Sweep of the Heart (Innkeeper Chronicles #5)(90)

Caldenia and he passed each other on the path, heading in opposite directions. She raised her eyebrows at him and approached me.

“He seems rather annoyed,” she said.

“You permanently damaged Surkar.”

“I did no such thing.”

“You broke his spirit.”

“Then it wasn’t that strong to begin with. Pain is the best teacher. Whether he learns his lesson is of no interest to me.”

“Shall we walk, Your Grace?”

She glanced in Kosandion’s direction, took a slightly deeper breath, and slowly started down the path. Her nephew continued to study the trees. Caldenia drew even with Kosandion, and as she passed him, he turned and started walking, keeping her pace. They strolled down the beautiful path without saying a word. I followed a few steps behind.

Birds sang in the branches. A fish splashed in the pond.

Gertrude Hunt let me know that Resven and two members of his staff left the inn via the portal. Resven had been glued to Kosandion since they’d arrived. This was the first time he’d left the inn. Tony was by the portal, probably waiting for the chancellor’s return.

“Have you heard of Sees Lathen, Dina?” Kosandion asked.

It was amusing how nobody expected me to do my homework. “Many thousands of years ago it was a galactic Empire. It survived for generations, ruled by a single family, but eventually it fractured in two. One half gave rise to the Seven Star Dominion and the other to the Six Star Supremacy.”

“You are well informed,” Kosandion said. “It was a difference of ideology. The Dominion favors a constitutional monarchy with an elected government that shapes its laws and a royal head of state who presides over the executive branch. While the Supremacy favors…”

He let it drift.

“Tyranny,” Caldenia said dryly. “A civilized version of an autocratic government where the ruler’s power is absolute in theory and constrained by political considerations in practice.”

“How does that work with the collective consciousness?” I asked.

“Very well, actually,” Caldenia said. “The ugly truth about democracy is that it breeds anxiety. The responsibility for the government is shifted onto the body of the citizenry, who often lack the awareness and knowledge necessary to make informed decisions. They are tasked with electing their officials, they stress over it, they fall into despair when their side loses and act like their lives are over, and then when the government they elected inevitably does something they don’t want, they feel betrayed. There is no constancy in leadership, the policies vary wildly from one administration to the next, and one never knows where the nation shall be in ten years’ time. It is chaos.”

Nice try. “Democracy protects the rights of an individual. Tyranny protects only the select few and not very well.”

“Tyranny provides stability and rules. Follow the rules, and you will be safe,” she said.

“At the cost of personal freedoms,” I said.

“You would be surprised how many beings will gladly trade their freedom for safety.”

“Not me,” I told her.

This wasn’t the first time Caldenia and I had clashed over politics. I had seen a lot of the galaxy, and I’d witnessed the kind of horrors a tyrannical government brought. I would take chaos and freedom over stable shackles any day. Yes, it was messy and inefficient at times, but I could vote, I could run for office, I could criticize our government without fear of persecution, and that was priceless.

Caldenia shrugged. “As paradoxical as it is, authoritarian displays tend to stabilize the public. The citizens find a strong, frightening leader reassuring. The tyrant is a monster, but it is their monster, and they take pride in their power.”

“To be fair, the Supremacy practices a limited tyranny. The Parliament of the Supremacy is also an elected body,” Kosandion told me. “Sometimes they murder incompetent tyrants.”

Caldenia shrugged. “Well, one has to throw the rabble a bone, Dina.”

This was the strangest conversation. They were both talking to me without acknowledging the other person existed.

Resven returned and brought two people with him. They weren’t the same as the two who left. It must’ve been a team swap. We had given Resven, Miralitt, and Orata a lot of autonomy when it came to their own people, because they changed their staff depending on the situation, and none of us had time to approve every personnel member they brought over. We’d asked them to keep their personal team at three members or less.

“The ruling families of the Dominion and the Supremacy grew apart over the many centuries,” Kosandion said, “Yet each followed a similar method of selecting their rulers. At first, it was calculated marriages and natural birth, then a ruler with multiple partners and many children in hopes that one would prove suitable to govern, and finally genetic modification. A single heir bioengineered to lead the state and its people.”

Of which both people in front of me were prime examples.

“A century and a half ago, there was a biological attack on the Dominion’s ruling family,” Kosandion said.

Caldenia gave him a sharp look.

“The perpetrators were found and eliminated, but the damage had been done. A vicious hereditary disease ravaged the bloodline, threatening to permanently end generations of careful genetic selection. It wiped out three quarters of the family. For thirty years the ruling family struggled to carve it out of their genetic code, but it came back again and again. It killed the children and destroyed hundreds of embryos in the natural and artificial wombs.”