Ilemina turned to Maud. “What does that mean?”

“It means he thinks you are a xenophobic species prone to rash and violent reactions, so he saw no point in explaining himself. You wouldn’t have believed him anyway.”

Ilemina’s eyes narrowed. She pierced the tachi with her stare.

“I can’t make it simple for you,” he said.

Ilemina flashed her fangs. “Try me.”

The tachi turned to Maud, switching to the Akit dialect. “They think I killed the child; the royal is angry. Now they know I saved the child; she is angry. I do not comprehend this species. How have they ever managed to achieve interstellar civilization without self-destructing?”

“Could you please tell me what happened to my daughter?” Maud didn’t even try to keep the desperation from her voice.

The tachi’s color lightened for a moment. “Yes, of course.” He folded his arms in an apologetic gesture. “I will use short thoughts. We were bathing. The children were running and making excited noises. Your child ran close to us. She was not afraid like the other children. They could not catch her. She ran too close and almost ran into me. Then she apologized for disturbing my tegah.”

Maud had given Helen a primer on tachi manners. Until now she had no idea any of it had stuck.

“She is such a polite child,” the tachi said. “We spoke. Something hit her in the neck, on her left side. She fell. I caught her. I saw a wet spot on her skin. It smelled wrong. Her eyes rolled back in her head. I knew I had to act. I bit her to keep the poison from spreading.”

“Which way was she facing when it hit her?” Soren asked.

“She was turning away from me to rejoin the game. She was facing the rest of the children. The lake was on her right and the castle was on her left.”

“A sniper shot from the bluff,” Otubar said.

Karat bared her teeth in a grimace. “There is a clear line of sight from the western edge of the game grounds to the lake. They distracted us with the krim match, then goaded Arland into a fight, and while we were watching, they shot Helen.”

“Pull the video feed,” Ilemina ordered. Karat took off at a run.

There were implications and conclusions to be drawn from all of this, but right now, none of them mattered. “Did you recognize the poison?” Maud asked.

“No,” the tachi said. “I would know it again. It smelled strong.”

The vampire medic failed to identify it and the tachi didn’t know it. The tachi coma wouldn’t last forever. It could fail at any moment. She had to do something now, or Helen would die. There was only one place she could turn to.

“I don’t have anything to trade.”

Everyone stopped and looked at her. She realized she had spoken out loud.

Before she could explain, a half-dressed Arland rounded the corner, somehow managing to look angry and confused at the same time. “What the hell is going on?”

Soren blinked. “Why are you out of armor?”

“Maud?” Arland closed in on her.

She looked up at him, feverishly rummaging through the list of her meager possessions in her head.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Helen has been poisoned, and I don’t have anything to trade.”

“Will someone explain this to me?” Ilemina demanded.

Understanding sparked in Arland’s eyes. “But I have things to trade. They will trade with me or I’ll twist their heads off.”

“Who?” Ilemina snarled.

“Explain things to your mother,” Otubar boomed.

“No time.” Arland grabbed Maud’s hand and pulled her down the hallway. Behind them the sound of a pissed off Preceptor shook the air. Arland sped up.

“How are you still walking?” Maud squeezed out.

“Booster. Activated it before you took my armor off. I had plans. None of which involved a sedative.”

“Arland Roburtar Gabrian of Krahr!” Ilemina roared. “Stop this instant!”

Arland ignored her. They were almost to the bend in the hallway.

Suddenly Arland braked, and then the lees flooded all available space, their veils swirling, their jewelry shining, tails and ears twitching. Maud saw Nuan Cee in the center of the lees mob and reached out to him. “Helen…”

Nuan Cee took her hands into his furry paw-hands. “I know.”

The rest of the lees rushed past them, washing over them like a wave, and rolled down the hallway, parting around Ilemina, Otubar, and Soren.

“I have nothing to trade,” she said.

Nuan Cee’s turquoise eyes shone. He grinned, displaying sharp, even teeth. “I am sure we can come to an arrangement.”

“Get out of my medward, vermin!” the medic screamed.

“Do not worry yourself.” Nuan Cee patted Maud’s hands as a mob of lees carried the medic out of his medward. “All will be well now.”

15

Maud slumped in an oversized chair in Lord Soren’s study. She felt wrung out like a piece of wet laundry about to go in the dryer. The lees had treated Helen for the better part of an hour, and when Nuan Cee finally emerged from the medward, Maud felt ready to tear her hair out. He had announced that the danger had passed, Helen would be up in a few hours, and there was no need to worry.

Maud had been allowed to see her daughter and to kiss Helen’s warm forehead, and then the enraged vampire medic kicked everyone out. She wanted to be back in the medward, sitting by the bed, watching for minute signs of improvement, but it would accomplish nothing and Ilemina had requested her presence in her brother’s study.

The Preceptor of House Krahr sat in a chair by Lord Soren’s desk, looking grim. Otubar sat on his wife’s right, Arland sat on Maud’s left. He had put on his armor and his booster kept him awake, but she could tell by the slightly feverish look in his eyes that a crash was coming. Karat took a spot at the opposite end of the room. Soren presided over it all, sitting behind his huge desk as if it were a castle wall and he was watching a horde of invaders gather for a siege. Except this time the invaders looked back at them not from a field before the castle but from a massive screen, where the recording of the events on the mesa played out.

Maud had picked the farthest chair from the screen, maybe twenty feet away. It felt like miles. The room contained the Krahr, not the huge House, but the small nuclear family who ran it. She didn’t really belong here.

“So we have no useable footage,” Arland said.

Karat frowned. Her fingers danced across the tablet in her hand. The recording zoomed in past the game of krim, showing distant figures at the edge of the mesa. The image sped up and the figures jerked around in a slightly comical dance as knights mulled about.

“We know members of both Kozor and Serak were at the edge of the game grounds and had opportunity to fire the shot at Helen,” Karat said. “We know none of them had a gun on them, so they had to have assembled it on location. See how they keep crowding each other? They could’ve assembled a small space craft and we would’ve been none the wiser.”

“We should upgrade the surveillance,” Otubar said.

Soren grimaced. “Do you want to assign each of them a personal drone?”

“If that’s what it takes,” Otubar said.

“We would be breaking every rule of hospitality,” Soren said. “They would accuse us of cowardice and paranoia and claim we made the wedding impossible. We already failed to protect a child in our care and we were almost too late to prevent a confrontation between our other guests and these…ushivim.”

Karat jerked. “Father!”

Maud blinked. Of all the words she had expected the Knight Sergeant to use, the expletive meaning the bloody diarrhea of diseased vermin was the last on the list.

The corners of Otubar’s mouth rose a couple of millimeters. It was the closest she had ever seen the Lord Consort come to a smile.

“It was planned and premeditated,” Karat said. “As I pointed out, they had to have brought the weapon in pieces, assembled it on the spot, shot her, and disassembled it after. We scoured that entire area, on top of the mesa and down by the beach. If they had dropped any part of it, our scans would have picked it up. Each of them must have carried a small piece of it. It’s smart.”

“They switched targets,” Arland said. “They must have planned to take me out after the krim match in a final effort to uncover the Under Marshal, but they allowed for the possibility of failure. So, when I won the bout and walked away, they shot Helen.”

Maud turned to him. “Why her? She’s just a child.”

“Not her,” Ilemina said. “They used Helen to target you. If the tachi had truly injured the child, would you still negotiate with them on our behalf?”

“If she survived, yes,” Maud said. “But if she died, everything would be over for me.”

“And what would the tachi and lees do if Helen had been injured by one of them?” Ilemina asked.

“They would evacuate,” Maud said. “Neither delegation has the numbers to oppose a large attack and neither party wants to antagonize you. They want the trade station and access to your space. If their presence became an issue or caused any inconvenience, they would remove themselves from the situation rather than risk aggravating you. They would wait the wedding out and resume negotiations after the other guests left.”