“I’m sure you can understand that I can’t reveal my sources, Agent Shora.” It had been pure intuition and luck, and she was sure he knew that. The joke was a compliment, and her continuation of it was a signal that she’d received the compliment. She couldn’t dance, as she’d so thoroughly proved at New Year’s, but she knew some steps after all.
“What do I owe you for these finds?” He made a feint toward the carved teak pen holder on his desk.
“Oh, nothing, of course. Only to allow me to thank you for your support, and your mentorship within the Union.”
His reach retracted, and he pressed a hand to his waistcoat front. “Well, I’m truly touched, Agent Despana. I do hope we can continue to work together to make this organization stronger.”
“I’d like nothing more.” She let the exchange sink in as she assisted the Benevolents’ leader in wrapping up the paintings. He set them against a wall, next to a potted plant.
She could have gone on to report to the hospital, to start her shift early. She could have stopped by the police station on the way home.
Instead, she sat in one of Aines Shora’s upholstered chairs. “I have one other matter I’d like to discuss. I think we each have something to contribute to the situation.”
He took a seat behind his desk. “Anything I can do, I’d love to hear it.”
* * *
It took three trips down to the gallery to catch all of the lodgers, aligning with their disparate schedules. She met the last one at two in the morning. Some took her offer of a refund and departed. Some argued. Some bargained. The rest stayed, and four days after the signs went up over Kazi na Furujia’s fliers in every corner of the city, the remaining lodgers gathered to transform the gallery.
With Agna and Keifon pulling as many shifts in the hospital as they could, Bargi assumed the foreman’s role. Every evening over tea, she and Agna and Keifon tracked their progress from impromptu boarding house to meeting hall. The crew scrubbed and polished the front room and hauled the old sales counter out of the way. One of the lodgers, between shifts building pews for the Tufarian church, pulled apart Agna’s packing crates and nailed the boards into a table — open-centered, large enough to seat two to a side.
Still giddy with ideas for next year’s theater season, Keth Vogal unearthed a vast swath of heavy silk fabric from somewhere in the Crescendo’s scenery storage. After two washings to rid it of the musty smell, they stretched it across the sales counter to dry.
The eight chairs had to come from Agna’s replenished bank balance, in the end. No paint in the world could mask chairs cobbled out of packing crates. Someday she would host openings, benefits, lectures. She could think of it as an investment. There were worse ways to spend the money her parents had poured into her account over the years.
She worried about the bare walls, unwilling to put up the hodgepodge of pieces she’d collected; most of them were destined to belong to her backers, anyway. One night, Keifon woke her with a candle and a book in hand. Not quite a book, actually: a sheaf of drawings, held together with clips.
Agna sat up, head reeling. She hadn’t really been asleep. She held the bound drawings of Kaveran medicinal herbs on her lap. “I can’t,” she said. “They’re terrible, and anyway, I don’t even have frames for them.”
“Whalen said he has some ready. I saw them when I stopped by to order the bookshelf. Business has been slow, so he said it’s something to work on. And they’re not terrible.”
She shook her head and tipped it back to the dark ceiling. “I’ll think about it.”
Three days later, she hung her drawings, framed with Lina’s notes, in the front gallery. It wasn’t a real show, but the walls weren’t bare, at least. She’d try not to look at them.
Two apprentices from the Benevolent Union were hired as pages. A day filling water glasses and teacups beat yet another day pushing patients down the hospital’s halls.
On the morning of the summit, Agna woke early, leaving Keifon to sleep off his night shift. She fed the cats and dressed in the pre-dawn hour, then let herself in through the back of the gallery. Bargi directed as the lodgers packed up, and cheerfully dealt out insults as she passed around toasted bread for breakfast. Eventually they all packed up their bedrolls and backpacks and headed out with Agna’s apologies, leaving Agna and Bargi in the quiet gallery.
Agna turned to Keifon’s friend. “Can you help me with the tablecloth?”
“Sure.”
They unfolded the fabric on the makeshift table. The heavy weave covered a few uneven spots and rough corners, draping to the floor. It was hard to guess that the table had been a pile of crates a week ago.
“Thank you,” Agna said, before her mind could slip into seating arrangements again. “I know you support Kazi, and I want you to know that I just want to bring an end to this. The Benevolents are working for Wildern. I believe that.” Of course, Aines Shora worked for himself, always, but he’d do so with the support of his hometown.
Bargi pulled at a crooked corner of the tablecloth. “Kind of annoying that we all have to clear out, I have to say.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. The Yanweians were making noise about Kazi having spies. You’re welcome to stay upstairs if you want.”
“Eh, I might. I’ll be at the church site all day, so it’s just my stuff. Appreciate it, though.”
Agna smiled apologetically. “It’s the least we can do.”
“Well.” Bargi dusted her hands. “Time to pack up, then. Good luck.”
“Thanks. See you.”
As Bargi took her rucksack and her packed-up tent upstairs, Agna pumped water into the kettle to boil. The lingering smell of toast in the gallery’s kitchen convinced her stomach that breakfast was not a terrible idea after all. She had a little time.
* * *
Seven seats filled before ten o’clock, each delegate arriving in a volley of introductions and polite fictions. Aines Shora, captain of the Wildern base of the Benevolent Union, arrived first. He was joined before long by the mayor of Wildern, escorting a youngish man who spoke with a Laketon accent: the representative in the Kaveran Council for the northern end of the country, newly arrived from Vertal.
The Yanweian delegation swept in all at once, taxing Agna’s interpretation skills as she acted as host. The first was a bearded man in his fifties, dressed in fur-trimmed clothes: the representative from the Yanweian capital. He was followed by an Eytran priest who spoke fluent Kaveran, honed, she said, during her time at the mountain pass work site. The final Yanweian delegate was a woman in a blue uniform, bracketed by two silent guards, who introduced herself as the leader of the police force sent to apprehend Kazi na Furujia.
The apprentices plied the attendees with water and tea as if they’d gathered for a dinner party. Rumbles from outside suggested a gathering crowd. Agna resisted the urge to look over her shoulder at the curtained windows. Everyone knew where the meeting would be held, and nothing could stop the under-employed, underfed populace from gravitating to her doorstep. The signs that Aines Shora had posted in Kaveran and Yanweian guaranteed safe passage for Kazi na Furujia if he showed up unarmed and unescorted. A mob was not an escort, and dispatching the Wildernian police to disperse them would cause more problems than they solved. And so the people filled the street, chanted in a jumble of languages, and waited for their savior.
The rumble rose to a roar, and the police captain held up a hand to stay her bodyguards. Before anyone else could move, the door opened, and the instigator of the pass strike strode in, dressed in the full formal uniform of the Yanweian National Army. Agna’s eyes flicked to the clock she’d borrowed from upstairs just before it struck ten.
Agent Shora leaned toward Agna. “You’re the host,” he murmured.
Agna stood, feeling the room’s attention like the pull of the tide. “Kazi na Furujia?”
Keifon had once told her that her Yanweian accent mangled Kazi’s name into gibberish, but the strike leader didn’t blink. Nor did he
betray any hint that he had spent most of the last two weeks hashing out his philosophies with her. “Yes,” he said.
The Eytran priest translated it for the Kaveran councilman. Agna extended a hand to the empty seat between Agent Shora and the priest. Kazi nodded graciously, and Agna began one last round of introductions.
As Kazi took his seat, Agent Shora stood and clarified for the group that the meeting would be moderated under the auspices of the Benevolent Union, which had operated in both countries for a hundred years. He repeated his brief, relaxed explanation in Yanweian, drawing a raised eyebrow from the police chief. He called upon Kazi na Furujia to restate his requests — the word in either language was softer than “demands.”
Kazi stood. His demands had not changed; his beliefs were the same whether they were reported in the papers or dissected in Agna’s kitchen or delivered to a roomful of delegates. He believed that the castes in Yanwei needed to be abolished, that any young person should be allowed to take an apprenticeship if they showed an interest or aptitude for the work, without regard to their family history. Furthermore — Agna had to piece together that word from context, as it had the ring of antiquity — he believed that the restrictions on foreign nationals and foreign-educated Yanweians also strangled Yanweian commerce and culture, and should be abolished as well. If those laws were lifted, he would have his troops reopen the pass, resume shipping food to the workers, and complete the construction project. The Kaveran government had accepted the requests he’d sent them about taxes and tariffs, a fact that the delegate from Vertal affirmed once it had been translated for him.
The police captain spoke as Kazi kept his place. “What makes you think you have the authority to do any of that? I have a warrant for your arrest signed by the Head Speaker of the Senate herself.” The mayor leaned over to translate to the Vertalian councilman.
“I have yet to receive any orders from the Army to stand down or cease my actions in any way. I’m sure Traveller Lin can confirm this fact for the delegation.” He took his seat.
The priest remained seated, her hands folded. “I have received no word from the Church of Darano nor the National Army about this matter, except for their confirmation that I may speak on their behalf.”
The police captain and the government representative grumbled and turned aside to confer with one another. Patrician, Agna corrected herself, keeping her face carefully neutral. When they’d met, Keifon had read her as one of his kind — the hereditary ruling class that pretended they weren’t nobles and ran everything by vote. And here she was, two seats away from one of them, taking notes on a meeting that could either shift the course of thousands of years of history or kill Keifon’s former beloved. As the two Yanweians spoke, she calmly sharpened her pen.
The fur-clad delegate from Nijin stood. “We find these demands to be unacceptable. The laws restricting apprenticeships protect tradesmen and professionals from losing their livelihoods to untested newcomers. The restriction provides continuity and accountability, and upon such values is our entire nation built. Those who cannot or will not join their families’ trades have a multitude of options under the Churches’ oversight.”
“Four options.” A smile pulled at Kazi’s mouth as he recited what sounded like a skipping rhyme. “Soldier, healer, counselor, breaker. What’s it going to be? Fall too far and they’ll remake you, better you than me.” He paused for the priest to translate. It didn’t scan in Kaveran.
The patrician’s face was sour, but his voice remained polite. “Begging your pardon, Councilman — a third of all business ventures in Kavera fail within a year. Is that correct?”
“Something along those lines. The turnover is primarily in the cities. Vertal, Prisa, Laketon — Wildern,” he added, glancing at Agent Shora. Not at the mayor, Agna thought. But anyone who spent a week in Wildern knew where the power in this town lay.
The patrician nodded. “And what happens to the people who are employed by those failed businesses? Their families? Their neighborhoods?”
The councilman frowned, turning over the idea as it was translated for him. “I suppose they try something else.”
“And what of wages lost in the meantime, damage to reputations, living costs while the business falters? Who pays the price for that?”
Increasingly confused, the councilman looked to the mayor, who took up the answer in Yanweian. “If malicious intent is proved in court, then the bad actor will be fined. Otherwise we do not see a need to punish anyone in that situation. Risk comes with any venture.”
“And the failure goes on to wreak more havoc,” the police chief remarked. The word failure had a different inflection, supposedly, if one meant a person who is a failure rather than a venture which failed. Agna could not hear the difference, but she could guess which one the police chief meant.
The mayor shrugged. “Eventually, one may get a reputation as a fly-by-night dabbler, and few would go into business with them.”
The police chief was not so polite as the patrician had been. “How many people suffer before that happens? Before something is done about it?”
“If I may,” Agent Shora cut in, “we would like to hear all sides, and I feel this avenue has been covered enough for now. May we move on and discuss the Kaveran system, which this plan resembles? Each way of doing business has its own advantages and disadvantages.”
“An anarchist system certainly simplifies the jobs of my counterparts,” the police captain said. “With your charlatans and thieves running your economy, what’s left to police?”
Kazi narrowed his eyes, but the Kaverans did not react, and no one translated the comment. Even the patrician representative went on as if the police chief hadn’t spoken. “Apart from mere pushback against the establishment, one imagines there must be advantages, yes. The Kaveran economy has long been quicker to adopt new technologies, and its rebuilding after your war was commendable.”
The mayor nodded. “It offers flexibility, for one thing. For instance, many people have come to Wildern since the Benevolent Union chose to expand here. The city has gained dozens of businesses that could not have been supported by our past population level. The newcomers have brought expertise and capital to our city, and this has helped to make Wildern what it is today. Present situation aside.”
The police chief scoffed. “Who’s to say that any of those people have any clue how to run a business? Do you even know who they are?”
“That’s their investors’ decision,” the mayor said. “If they believe an entrepreneur stands a chance, they’ll invest. Take the risk, reap the reward.”
“So…” The Council member from Laketon raised a hand. “Just so I understand this. If I decide I want to run for city council in Yanwei, I can’t — unless my family members are already council members?”
Kazi snickered as the patrician and the police chief tripped over one another’s words. The priest translated an approximation of both, as far as Agna could tell. “Only the nobility is considered fit to hold office, Councilman. No one else has the proper perspective and education. It’s the same with any other industry or art.”
“But you never have — oh, musical genius, say, out of the blue. Certainly that has to happen sometimes.”
The police chief spoke first. “They simply show up one day knowing how to play an instrument, when a thousand more are trained from childhood?”
The councilman scratched his head. “Well, bad example, I suppose. But new ideas, fresh talents…” He trailed off, then gestured for the mayor to go ahead with her translation.
“We take failure very hard in Yanwei,” Kazi remarked, his eyes flat on the patrician. “We don’t like to take risks. Just in case something somewhere might not go perfectly. One might think we hadn’t had thousands of years of believing that the gods love us and guide us where we need to be.”
“Where we should be.” The police chief planted her hands on the table, rising halfway out of her seat. “The gods know where we were meant to be, a
nd that is where we are. You were born in your station by the gods’ design, and you think you know better than they do?”
“Or the gods gave me the talent to rise above my circumstances. You know their plans better than I, evidently. Why don’t you tell us?”
The police chief rose fully to her feet. “You’re housed and fed by the graces of the Church of Darano, and you spit on the gods’ word.” The patrician held up a hand, and she sank into her seat.
Kazi’s voice was low and smooth. “I’m sure you’d like to think I’m an isolated instance. I’m sure you’d like to think that if you take me back to Nijin in chains, those people out there will sit down like good little children. And that no one will think to try again.”
“Major,” Agent Shora said quietly.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the priest said, breaking in with her own words, “I’d ask you to leave divine interpretation to the priests.”
The Yanweians fell silent. Agna caught the eye of one of the apprentices in the hallway and tilted her head. The pair rushed in with water pitcher and teapot to refresh the delegates’ glasses and cups.
When the group had taken a minute to breathe, the mayor cleared her throat. “May I ask, what of the other requests? Allowing foreigners or those trained outside the country to do business inside your borders?”
The patrician spread his hands. “The situation is the same. How would we know whether a foreigner’s word can be trusted? What’s to stop them from simply lying, forging papers, fabricating their business experience? And requiring proper training ensures a high standard across all industries and arts. Would you want to be treated by a healer whose training you knew nothing about?”
The councilman nodded toward Agent Shora and Agna. “Well, we do that all the time through the Benevolents. And so do you. We take their word that they accept personnel who have been properly vetted.”
“Just so, you see,” the patrician said. “The Benevolent Union takes the place of a family structure, ensuring honesty and ethical behavior. The Churches do the same in our country, ensuring the behavior of… certain elements of society. Without such a framework, there is no trust.”
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