Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #5)(115)

I groaned and bumped my forehead against his shoulder. “And we don’t even know what we’ll find on the other side of the Karron portal.”

We stood together for a few minutes. Sean stroked my hair.

“If they void the selection, they won’t have another right away,” I said. “It might take years to set one up again.”

“Maybe he’ll do us all a favor and marry the fish.”

“I can’t,” Oond’s mechanical voice said behind us.

We turned. He had stopped swimming and was hovering near the transparent wall.

“I can’t do it. It’s too dangerous. I’m not brave enough. I cannot go to the Dominion. I cannot stay there. I cannot be the spouse. Someone will kill me. Someone will kill my offspring. It will all end in tragedy and death. So much death.”

“Well, there goes that idea,” Sean said under his breath.

“I am so sorry. I am a failure. I have failed my people. I have come here for the minor ask. The survival of my people depends on it. If I withdraw, we leave with nothing. But I have no courage. I have no strength. I am miserable.”

A slightly opaque cloud of water spread from him.

I hid a sigh. “I will speak to the Sovereign on your behalf.”

Oond’s fins fluttered weakly. “You will?”

“I will. You are our guest. Your wellbeing is important to us. I’m sure some solution can be found. Rest and try not to worry.”

I took Sean’s hand for moral support, before I lost it and peed myself too, and the two of us went back upstairs.





“I don’t understand.” Miralitt frowned at me. “The oombole does not want to be the spouse? Does he think we can’t protect him?”

I sighed. Around me Kosandion’s private balcony was a flurry of activity. Right after the Game Day assassination attempt, Kosandion had requested a private portal. Considering that a civil war in the Dominion was looming, refusing seemed unreasonable. The big portal was shut down most of the time anyway, so we completely closed it off, and opened a smaller one right on the balcony. It could only transport one person at time.

As soon as the portal was opened, Miralitt’s guards came through and positioned themselves all around the balcony, ready to respond to any threats. Normally I might have taken that as an insult, but if I balked, Miralitt would’ve had an aneurism, and we needed a favor from her. This whole affair was a lesson in learning to compromise.

With the opening of the portal, the balcony transformed into the Sovereign’s remote office. On one side, Orata sat surrounded by translucent screens, scanning their contents and issuing brisk commands to a small pack of her staffers. On the other side, His Holiness was in an identical position, with the screens and a throng of aides. He was pointing to the screens and delivering instructions in short confident bursts like a general in the middle of a battle. Kosandion sat at his table, closest to the rail and the water, reading and signing things, while Resven hovered nearby with a small army of staffers. Periodically he would single one out, and then the staffer would take off at top speed and vanish into the portal.

Tension vibrated in the air. The balcony sparked with it, as if the molecules that made it had somehow acquired a charge.

“A spouse hasn’t been murdered for the last 70 years,” Miralitt said. “It won’t happen on my watch. I guarantee it with my life.”

“It’s not personal. It has to do with their evolutionary origin,” I said. “Sapience evolves in many ways across a myriad of life forms, but the fastest and the most common category of sapient beings are either predatory omnivores or omnivorous predators that come from the middle of the food chain. For intelligence and problem-solving skills to develop, it helps if you are both a hunter and the hunted. Earth’s humans are predatory omnivores. The vampires of the Holy Anocracy are omnivorous predators. The omnivorous quality is important because organized hunting, animal husbandry, and crop cultivation are essential progress milestones.”

“The oomboles are also predatory omnivores,” Miralitt said.

“Technically,” Sean said.

“Their diet consists of plants and several species of crustaceans, all of which have evolved to be sedentary,” I explained. “Their protective shells are attached to the ocean floor. They don’t move.”

“Why is that important?” Miralitt asked.

“Because they don’t hunt,” Sean said. “They are grazers. They don’t chase and eat other fish, so they do not understand the predatory mindset. They only fear it.”

I nodded. “They are closer to the bottom of the food chain than the middle, and they have a pathological fear of being eaten.”

“What are you trying to say?” Miralitt asked.

“They are cowards,” Sean said. “It’s an evolutionary adaptation, and it will be almost impossible to overcome. Right now, Oond sees everything that isn’t an oombole as a predator.”

“This is consistent with their ask,” Resven said.

I hadn’t realized he was listening. “What are they asking?”

“Their planet is a single shallow ocean with occasional deep trenches,” Resven said. “They’ve killed off the predators in the shallows. In the absence of predators, their population and that of other prey fish has exploded to unsustainable levels. Killing other fish who are not a direct threat to them is against their philosophical doctrines, so they are asking the Dominion to save them from themselves.”