Pretender

All eyes turned to the paidhi for the ultimate decision in this political arena. And the best advice seemed to come from the eight-year-old.

At least moving Cajeiri downstairs while his staff moved his baggage back to Ilisidi’s suite would put him under Cenedi’s protection, not to mention Ilisidi’s, leaving no trace of the boy’s evening sojourn here. Ilisidi in particular was, it always had to be reckoned, an easterner, from that most tenuously attached half of the aishidi’tat, and the eastern half of the continent was a force that had to be reckoned with cautiously—very cautiously. In any general upheaval, Ilisidi stood a real chance of being among the few left standing, if her staff could move quickly enough.

“Never mind your coat, young sir. Take mine. Go.”

“But—”

“I shall manage, young sir.” He shed it, and with his own hands held it out for the boy.

The purple coat was a fair fit, even if Cajeiri was growing broader in the shoulders. Bren took Cajeiri’s plain day-wear in its place, a fine coat, nonetheless, a pale green brocade that just happened to be in the Atageini shade, while the purple and red was very well in color key with the Ragi colors: It was dark, it was dramatic, and if the seams held up, it lent a handsome boy an extremely princely look in a time of crisis and threat.

He straightened Cajeiri’s collar himself, the servant’s role, and looked the boy squarely in the eyes as he did so. “Be ca

“One understands, nand’ paidhi.” Cajeiri was entirely sober and attentive, young eyes wide and, for the first time, truly frightened.

“If you have to run outdoors,” Jago said, “remember there will be other Guild with night-scopes. They can see you in the dark.”

“If you must escape, Bren-ji,” Banichi said, “escape outside. Never mind the baggage. We will stay by you and the young gentleman.”

If things went wrong down there, getting the heir away became a goal worth any risk, any sacrifice, not just for the continuity of Ragi rule on the continent, but for the stability of government that had to deal with the kyo when they arrived— everything hung on either Tabini or his son surviving. “You have no other job, if things go badly, young sir, except to use your head and to get yourself to safety. That is how you help your staff, by helping them help you.

Go. Quickly now.”

The boy cast a look at his own young staff and headed for the door.

And stopped, with a scared look back.

“Defenses are down now,” Tano said. “Go.”

A quick study. Bren never doubted that. It was why he placed his hopes in the boy.

And if the boy came ru

“The Guild will have made more than one approach to the house,”

Banichi said. “There will be the delegation, and observers that we will not see, Jago is quite right. They will likely have been here before the delegation. And possibly within the house.”

“As simply so as contacting an amenable Guild agent on a given staff,” Jago added, leading one to wonder, not for the first time during the years he had dealt with these particular Guild members, if there were agents who worked directly for the Guild planted in key houses throughout the aishidi’tat.

He didn’t ask. He had become privy to enough Guild secrets as it was, information that didn’t make him confident of their situation at the moment. If, as Banichi hinted, the Guild had just become a player in this game, if the old Guildmaster had gone down, and if rules were all suspended, then what the Guild could do was extensive, and extreme, and bloody.

And not on their side. Not even neutral any longer. They could be walking down there to hear a Filing against Tabini. And if that was the case, they had to listen and let these people walk out safely.

Deep breath. He straightened his own queue, which had gotten crushed under his collar. He was, he decided, as dressed as he could get. “Time for us to go,” he said, and cast a look at Jago, at Banichi, then at Tano and Algini. “The boy,” he said, “nadiin, should anything happen that seems to require it, any one of you take him somewhere, and the rest of us do not ask to know where that would be. We will find one another.”

“Yes,” Tano said, agreeing to back up Algini, that partnership working together, and that was that, as Bren headed out the door with Banichi and Jago.

Out into an otherwise quiet hallway. The boy had gone downstairs, and at least there was no uproar from below. Bren walked calmly, quietly toward the stairs, with Banichi and Jago, one on each side of him—walked toward what he had asked for, in one sense, with his letter to the Guild—but he very much doubted now that it was what had brought this mission to Tirnamardi.

He took his cue from Banichi and Jago and kept his brain entirely in present tense, in the moment, his eyes sca

Was he scared at that moment? Oh, not half.

Down the steps next to the foyer, where the workmen who had been hammering away at the doors stood idle amid lumber and their scaffolding, looking confused and doubtful as to whether they ought to take up their work again.

“Have you seen strangers from the Guild, nadiin?” Banichi asked them.

Several hands pointed silently and solemnly toward the drawing room. Bodyguards were no longer in evidence at the door. They had all drawn into the room, it seemed, indicating a prudent move to protect the lords who held their man’chi not from some external threat, this time, but from the high officers of the Guild itself, and some shift in policy that immediately concerned them.

“Come in with me,” Bren said, “nadiin-ji.”

He started to touch the door, hesitated, just that heartbeat of doubt, but Banichi and Jago, who were wired and doubtless reading those devices and signals they had not used in two years, simultaneously put out hands and opened both the double doors.

It was a dramatic, two-door entrance, to be sure. Every eye turned. The weapon hand of every bodyguard in the room moved.

And stayed and relaxed, as they recognized him.

Cajeiri had gotten a seat next to his mother. New arrivals stood in the middle of the half arc of chairs, men and women in Guild black and silver, a grim, tall old man who did not look at him, and his two bodyguards, whose gold eyes locked on the intrusion for one paralytic moment. Smooth as a well-oiled machine and deadly: The older Guild, rarely seen, was like that.

“Nandi,” Bren said, as the old man slowly swung a look toward him and as one of the old man’s guard looked, machinelike, toward the assembled lords. That was the address appropriate for a newly arrived Guild official, and Bren gave a careful, measured bow to the old man.

“Paidhi-aiji,” Tabini said. “Come sit.”

That shocked him. Scared him, in fact. Tabini made a point, made a defiant statement in that invitation, in fact, in a morass of political quicksand, and with his guard behind him and these Guild strangers in front. Bren felt his heart skip, covered his shock as smoothly as he could, and went to sit where Tabini pointed, as servants managed to insert a chair between Tabini and the dowager.