DIPLOMATIC CRISIS

The promised refreshment was carried through The Lady’s door by her tousled page, who had evidently finished his ‘talk’ with Father Trout. On the table between us, he carefully set a silver tray on which lay half a dozen small confections and two delicate porcelain cups of something that looked like tea and smelled of grapes and flowers. My stomach suddenly awakened. With breakfast who knew how long behind me, it seemed a rather meager snack, actually—not that I’d have dared to say so—until I put one of those insubstantial-looking puffs into my mouth. I won’t bother trying to describe the taste. Why wallow in the memory of pleasures I will likely never know again? But both the food and drink were more delicious and strangely filling than I’d have imagined possible. I was well beyond mere satisfaction when a light knock came at The Lady’s door.

“Come in, Chancellor,” she said, even before her page had time to open it. “I’ve saved a bite of our pastry for you.”

“Thank you, Lady,” Rain said, bowing slightly as he entered. “I am already well refreshed, however.” He looked it too, as he came to sit between us in fresh clothes, his hair tied smoothly back, and without any hint of the extreme exhaustion I’d last seen him suffering. Clearly I had ‘slept’ for several hours, at least.

“Then there’s an extra one for Matthew,” said The Lady, extending a finger to move her last pastry across the otherwise empty tray in my direction.

I looked questioningly at Rain, reluctant to snatch such a treat from him after all he’d done for me, but he just shook his head.

“Go ahead, No Name. I’ve no stomach for it at the moment.”

My conscience satisfied, I wasted no time in wolfing it down.

“So, Chancellor,” The Lady said. “Quite a knot to untangle.”

“Yes.” Rain looked down unhappily, then up again, straight into her eyes. “My Lady, I made numerous mistakes today, and failed you badly. I should have checked the tunnels before taking the boy, much less your daughter, into them. And,” his gaze faltered, “when I encountered the carrdoheen’s probe…I should have retreated.” He looked down again, seeming suddenly stricken. “We were nearly here. … There was no way to pass him undetected. I dared not move slowly enough to do so on the tracks, given the risk of…an oncoming train.” These last words were spoken almost too quietly to hear, and I wondered, in sudden astonishment, if he were about to cry. “I meant no loss of life,” he said. “I thought they’d have sufficient time to recover. … Nonetheless, a life is lost.” Visibly leashing his apparent grief, he raised his eyes—all stoicism once more. “I submit my immediate resignation, and await whatever judgment you deem just.”

I stared at him, that last pastry settling much less comfortably than expected.

“Twenty-twenty hindsight, as our guest might say,” The Lady replied.

I nodded in earnest agreement, feeling like something of an expert on hindsight now.

“I reject your resignation,” she continued, “and find you guilty of nothing but the same future-blindness that I, myself, suffer all too regularly.” I expected him to look relieved, but his bleak expression didn’t change. “And if you think I’d let you make a mess like this, and walk away, leaving it for some untried novice to resolve, then I am offended at your estimate of my foresight.” Oddly, this did elicit the ghost of a smile from him, however grim. “Any misjudgments you made today are dwarfed by those of our opponent. I have already sent Anselm formal protests of the highest order, and demanded explanation. He may scream all he wishes about the death of his instrument. Had he cared so greatly for the safety of his own, he might have considered their risk before sending them against me unprovoked. The Lady he accuses me of being would already have had him stripped and banished for the recent assault on my daughter, much less this morning’s adventure.”

This was an altogether different woman from the one I’d just had lunch with. For the first time in my life, I understood what ‘queen’ really meant, and felt a sudden pang of sympathy for Piper. What must it be like, I wondered, feeling expected to follow such an act?

There was yet another knock, answered by the page, and, as if summoned by my thought, Piper entered in a simple blue skirt and paler blue sweater, looking more like a girl than I’d imagined she could. Her face was a mask of abject remorse as she came to kneel, eyes downcast, beside her mother’s chair.

“I am informed that my actions have resulted in a death,” she said. “I beg you, Mother, to hold Rain free of any—”

“Get up,” The Lady interjected, quietly but sternly.

Piper stood, still looking miserably at the ground.

“Sit down,” her mother said more gently, pointing to the remaining empty chair.

Piper did so, still looking no one in the eye.

“As I have just been telling my chancellor,” said The Lady, “I hold no one in this room responsible for that deeply regrettable loss. The burden lies with Anselm and his henchmen, as I am confident any arbiter they consult will agree. Nor have we any time or energy to spare right now for the kind of cathartic theater everyone seems intent upon. I am not interested in parsing mistakes. I am interested in solutions to the problems they’ve left us with.” She turned back to Rain. “The heart of our dilemma, it seems to me, sits there.” To my dismay, she pointed at me.

“None of this is his fault!” said Piper. “I’m the one who—”

“I do not blame him,” her mother interjected again. “If anything, his presence here is my fault, as we all know. I merely acknowledge what we all must recognize by now: that while the death today may not fairly be laid at my door, if it were perceived to have been inflicted in defense of an Andinol boy, difficult questions about his origin would be dwarfed by those about our true allegiance in general. Our first order of business here must be deciding how best to contain the entire problem presented by our honored guest. Does that clarify my intent?”

Piper nodded sheepishly, and I felt even worse for her than before.

The Lady turned back to me. “No one in my household intends you harm, Matthew, or holds you to blame for anything that’s happened. Let me make that absolutely clear. But both your safety and ours depend on finding some fair and effective way to make you vanish now, completely: past, present, and future.”

“You can do that…without harming me?” I asked.

“Ever been to Europe, Matt?” Rain asked. “It’s very nice. Or is there some other continent you’ve always wished to see?”

“I think not,” The Lady said before I could reply. “It would be dangerous to place him that far out of sight now. If Anselm smells some chance at my undoing on him, he will not stop searching, and the farther away young Matthew is, the harder it will be for us to know—much less manage—whatever may happen.”

“We would send him with guardians, of course,” said Rain.

“To where?” she asked. “One of our other cities, to spread the contagion?” She shook her head. “Or am I to banish a handful of my own best people to decades alone without kin or community in some even more remote Andinol outpost, like criminals? I will not punish others so severely for what I have set in motion.”

“I’ll go with him then,” Rain said. “I set today’s crisis in motion.”

The Lady sighed. “I thought I’d made my opinion of releasing you clear.”

“My Lady, we cannot keep him with us here,” said Rain. “If any of this day’s secrets ever do come to light, we must at very least be able to claim that our involvement with the boy was passing and accidental. If Anselm were able to prove we’d kept him as a pet,” his gaze flickered, uncomfortably, I thought, toward the silent page behind us, “there’d be no repairing the damage. Keeping him inside the seat just fixes his existence here, past, present, and future.”

“Couldn’t I just hide?” I asked. “Like Piper asked me to this morning?”

“That might have been possible before so many of us had seen you,” Rain said glumly. “The Lady’s staff here can be trusted, I believe. But any chance that an untrained Andinol boy might learn to hide successfully from the kind of hunters you saw in those tunnels ended when they learned for sure that you were there to look for.”

“Did they?” I asked, the ghost of an idea forming in my head.

“Did they what?” he replied.

“Learn I’m here to look for. You hid me most of the way, didn’t you?”

“Until the fighting started, and you screamed,” Rain said. “Not that I blame you, of course. I did what I could after that, but they all knew you were there.”

“Yeah, but it was dark, and they were busy fighting.” I looked at Piper. “How much did they really see?” I saw her face change as she began to understand what I was thinking.

“He’s right!” she said. “It could have been me you carried!”

“What?” Rain looked back and forth between us as if we’d both gone mad.

“He’s not much shorter than I am. We both have black hair, of about the same length.”

“She even dresses like a boy,” I said. Her eyes narrowed. “Dressed, I mean. This morning.”

“Ashta, why would I have snuck you through the tunnels to your own keep?” Rain asked.

“Because…I was afraid of Anselm.” Piper grinned. “I thought his goons were after me because I’d pulled that rock-brained stunt outside his house this morning—screaming protests because I was too angry about Cullen’s attack to control myself! Everybody knows I can’t control myself! Don’t they?” She sounded almost jubilant about it now.

Her mother’s smile was nearly too quick and slight to notice.

“But the boy was at Anselm’s doorstep this morning. They must have seen him there, or they’d never have swarmed the tunnels in the first place.”

“You said nothing to me this morning about a boy,” Piper pointed out. “You mentioned rumors about a tantrum I had thrown on Anselm’s porch? Was Matthew mentioned too?”

He paused, then shook his head, beginning to look thoughtful.

“Then it seems to me that whoever noticed his performance confused the two of us for at least that long,” Piper pressed. “And even if they did see both of us run off, so what? I was being chased; I threw a decoy. Who wouldn’t have? Assuming I had someone with me, they saw me and my decoy disappear around that corner and not reappear. Thinking we’d gone underground, they went down too, hoping to uncover some useful new scandal—or just for another shot at beating me up. After what Cullen did, it’s not as if Anselm can just scoff at the idea. I lost my nerve, summoned you to come get me back here safely, and things got out of hand.” She sat back triumphantly. “Let that story leak and it won’t matter what they thought this morning. Even if a few of them still know it’s not what really happened, everybody else will buy it. The Lady’s reckless heir, at it again—worse than ever. Disgrace me to the teeth,” she said fiercely. “For once, I’ll be delighted.”

I saw her mother very clearly in her then, and didn’t feel as bad for Piper as I had.

Her mother saw it too, I think. She leaned over and kissed Piper’s cheek. “You have done nothing disgraceful in your life, daughter,” she said gravely. “If Anselm’s response to my complaint contains nothing to disprove your clever story, it may do the trick.”

Piper responded with a slight, self-conscious smile.

“All right,” Rain said. “That might vanish him past. What about present and future?”

“You called me an untrained Andinol,” I said. “Does that mean I could be trained? To do what you guys do, I mean?”

Rain shook his head. “Your kind haven’t the equipment for it.”

“But he could learn to do much more than he can now,” said Piper. “Others have.”

Rain shook his head. “We haven’t anything like that much time.”

“How much time would we need?” The Lady asked. “Given the right teachers and enough incentive. He doesn’t have to become a hero, just a clever boy who knows how to remain beneath our interest in the world. He seems rather clever already, doesn’t he? The most helpful idea so far was his, after all.”

“Even if such time were arranged, who’s going to teach him?” Rain asked. “And where?”

The Lady looked away thoughtfully. “The Stbrich clan, I think. They’re extremely talented, and their fascination with the Andinalloi is quite well-established. Who would notice if their boys adopted one more stray? If everyone is very careful, we might hide Matthew right in the open for quite some while, and lose him just as unremarkably when the time comes. It seems about the last sort of hiding place Anselm is likely to think of.”

“With all due respect, my Lady, this plan makes my skin crawl,” said Rain. “It begs disaster.”

“No need to beg for what we already have,” The Lady said. “Summon Mikayl to court. Tell him I wish to commission a painting—nothing more than that until he’s here. We will explain to him, somehow, the need to hide and train an Andinol boy, but,” she looked pointedly at me, “no one outside this room, Matthew, not even Mikayl Stbrich or his sons, is to know that you were ever more or less than the boy you seem.” She turned her gaze on Rain. “Nor must any of us even speculate again on how that change came about. Am I clear?” She looked at each of us in turn.

I nodded with the others, then remembered the silent page who’d been waiting by the door behind me all this time. I glanced at him, then uncertainly back at The Lady.

“He can be trusted,” she said sadly.

Piper looked at the page too, mirroring her mother’s sadness.

            “Nothing that dear child hears will ever leave his head, much less this room,” The Lady said. She turned to give the lad a reassuring smile.

He bowed to her, as solemn and silent as ever.