The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(46)

“You could have still brought him around.”

“If you really believed that, Mom, then you shouldn’t have had him killed.”

The countess shrugged. “He hurt you. I was angry. And anyway you’re right. The window for you with him was closing, and we couldn’t risk him marrying someone else.”

Nadashe gaped at her mother. “You were just saying I could have brought him around!”

“I was agreeing with you,” the countess said. “I thought you’d be happy about it.”

Nadashe closed her eyes. “God, you are so exhausting, Mother. Please pick another topic.”

“Marriage.”

“That’s the same topic.”

“Same topic, different players.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Jasin Wu.”

“What about him?”

“You should consider marrying him.”

“He’s already married.”

“This is a small detail. Also he has no children, which is useful.”

“Useful for what?”

“We’re going to make him emperox.”

Nadashe sat up for this. “He’s not in the line of succession.”

“He’s a Wu. When Grayland’s gone, whatever ‘line of succession’ there was will be tossed to the wayside. What’s left after that is negotiation.”

“There will be other Wus who want to be emperox.”

“There’s only one serious competitor, Deran Wu. And we’ve already taken care of that.”

“How?”

“Deran supports Jasin’s bid to be emperox and gets his supporters to fall in line. In return, when Jasin is emperox, he gives Deran sole control of the House of Wu. No more of this ‘board of directors’ nonsense that keeps the house paralyzed.”

“And the other cousins are just going to fall in line for this.”

“By the time it’s done they won’t be in a position to argue. You’ll be meeting both Jasin and Deran soon enough. You can judge how serious they are about the plan.”

“And Jasin will have me as consort.”

“Yes, he’s already agreed to that.”

“He tried to have me murdered in prison.”

“He didn’t know you as a person yet.”

“Also, there’s the minor detail that I’m supposed to be dead.”

“We’ll fix that. We’re already fixing it. You were already fixing it. I know how you were working on shifting the blame for everything to Amit. Deran Wu laid it out for me. I told him to keep doing it.”

Nadashe was genuinely shocked. “You just said Amit was your favorite.”

“He is. Always will be. But he’s also dead, and we need you alive and relatively unimplicated. Jasin is offering you a throne.”

“In return for what?”

“Obviously, for us helping to unseat Grayland.”

“‘Unseat’ is such an ambiguous verb, Mother.”

“We don’t have to kill her,” the countess said. “Isolating and exiling her would work just as well.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

“She is already doing it herself with this visions nonsense. She’s alienating the church and she’s about to alienate the parliament. Some of the noble houses are already turning against her. It’s just a matter of time. That and we remove some of her key allies. Starting with Kiva Lagos, who is just causing trouble for us anyway.”

“How do you plan to remove her?”

“Let me worry about that, Nadashe.”

“Grayland’s not actually that close to Lagos,” Nadashe said. “Getting rid of her benefits us more than it wounds her.”

“I have something else to wound her.”

“What?”

The countess was silent for a moment. “Did you know that Grayland was going to make you a hostage?”

“How was she going to do that?”

“She told me was going to commute your death sentences and have you serve your time on Xi’an. Somewhere you would always be within reach. It was her way of letting me know that if I ever got out of line, your life was forfeit.”

This got a wry smile from Nadashe. “She doesn’t know you very well. Or our family.”

“That’s not the point,” the countess said. “The point was that she thought she could get to me through someone she thought I loved. Control me with someone she thought I loved.”

Nadashe noted the construction of her mother’s sentences but didn’t say anything about it. “So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to make Grayland feel what she wanted me to feel. I’m going to make it known that I can touch the people she cares about the most.”

“And who does she care about?” Nadashe asked. “Enough to make an example out of?”





Chapter

12

Marce Claremont watched as the Oliveer Bransid turned on its floodlights and illuminated the outer hull of the structure it floated next to.

“You wanted to see Dalasysla,” Captain Kinta Laure said to him. She pointed toward the bridge viewscreen. “There it is.”