Fledgling(96)

“Go on with the Council of Judgment.”

If he had been anyone other than Preston, I would have walked away without bothering to comment. But Preston had become important to me. It wasn’t only that I liked him. He was Daniel’s elderfather. And he favored a mating between his sons and me. “Why?” I demanded. “Why should I wait?”

“Think about why this was done, Shori. Think. You were very much in control of yourself last night. If your memory were intact, you wouldn’t have been, you couldn’t have been so calm as you sat in the same room with the people who probably had your families killed. I don’t think you were expected to be calm. I think the Silks and perhaps the Dahlmans expected you not only to look unusual with your dark skin, but to be out of your mind with pain, grief, and anger, to be a pitiable, dangerous, crazed thing. We Ina don’t handle loss as well as most humans do. It’s a much rarer thing with us, and when it happens, the grief is … almost unbearable.”

I looked away from him. “I know what the grief is like!”

“Of course you do. You stand there hugging yourself as though you were trying to hold yourself together. They did this to you, Shori. They want you this way!”

I found myself leaning against the wall, wanting to slide down it, wanting to dissolve to the floor. “What can I do?” I said. “How can Katharine be punished when the Silks are the only ones everyone is paying attention to?”

“The facts are what the Council is supposed to pay attention to.”

“But Katharine Dahlman is a member of the Council.”

“Challenge her tonight. Tell the Council what has happened just as you told me. Facts only. Let them draw their own conclusions. Let them question you. Then ask that Katharine be removed from the Council.”

“And they’ll do it? All I have to do is ask, and they’ll do it?”

“Yes. They’ll question her. Then they’ll do it because they’ll know you’re telling the truth, and they’ll decide her guilt or innocence as well as her punishment—if there is to be punishment—tomorrow night, when they decide what to do about the Silks. But once she leaves the Council, someone else will have to go, too. Chances are it will be Vlad.”

If there was to be punishment? If? If they didn’t punish her, I would. I would kill her. I would find a way to do it, a way that would not leave my symbionts unprotected. Perhaps I could find a human criminal—a murderer—and have him kill her and then die himself before he could be made to say who had sent him. Katharine’s people would know as I knew, but if she could get away with it, so could I. I had to do something. What I wanted to do was tear her apart with my teeth and hands. Maybe it would come to that.

Then my mind registered the other thing that Preston had said. Vladimir Leontyev, my advocate, one of my mothers’ fathers, off the Council. “Why?” I demanded.

“Numerical balance. All Councils of Judgment must have an odd number of members. If Katharine were to leave the Council because of an injury or an emergency at home, her sister Sophia would take her place. Under the circumstances, I don’t think you or your advocate would find Sophia any more acceptable than Katharine.”

“I agree,” I said. Who knew whether this was something both sisters had agreed to do or something Katharine had thought of on her own.

“Also,” Preston said, “it will strike people as reasonable that both you and the Silks lose your advocates.”

“It’s as though they’re playing a game. After all, I’m not trying to get at her because she’s the Silks’ advocate.”

“It’s not a game, Shori. The Council will know why Katharine must go. But it will be best for you if you do this according to custom.” He frowned, looked at me, then looked away. “You, more than anyone, must show that you can follow our ways. You must not give the people who have decided to be your enemies any advantage. You must seem more Ina that they.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“You know enough. When you don’t know, ask.”

“Who shall I ask? Who will be my advocate now?”

He thought for a moment. “Joan Braithwaite?”

I had to think about that, too. “If Margaret were the Council member, I’d say yes, but Joan … Just how friendly is she with the Silks?”

“Because of the way she spoke to you last night?”

“That and … when she finished with me, she went over to talk with the Silks.”

“You should have listened to what she said to them, to Milo in particular.”

I waited.

“She told him to give his place to one of his sons or she would, before the Council, question his mental stability.”

“As he questioned mine.”

“Yes. Stupid of him. But as I’ve told you, you were not what the Silks expected you to be. You should have been, by all reckoning, only a husk of a person, mad with grief and rage or simply mad.” He paused. “I wonder if that’s part of why your memory is gone, not just because you suffered blows to the head, but because of the emotional blow of the death of all your symbionts, your sisters, and your mothers—everyone. You must have seen it happen. Maybe that’s what destroyed the person you were.”

I thought about that. I tried to let his words touch off some feeling, some grief or pain, some memory. But those people were strangers. Right now, there was only Theodora and the pain of just thinking her name. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll never know.”