Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #5)(62)

Sean approached. I took his hand. He squeezed my fingers.

“You are awesome,” I whispered.

“No, just fast.”

The observers walked past me toward their quarters. Karat made big eyes at me. Dagorkun was grinning. Cookie was next.

I pulled the floor under Cookie’s feet toward us. To his credit, he didn’t jump in surprise. The floor brought him to us and stopped.

“A word?” I asked.

“Of course.” Cookie nodded.

“We need some information,” Sean said.

Cookie fluffed his tail and squinted his eyes. I had seen that exact expression on Nuan Cee’s face. It meant trouble.

“Tell me more,” Cookie purred.





It was two hours until midnight. I sat on the terrace of the Ocean Dining Room savoring a cup of oolong tea and gently rocking in a rocking chair I had stolen from our patio. Sean sat in the other chair, drinking decaffeinated coffee. It was late and he didn’t want to be wired. Beast napped by the rail, while Gorvar had somehow climbed on top of the other table and lay there, his tongue out. He liked being high up.

The deep amber ocean of Kolinda shimmered with bioluminescent sparks, as if the setting sun had bled its glowing lifeblood into the waters and now it flickered in the depths. The air was warm and smelled of salt and sea.

To our left and slightly behind, the interior of the Ocean Dining Hall glowed with honey-colored light of its chandeliers like a giant garden lantern. It was quiet and mostly empty. The floor to ceiling wall of glass that separated it from the terrace was almost invisible.

Just inside the Ocean Dining Hall, Orro slumped in a big chair at a round table, an exhausted heap of dark quills. The taller of his assistants had curled up on the floor, the other crawled into a chair and passed out. Droplet had pushed two chairs together, climbed onto them, and wrapped her fluffy tail like a blanket around herself. None of them noticed me quietly reshaping the chairs and the floor under them into comfortable loungers so they could stretch out. The food on their table remained mostly untouched.

It had been a long day. All remaining delegations decided to discuss Kyporo’s expulsion, and all of them wanted to do it over dinner in their individual quarters at different times. The kitchen staff was exhausted.

I was exhausted too. After we dealt with Odikas and the Kyporo delegation, Kosandion went on a date with the Donkamin candidate. The candidate had requested a “plain room with nothing in it,” which was exactly what I provided. Kosandion and the Donkamin stood for an hour inside the empty room, discussing scientific advancement. It was intellectually boring and visually disturbing.

On the way back, the Donkamin candidate nearly collapsed in the hallway. I caught him before he fell to the floor. Apparently, Donkamins didn’t do well when they were separated from their group, and they also found us grotesque and incredibly disgusting. Once I delivered the candidate to his rooms, they asked me for a purifying pool so they could wash my molecules off the candidate’s body. The purifying liquid was complicated and took forever to make.

The ocean shimmered. Amber lights in front of us, warm yellow glow behind. Sean and I sat in the narrow strip of shadow and watched the waters under an endless sky, studded with alien stars and so deep that looking at it for too long filled you with vague unease.

My earpiece chirped steadily, delivering a successive assortment of the Dominion’s news broadcasts into my ear. The fall of Tair Odikas was the talk of the nine star systems.

Olasard padded out of the dining hall on his fluffy paws and hopped into my lap. I put my tea on the small side table between my and Sean’s chair and stroked the cat’s back.

According to the newscasts, the saga of Tair Odikas stretched back many years, long before Kosandion was born. Four centuries ago, Kyporo faced a crisis. The planet’s population had outpaced its natural resources while its space technology was in its infancy. Kyporo joined the Dominion to save itself.

Before the unification, Kyporo had a rigid, striated society with sharply defined social castes, while the Dominion adhered to the belief that every citizen had the same rights. The integration of Kyporo was slow, difficult, and took centuries. Officially the castes had been abolished, but the citizens of Kyporo had good memories.

Odikas came from a long line of patricians, the highest caste of Kyporo. His great-grandfather was the Prime Councilor, revered and venerated, and on the rare occasions he had condescended to leave the hallowed halls of the Grand Council and stepped into the street, among the commoners, people of lesser castes knelt and touched their foreheads to the ground.

No matter how much education and cultural exposure they had, some people craved to be bowed to.

Odikas followed in the footsteps of his ancestors, climbing to the post of the highest elected official, resisting change, and doing his best to block the Dominion’s attempts to integrate the planet. His highest aspiration in life was to resurrect the old customs. He wanted to step outside his palace and see an ocean of bent backs with not a single person daring to meet his gaze. He would’ve rebelled if he could, but the Dominion managed Kyporo wisely, leaving them with little military autonomy, and the public sentiment among the younger generations wasn’t on Odikas’ side. Once the genie of freedom came out of the bottle, it was hard to put it back in.

For the forty years he was in office, Odikas flirted with separatism, made grand pronouncements about national identity and independence, and hated Kosandion’s father, who had removed the last vestiges of the old social system. When Caldenia murdered her brother, the Dominion was already facing an external threat from an alien species and domestic unrest on several fronts. His death struck the seven star systems like a meteor, causing numerous fractures. Odikas had taken full advantage of that. Kyporo was the last planet to accept Kosandion as the Sovereign, and Odikas and his faction continued to be a massive pain in the ass through his reign. Until today.