Peacemaker

It was almost his birthday, he was almost nine, he should have had two more days at Tirnamardi, riding mecheiti and doing whatever he liked; and that had lasted about one whole day. He didn’t know exactly what danger was out beyond those window shades—except that Kadagidi clan was definitely upset, except that Banichi was hurt and some of Great-grandmother’s young men were, and except that they had the Kadagidi lord a prisoner in the next car, along with two Dojisigi Assassins, who had come to kill Great-uncle and had apparently ended up turning on the Kadagidi lord instead.

It was all about the Shadow Guild, which was scary bad news. He had so much rather it was just two lords fighting.

Mani had said everything was going very well—and he almost believed that, considering that they had apparently won, but mani had been very grim when she said it. And she had not wanted to wait for the safer, armored Red Train to travel out from the Bujavid—because speed was apparently more important than security. Or speed was security. The adults had not told him which. He almost had the feeling it was speed his great-grandmother wanted right now, not because she was ru

He, meanwhile, was in charge of his birthday guests, while the grown-ups did their grown-up business and laid plans and kept secrets. He had to explain the situation to his associates from the space station, and he—and his bodyguard—had to be very sure they didn’t sneak a look out past the window shades. Going out to Tirnamardi they had been more relaxed and they had done a lot of looking from the bus—but on the Red Train, they had had no windows to look out once they were aboard: its walls had only fake windows. In this car, there were just woven fabric shades between them and outside, and the temptation even for him was extreme. His guests were missing a chance to look at trees and the whole world that they had come down to see.

But along the way, among those trees, there could very well be Assassins waiting to shoot at them, because, as his bodyguard had told him, trains ran on tracks, and anybody could tell the route they were going to take.

Anybody could guess, too, that the Shadow Guild was going to be very upset about what had happened to some of their people this morning.

Had they left anybody behind who would be chasing them? His bodyguard said it was possible, but the senior Guild was not telling them that.

Officially, too, everybody acted as if he was still going to have his birthday party in the Bujavid, the way they had always pla

Very mad.

He’d understood last year, when they’d arrived back on the world on his birthday and they had to sneak across country . . . he hadn’t been happy about it, but that was the way it had had to be.

So here they were sneaking across country this year, too. He had gotten his guests down from the space station. But their parents might not ever let them come back again, the way things were going. They might not want to come back, the way things were going.

Now his grandfather was dead, just north of Great-uncle’s estate . . . and nobody knew why.

He was sure that if anything had happened to his parents in Shejidan, his great-grandmother and everybody else would be a great deal more upset than they were, so everything was probably all right in the Bujavid—assuming the Bujavid was really where they were going, and it was not another trick for their enemies.

And if Great-grandmother was talking about di

All he and his guests had seen of the trouble so far was smoke on the horizon, and flakes of ash wafting down on the driveway at Tirnamardi. Well, that, and riders going back and forth in the night. And all of the goings-on with the Dojisigi Assassins.

It did seem odd to him that Great-uncle was not that mad at the two Dojisigi who had tried to kill him. Dojisigi clan had made trouble for everybody in the north for a hundred years at least, so they had been a problem for a long time, and the Atageini and the Dojisigi had never had any good dealings between them that he knew of.

But then so had the Dojisigi clan’s neighbors, the Taisigi, been a problem just as long, and now Lord Machigi of the Taisigi was Great-grandmother’s official ally.

And he did know that Dojisigi clan had had the Shadow Guild ru

That was politics. One could just not say a thing would never happen or that somebody would be a problem forever. He had watched all sorts of really strange changes happen, almost all of them in his eighth year.

So one had to be ready for any sort of thing to change.

The hard part was, he was going to have to explain to his guests the politics of what was going on, without scaring them or mentioning things that could be his great-grandmother’s secrets. He was sure the fighting over on Kadagidi land was not going to be secret from the ship-folk, since Jase-aiji had been right in the middle of it. So the ship-aijiin were going to know a lot more about that situation than he could tell to anybody, since he had not been there.

And secondly—his three guests were not stupid, and they had seen most everything that had gone on over on Great-uncle’s estate, including the ashes falling on the driveway, and the smoke beyond the hedges and the bullet holes in the bus that had taken them to meet the train.

“So are we going to meet your parents when we get there?” Artur asked him.

Gene, Irene, and red-headed Artur—his three associates from the starship where he and Great-grandmother had lived for two years . . . well . . . his three associates whose home was now on the space station.

His three associates who were full of questions and who did not have enough Ragi words even to ask him what was going on.

They were not used to the way atevi lived, or what it meant to be Tabini-aiji’s son.

But they did understand politics and double-crosses. He knew that. Their own politics was trying to send all of them that had come back on the starship out to a new station over a dead planet, far away from the Earth, for a lot of really underhanded reasons, like people wanting political power and people not trusting one each other. That was one thing.

And his guests by no means wanted that to happen: they were scared to be shipped out to a lonely place where they could never come back again. So they had real reason to ignore anything bad about their visit and not mess things up.

And, he thought, they wanted to tie themselves to him as solidly as they could, not in a bad way, so far as he was concerned, even if it could be because they were afraid of being sent away to that other world. If they wanted favors, if they wanted things, that was all right. Giving them whatever they needed hardly hurt him. From his side—they were associates. His associates. He was who he was because he had important associates, and maybe three young people from the space station were not as important as, say, nand’ Bren or Lord Geigi, but he wanted as many good co