After a day of hiding and skulking around with mercenaries, which was a thing too tedious to recount or indeed ever to think of again, Nadashe found herself on the You Can Blame It All on Me, her mother’s personal fiver.
Nadashe thought it was an almost unconscionable extravagance that her mother used a fiver to haul herself from star system to star system, but on the other hand her mother didn’t really live anywhere else. The fiver was her home, even when it was parked in orbit over Terhathum. She never went down to Terhathum, or Basantapur, its largest city.
Well, that was the deal, wasn’t it, Nadashe thought to herself. Dad got Terhathum. Mom got the rest of the universe.
Nadashe was tucked quite comfortably into her own private apartment on the Blame. It was the one her mother always kept for her, because it was a whole huge goddamn spaceship, and she could keep an apartment for a couple hundred of her closest friends if she wanted. And in fact she did travel with an entourage of friends and lackeys and what have you. She was a countess, and she was the head of the House of Nohamapetan, and she was a narcissist who needed and wanted attention. All of these things conspired to have her travel with a village in tow. But the villagers were kept on the other side of the ship’s ring from Mother and her quarters. The only living quarters on her side of the ring were the ones for her and her three children.
Two now, Nadashe said to herself, and sighed. She wasn’t ready to have that conversation with her mother.
But she didn’t have to, yet; Mother wasn’t on the Blame. She was down at Hubfall, where she was being told the horrible news that her daughter, the traitor, the murderer, the imperial assassin, had gone up like a firework in a botched escape attempt that killed her, three guards, a driver and the Lord Teran Assan.
The presence of Assan was a spicy bit of news that the media glommed onto and ran with. Everyone loved the idea of Assan, obsessed with the traitorous Nadashe Nohamapetan, planning her escape with her witless lawyer as their go-between. The lawyer who, incidentally, had jumped to his death while his family was at the zoo looking at miniature giraffes and long-haired otters.
Nadashe pursed her lips at that thought. Alas, poor Dorick. He had had no idea what he was getting into, and probably continued to have no idea, up to and including the moment whichever of the countess’s bodyguards it was pushed him out of that window. At least his family would be well cared for, as long as Dorick had told his wife where his stash of money was, and also the authorities didn’t find it.
No one as yet had seemed to suggest that Nadashe might still be alive. The escape scene featured a body for everyone plus one extra, and what was left in all cases was hardly identifiable. Assan’s presence, for example, had been identified by a titanium signet ring he was known to have been proud of. Nearly everything else had melted, burned and turned to ash. The only ones who knew Nadashe was still alive were the mercs who had retrieved her, and who Nadashe was sure would all find themselves at the wrong end of some death-dealing weapon sometime in the reasonably near future, and the crew of the Blame, none of whom would have any intention of speaking about her presence to anyone else, because their lives and jobs depended on it.
Well, and Nadashe’s mother, who was no doubt wailing up a storm right now down on Hubfall. Nadashe imagined her mother gnashing her teeth and rending her garments, all for the benefit of the various local and imperial investigators who would be looking for something, anything, to suggest that this escape attempt was something other than a horrible failure.
Let them look, Nadashe thought. Meanwhile, she was safe, she was secure, and as much any place could be called it, she was home. The beds were unspeakably soft and the bedclothes were warm and caressing, the food was exquisite, the showers were hot for as long as you wanted them to be hot, and the clothes weren’t all the same fucking shade of orange. Nadashe celebrated by eating a ridiculously large sandwich, taking a forty-minute shower, and then falling asleep under a pile of blankets for most of a day.
She woke up to her mother sitting in a chair beside her bed. The countess had been watching Nadashe while she slept. Nadashe wondered how long it was that her mother had been watching her, and also, idly, at what point the watching would transmute from warmly maternal to something else entirely, something not quite seemly.
Nadashe propped herself up and smiled at her mother. “Hi, Mom,” she said.
The Countess Nohamapetan slapped her daughter hard across the face.
“That’s for killing your brother,” she said.
Then she slapped Nadashe again.
“What’s that one for?” Nadashe asked.
“For getting caught.”
Nadashe rubbed her cheek. “I thought you’d be more upset about Amit.”
“I’m absolutely furious about it,” the countess said. “He was my favorite.”
“I know. So did Ghreni.”
“I didn’t make a secret about it.”
“You might have. Other parents do.”
“I loved your brother. And he would have made a fine consort for the current emperox. And then there would have been a Nohamapetan on the throne.”
“I have to tell you, Mom, that wasn’t going to happen.”
“It could have been managed.”
Nadashe smiled ruefully. “Have you met the new emperox? She’s not manageable.”
“I learned that.”
“So did I,” Nadashe said. “Early on. And when it was clear she wasn’t going to marry Amit, it was time to try again. There are a lot of Wu cousins. We could have made it work.”
“You didn’t have to kill Amit to get to her.”
“There were other complications.”
“Your damn fool plan to take over End. And yes, I know about that,” the countess said when she caught Nadashe’s expression. “You and Amit and Ghreni. You weren’t as clever as you thought you were about covering your tracks when you skimmed accounts to pay for your little adventures. That Kiva Lagos person is going through our financials for the last decade. You’ve put the entire house at risk.”
“That’s mostly on Amit,” Nadashe said. “He was the one cooking the books.”
“But you were the one telling him to do it,” the countess countered. “You’re the smart one, Nadashe. You were always the smart one.”
“I am what you made me, Mom.”
“Not smart enough to keep Rennered Wu, though.”
Nadashe groaned, fell back on the bed and put a pillow over her head. “I’m not listening to this again.”
The countess removed the pillow. “You had one job. Become the imperial consort. I wanted it. The emperox wanted it. We spent years managing that. And you let it slip past you.”
“For the last goddamned time, Mother, I didn’t let it slip past me. Rennered decided he liked fucking a variety of people and didn’t want to narrow down his enthusiasms.”
“You could have dealt with that.”
“I did. He and I had that conversation. I told him he could stick his dick anywhere he wanted, as long as I was the one he had children with. I thought that was what he wanted. A political marriage with benefits. But it turns out he wanted me to be jealous. Or something. He wanted monogamy and true love, and he wanted sex with just about anything that moved. And he was offended that I offered him the sex, which he was going to have anyway, instead of the monogamy, which he had no intention of practicing. He was a pig.”
“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?”