But the name of the Anasati Lord had pierced through Mara’s lethargy. ‘Jiro did this?’ She spun from Ayaki’s body and saw the red-and-yellow disk in Hokanu’s hand. Her face contorted into a frightening mask of fury. ‘The Anasati shall be as dust in the wind. Their natami will be buried in offal, and their spirits be consigned to the dark. I will show them less mercy than I did the Minwanabi!’ Her hands clenched into fists. She stared without seeing between her husband and her Force Commander, as though her detested enemy could be made manifest through the force of her hatred. ‘Not even that will pay for the blood of my son. Not even that.’
‘Lord Jiro might not be responsible,’ Lujan offered, his usually firm voice torn by grief. ‘You were the target, not Ayaki. The boy is the nephew of the Anasati Lord, after all. The tong assassin could have been sent by any of the Emperor’s enemies.’
But Mara seemed not to hear. ‘Jiro will pay. My son will be avenged.’
‘Do you think Lord Jiro was responsible?’ Hokanu repeated to the Force Commander. That the young Anasati heir still felt as he did, even after inheriting the mantle and power that had been his father’s, bespoke stubborn, and childish pride. A mature mind would no longer nurse such a grudge; but in vain arrogance, the Anasati Lord might well wish the world to know whose hand had contracted for Mara’s downfall.
Except that since Mara was Servant of the Empire, her popularity was too widespread. Fool Jiro might be, over slighted manhood, but surely not so much that he would invite the Emperor’s wrath.
Lujan turned dark eyes toward Hokanu. ‘That bit of shell is all the evidence we have. Its very obviousness might be subtle, as if by calling attention to House Anasati, we might dismiss them at once and look elsewhere for the culprits.’ Fury coiled beneath his words. He, too, wanted to strike in anger at the outrage that had been committed. ‘It matters very little what I think,’ he finished grimly. For honor demanded that he do his Lady’s will, absolutely and without question. If Mara asked him to muster the Acoma garrison and march suicidally to war, he would obey, with all his heart and will.
Dusk dimmed the skylights in the great hall. Servants entered on quiet feet and lit the lamps arrayed around Ayaki’s bier. Scented smoke sweetened the air. The play of warm light softened death’s pallor, and shadow veiled the misshapen lumps of the injuries beneath the silk robes. Mara sat alone in vigil. She regarded her son’s oval face, and the coal-dark hair that, for the first time she could remember, had stayed combed for more than an hour.
Ayaki had been all of her future, until that moment of the gelding’s crushing fall. He had been her hopes, her dreams, and more: the future guardian of her ancestors and the continuance of the Acoma name.
Her complacence had killed him.
Mara clenched white fingers in her lap. She never, ever, should have lulled herself into belief that her enemies could not touch her. Her guilt at this lapse in vigilance would follow her all her days. Yet how bleak any contemplation of tomorrow had become. At her side lay a tray with the picked-over remains of a meal; the food had no taste that she could recall. Hokanu’s solicitude had not comforted; she knew him too well, and the echoes of her own pain and anger she could sense behind his words galled her into deeper recriminations.
Only the boy showed no reproach for her folly. Ayaki was past feeling, beyond reach of sorrow or joy.
Mara choked back a spasm of grief. How she wished the dart had taken her, that the darkness which ended all striving could be hers, instead of her son’s. That she had another surviving child did not lessen her despair. Of the two, Ayaki had known the least of life’s fullness, despite his being the elder. Fathered by Buntokapi of the Anasati, whose family had been an Acoma enemy, in a union from which Mara had derived much pain and no happiness. Political expediency had led her to deeds of deceit and entrapment that to her maturer view seemed no less than murder. Ayaki had been her atonement for his father’s wasteful suicide, brought about by Mara’s own machinations. Although by the tenets of the Game of the Council she had won a telling victory, privately she considered Buntokapi’s death a defeat. That his family’s neglect had made of him a tool open for her to exploit made no difference. Ayaki had offered her a chance to give her first husband’s shade lasting honor. She had been determined that his son would rise to the greatness that Buntokapi had been denied.
But the hope was ended now. Lord Jiro of the Anasati had been Buntokapi’s brother, and the fact that his plot against her had misfired and resulted in a nephew’s death had shifted the balance of politics yet again. For, without Ayaki, the Anasati were free to resume the enmity quiescent since her father’s time.
Ayaki had grown up with the best teachers, and all of her soldiers’ vigilance to protect him; but he had paid for the privileges of his rank. At nine he had nearly lost his life to an assassin’s knife. Two nurses and a beloved old household servant had been murdered before his eyes, and the experience had left him with nightmares. Mara resisted an urge to rub his hand in comfort. The flesh was cold, and his eyes would never open in joy and trust.
Mara did not have to fight down tears; rage at injustice choked her sorrow for her. The personal demons that had twisted his father’s nature toward cruelty had inspired melancholy and brooding in Ayaki. Only in the past three years, since Mara’s marriage to Hokanu, had the sunnier side of the boy’s nature gained ascendancy.
The fortress of the Minwanabi, Ayaki had been fond of pointing out, had never been so much as besieged. The defenses here were impregnable to an enemy. Moreover, Mara was a Servant of the Empire. The title carried favor with the gods, and luck enough to ward away misfortune.
Now, Mara berated herself for allowing his childish, blind faith to influence her. She had used traditions and superstitions to her advantage often enough in the past. She had been a vain fool not to see that the same things could be exploited against her.
It seemed an injustice that the child should have paid, and not her.
His small half-brother, Justin, had helped lighten Ayaki’s bleak spells. Her second son was the child of the barbarian slave she still loved. She had only to close her eyes for an instant and Kevin’s face came to mind, nearly always smiling over some ridiculous joke, his red hair and beard shining copper under Kelewan’s sun. With him she had shared none of the harmonious rapport she now enjoyed with Hokanu. No, Kevin had been tempestuous, impulsive, at times passionately illogical. He would not have hidden his grief from her, but would have freed his feelings in an explosive storm; in his intense expression of life she might have found the courage to face this outrage. Young Justin had inherited his father’s carefree nature. He laughed easily, was quick to get into mischief, and already evidenced a fast tongue. Like his father before him, Justin had a knack for snapping Ayaki out of his brooding. He would run on fat legs, trip, and tumble over laughing, or he would make ridiculous faces until it was impossible to be near him and stay withdrawn.
But there would be no more shared laughter for Ayaki now.
Mara shivered, only that moment conscious of the presence of someone at her side. Hokanu had entered the chamber in the uncannily silent manner he had learned from the foresters on the barbarian world.
Aware that she had noticed him, he took her cold hand into his warm one. ‘My Lady, it is past midnight. You would do well to take some rest.’
Mara half turned from the bier. Her dark eyes fastened on Hokanu’s, and the compassion in his gaze caused her to dissolve into tears. His handsome features blurred, and his grip shifted, supporting her body against his shoulder. He was strong in the same sparely muscled way of his father. And if he did not kindle the wild passion that Kevin had, with him, Mara shared an effortless understanding. He was husband to her as Ayaki’s father had never been, and his presence now as grief crumbled her poise was all that kept her from insanity. The touch that sought to soothe her sorrow was that of a man well capable of command on the field of war. He preferred peace, as she did, but when the ways of the sword became necessary, he had the courage of the tigers that inhabited the world beyond the rift.