Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #5)(114)

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.

“I’m so tired,” I whispered into his ear.

“I know, love. I know. I’m sorry I got us into this.”

“You didn’t get us into this. We held hands and jumped off this cliff together.”

When we were talking and thinking about doing it a week ago, it hadn’t seemed so…so…so big. So difficult. Galaxy, it had only been a week. How…

“It’s like this bottomless hole and we keep throwing time, magic, and resources into it, and it just keeps getting bigger,” I told him.

“I just want it to be done. I want this shit to be over with. I want everyone to fuck off out of our inn. They all need to go somewhere else, and we need to go get Wilmos.”