’re not going to make it through two days of these peace talks. They’ll get stuck on those, I guarantee it.”
“We won’t open with those,” Emmory said. “There will be some posturing tomorrow when the entire lists are read, but Her Majesty will be able to get through most of the demands.”
“He’s right. I’ll save those for last. There’s no point in setting ourselves up for failure. Maybe if I can get them to talk over these easier terms.” I pointed at a few. “Especially something like land for the Shen, which Adora is outnumbered two to one on; I might be able to work them around to something on these last three points.”
Alba joined my side. “The Solarians wanted these peace talks to happen, and once Indranan concerns were dragged into it, so did our government. That has to count for something.”
“Indranan concerns.” I sipped at the whiskey, letting the slight sting ease some of the bitter taste from my mouth. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“The dead don’t care what we call them, Majesty,” Emmory replied. “And there will be a whole lot more of them if these two races go to war in our arms of the galaxy.”
“Why can’t they just go back to the other side of the galaxy? Have their little fight and whoever wins can come home. Or shit, even just go back to wherever they’re hiding their homeworld. It’s far enough away not to bother the rest of us.” I wondered, scanning the lists of demands. Erasing the three most daunting ones did make the task seem easier, and I started sorting through them, letting my mind wander as I imagined what the various reactions would be to each group’s requests.
Mia’s easy smile slipped into my thoughts and I cleared my throat, earning a strange look from Emmory.
“I wish I had a good answer for you about that, Majesty. Something tells me they’re content to have this fight right here.” Emmory shook his head.
“That’s what worries me,” I replied. “I don’t know. If you take away demanding that the Farians dismantle their government, the return of a soul, and wanting people killed; then the rest of this?” I gestured with my glass. “Isn’t so bad. It looks an awful lot like the demands Mother went back and forth with the Saxons over during the war.”
The door cracked open, Iza smiling in my direction as she escorted Heyai into the room.
“Majesty.”
“Ambassador. I thought your expertise would be helpful here.” I gestured at the wall. “We’re discussing the likelihood of getting these three groups to agree on anything on their lists. Each group has made some rather outrageous demands; we’ve removed them for the moment.” I put them back on the screen for Heyai to read and her eyes widened.
“A good choice to remove those for now, Majesty. It’s possible they’re just shock tactics to make their other requests more palatable?”
“They’re still not going to agree on half of it,” Alba said. “Or the Farians won’t, anyway. Everything about their attitudes today said they were ready for a fight.”
“They’ve come to the wrong place for that,” Emmory replied.
Zin rubbed at the back of his neck. “I’d be happy if they agreed to a third and we secured an uneasy cease-fire.”
I nodded. “The Solarians were pushing for the peace talks even before we got hit.” Something was dancing around the back of my brain, but I couldn’t get it to hold still long enough for me to recognize just what it was. I took another drink and hissed air out between my teeth. “Dhatt. The Farians wanted us involved. They got what they wanted—after a fashion. The Shen wanted us here, too. Either they all think I’m some kind of miracle worker, or they’re just stalling for time.”
“Why would they be stalling for time?” Alba frowned and sipped at her drink.
“I’m not discounting Your Majesty’s negotiating abilities, but this is a tall order for anyone and you don’t exactly have a lifetime of diplomatic experience. I’m more inclined to agree with Alba, but the only thing I can think they would be stalling for is to get their military in position for an attack.” Heyai picked up the thread, her face carved into a frown. “We don’t know anything about the Farians or the Shen in terms of fleet strength, so it’s almost impossible to guess.”
“But what if they are stalling?” I snapped my fingers. “When Aiz took me, he said, ‘By the time they are willing to beg for your help it will be too late.’ He was talking about our alliance with the Farians, but—”
“The Farians aren’t exactly begging for help. But what if something has shifted the situation?” Emmory pushed away from his spot at the door and stood on my other side. “Something like Fasé’s group gaining traction within Faria?”
“I don’t know, the amount of money they offered Indrana was a little bit like begging,” Zin said. “But I get your point, hridayam.”
My Ekam shifted uncomfortably. I kept my eyes on the screen and the smile off my mouth at Zin’s casual endearment.
“It makes no sense for the Shen to be the ones trying to stall. The Shen chose to engage the Farians here, after all this time. Why do that if they weren’t ready to go to war?” Heyai tapped a finger on her lower lip in thought.
“Why do it here at all?” I countered her question with one of my own. “By bringing the fight here they had to know humanity would get involved, which means they want us involved.”
“Otherwise they would have kept the fight in their own sector,” Alba murmured. Then my chamberlain sighed. “Majesty, I know I’ve said this before, but I don’t like it.”
“I am right there with you,” I replied.
Heyai tilted her head to the side. “When are you going to bring up the requirement about an immediate demilitarization of our sectors?”
“I was thinking first thing, just to get it out of the way.”
“I’d wait,” Heyai said. “A few days in, maybe? Let them work some of the issues out first and maybe relax some. By the third day or so the parties usually start to realize just how big a task they have in front of them and what’s at stake.”
I nodded and jotted down a note on my tablet.
“Majesty, do you mind if I steal Alba for a few minutes?” Heyai asked. “I had a few reports come across my desk today that may be of interest to you, but it would be more efficient to let her take a look rather than distract you from this.”
I waved a hand and nodded absently. “Steal away, just bring her back. I can’t survive without her.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.” Alba squeezed my forearm.
“Thank you for your help today,” I replied with a smile, and tapped my glass to hers.
“Always, Majesty.”
I let the conversations between the others fade away as I stared at the competing lists. The Farians wanted justice—or revenge, depending on your definition—for the deaths of their gods. They also wanted to maintain the rigid hold they had on life on Faria, but I knew enough about revolutions to know that they were trying to hold on to oxygen in a vacuum with their bare hands. Change was coming; it didn’t matter what they did.
