The woman who emerged was in her late thirties, swarthy and stringy, the sort who isn’t ugly but has never been called pretty either. Stress lined her face in permanent creases, and strident energy sizzled through every line of her limbs. She sprang from her car, whipped its door shut, homed in on me, and tramped vigorously over.
“You work here?” she trumpeted.
Prefect Lindo sure seemed a lot calmer on television and in newspapers, but I guess no need for pussyfooting when she was in a hurry—or in a temper.
“Get me Edenfield!” she demanded, when I didn’t immediately respond. “I want to see him.”
No one had been quite that rude to me since my university years, when I’d worked as a barista at a series of increasingly fancy coffee joints. It’s amazing, how screamy people can get over a cup of caffeine, especially when one of our more popular seasonal flavors was out of stock.
I slapped on my dealing-with-difficult-customers expression—concerned eyebrows elevated, lips sympathetically upward but without a hint of humor, ears back—and said, “I’m afraid Bo Holst isn’t available at the moment, but I can help you.”
Someone had trained Prefect Lindo to take deep breaths and count to ten to avert explosion. She did so now, snorting like a flaming ghost horse and grinding out each letter beneath her breath. “Work with me here,” she told me. “This is prefect business, and it’s important. I don’t care if he’s asleep or stuffing his face or in bed with your sister. I want him.”
I’d been empathizing with her up until that last line. It wasn’t so long since I’d been in her position, blocked by a stranger from seeing Bo. And in other circumstances, insults don’t faze me, since I can return them. It’s a great way to defuse situations, giving the other person increasingly ridiculous (and sometimes obscurely flattering) barbs until they begin flyting back, and we both go away happy.
But a good flyte requires some form of agreement and equality between parties. I could flyte casually with my brothers and equals; and they wouldn’t take it personally, because they were free to respond in kind. I would never attempt it with Sr. Nordfeld unless he proposed it and set parameters.
Lindo thought that I was a servant, and that I’d lose my position if I riled her. She was abusing her power for no other reason than that she was annoyed, and that annoyed me. She didn’t deserve a response, let alone an honorable insult.
My gaze trailed back to the car, to its second occupant. Diagonal stripes of sapphire and ivory decorated Prefect Avior’s tie. Otherwise, the only differences in his appearance were a pronounced fatigue, probably from having shared a car with Prefect Lindo, and a glittering excitement as he transferred his gaze from Edenfield Manor to me.
Prefect Avior had been riding in the passenger seat. The rental car’s windows were slightly tinted, but not so much that they would hide someone sitting in the back.
Sr. Nordfeld had not come.
Maybe, I told myself, stomach contracting, he had taken a second car. Or maybe he’d opted for train instead of plane and wouldn’t be arriving until later.
Regardless, I hadn’t realized until this moment how much I’d depended on him arriving with Avior, on him telling me that I was exactly on track, doing an excellent job, well done, Mercedes.
“I would appreciate it if you looked at me when I talked to you.”
I blinked back at Prefect Lindo. She might know what had happened to Sr. Nordfeld. Prefect Avior would definitely know, but I wasn’t keen on another tête-à-tête with him. I prefer to leave skin-crawling experiences to absolute emergencies.
“It’s extremely rude to ignore people while they’re speaking,” Lindo informed me. “I could have your job for this. I don’t care how you behave when it’s only Edenfield about, but I expect a higher level of respect.”
I needed to stay focused. I said, “I’m Prefect—”
“Excuse me? Excuse me?”
I was decreasingly inclined to excuse her.
“Was I speaking?” Lindo demanded. “I think I was. Don’t interrupt me while I’m speaking.”
She waited. I waited. She bugged her eyes at me.
“I’m Prefect Edenfield,” I said.
“Like hell you are.”
This must’ve been how Prefect Avior felt, when I’d done the same thing to him. So I responded in the same way he had: I lifted my right hand and flashed the signet ring at her.
Lindo was less gentle than I’d been. She grabbed my fingers and crushed them close to her face, squinting like I do without my glasses.
It took her a good beat to process what she saw, but in that beat she became a new woman. She might never have been angry, when she released me and stood back. Her face smoothed out, and she assumed a determined and conciliatory dignity. “I’m sorry for yelling,” she said, dear as strawberry shortcake, “but you shouldn’t have tricked me like that. This week has been extremely stressful for me.”
I gestured in gracious sympathy.
“First, there was the conference to set up. My manor’s been torn to pieces and back again I don’t know how many times, because my workers keep getting it wrong and having to fix their mistakes. I haven’t gotten a wink of sleep in weeks, what with the constant noise and no one but me able to think for themselves. They keep coming at me twenty-four seven and bothering me with this and that and the other thing, like the incompetents they are. I have to micromanage every single detail, and never mind that I have my own work to do.”
I think the ring had genuinely surprised her out of her anger. If I’d been a neutral observer, I’d have been fascinated at how she worked herself back up without meaning to, each sentence angrier than the one before. Francis has a temper, but he doesn’t have the imagination to yell over nothing, and my coffee customers would’ve been kicked out by now. So this was a new experience for me.
“—and then Bo calls me and announces the conference is moving. He doesn’t care about anything I’ve done or my hours and days and weeks of hard labor. He doesn’t bother to ask, no ‘if you don’t mind’ or ‘I’m so sorry to inconvenience you,’ just orders me, like I’m one of his damned knights. ‘You don’t have a choice, Graça.’ ‘There’s a king’s agent, Graça.’ ‘Boohoo for you, Graça.’ Like I believe any of that.
“I know what he wants, the fat bastard. He can’t think of anything but himself, but I’m the one who deserves this. I’m the one who’s done the organization, the work—months and months of hard work, preparing for this, being interrogated, being questioned, having to prove myself to them—and then he orders me around and my plane is delayed and I have to wait and wait, and Avior’s no help at all—and then I get here and Bo’s run off and you say you’re Prefect Edenfield, and who the hell are you anyway?”
“I’m Prefect Edenfield,” I said.
She snapped back to me, accusatory, shrill. “You don’t look Edenfieldian.”
“She’s not. She’s Batatan,” said Avior, stepping up to join us.
A gentleman, I thought, would’ve interfered sooner. Maybe, like me, Avior had been staring in horrified fascination—but maybe he just knew Prefect Lindo and didn’t want her to turn on him. If so, he should’ve waited longer, because she turned.
“You know her?” Lindo demanded. “Is she another one of yours?”
“No, and I didn’t expect to see her here. She’s Jon Nordfeld’s personal assistant.” He’d been watching me since arriving, with that excited gleam, with an edge of hunger. I was abruptly glad Lindo was here with me—and that the knighthouse was barely fifteen yards distant. “How did you get here?” he asked me.
I opened my mouth to fabricate another cheap knockoff of the truth, but Lindo beat me to the punch. She squawked, “She’s who? What have you told her? Can’t you keep your mouth shut for two seconds?”
“I said I didn’t know she would be here,” Avior said, irritability edging into his voice. “And I didn’t tell her anything.”
“On which note,” I said, “where is Sr. Nordfe
ld? I expected him to arrive with you.”
“He’s in prison, where he belongs,” Prefect Lindo said, puffing up her chest and smirking at us. “Avior might be too stupid not to spot an obvious plant, but I’m not. A member of the Carinan Security Service, for heaven’s sake! And he didn’t think to do a background check!”
“I did check. I told you—”
“And you’re his assistant,” Lindo mused, shifting her attention back to me. “That means you work for the CSS too.”
“I work for Edenfield Prefecture,” I said coolly, glancing over at Torben without meaning to. He stood halfway between us and the knighthouse, watching me. “I told you, I’m Prefect Edenfield.”
“You’re a king’s agent,” Lindo said. For the moment, hardness superseded the anger. “You’re the king’s agent, the one who convinced Bo to change the conference location. Bo wasn’t lying.”
I hate losing control of a conversation. Lindo had taken me by surprise; she hadn’t been what I’d expected, and I still wasn’t sure what she was.
Politeness hadn’t worked, and she definitely wasn’t listening to Avior either, so I tried a new tactic.
I lifted my chin and puffed out my chest. “My dear prefect, I assure you that everything will work out for the best.” I waved a negligent hand. “That’s why I was sent.”
Lindo regarded me with empty eyes. Almost conversationally, she said, “You self-satisfied little bitch. You sniveling, conniving—”
The rest of the sentence wasn’t printable. Luckily, it was also nearly incoherent, as her voice got louder, shriller, and more distorted with every word, until she was full-on screaming insults at me. I had never seen anyone so angry, or made so ugly through anger. Her face crumpled into a clown’s mask of rage, horrible and hideous and strangely comic.
I think my lack of response enraged her further, because she ended in a scream of rage and threw her handbag at me. It missed by a mile and plowed into the gravel, and she screeched, “Now look what you’ve made me do! You’d better pay for anything that broke, you little—” She lurched at me, closer and closer, arms flailing.
I was so confused. I had no idea how to react. The problem was, I didn’t understand her, and I’m not used to not understanding people. Also, pepper spray was not an option.
Lindo’s flailing arms began slapping me—aimless, open-handed slaps, heavy enough to hurt but not to bruise. She kept screaming at me, calling me every name in the book and a lot of gobbledygook besides. She accused me of everything from conspiring to kill her to killing her sister to wanting to destroy her prefecture and bring the country to ruin to seducing Avior and Edenfield (and possibly the king as well) to whatever else flew up her throat and down her tongue and out her lips without bothering to check in with her brain along the way.
As she screamed, the blows grew more forceful. She whacked my head hard with the heel of her hand, shooting white-hot shards through the bullet graze, and screamed at me for hurting her hand. She hacked the arm down again, but a midnight-purple uniform interposed itself. That made her scream more, and rain down blows on the new body. I stumbled back, gasping and shaking my ringing, scorching head.
Torben didn’t defend himself against Lindo’s blows any more than I had, although that wasn’t due to shock in his case. A head knight striking a prefect not his own would’ve been political suicide—if not the outright sort—unless his prefect’s life was at stake. It did help him that he was so much taller than I, and Lindo’s blows reached only his chest. Shiro barked and danced, and I was afraid he was going to bite someone. Avior had wisely backed up to watch from a distance. I kept shaking my head and blinking against the darkness behind my eyes. I was going to have to get Francis to look at my graze again, the way it was splitting.
Everyone was doing something, but what no one was doing was interfering in any constructive way.
But this was my prefecture, wasn’t it? It was up to me to interfere. Not by yanking Lindo back by the hair—a prefect assaulting another prefect was the same as her head knight doing it. Besides, I needed her around for another five days.
Taking Lindo for inspiration, I therefore walked right up beside her, filled my lungs, and screamed in her ear.
Screaming effectively requires proper technique. You want your diaphragm to support you and your throat relaxed, like with singing. Higher is usually better, which gives women an advantage. Practice will let you hold the scream longer.
Even an older brother will have trouble keeping his grip on you with a one-hundred-decibel scream an inch from his ear—and, unlike Lindo, my brothers had practice.
Lindo’s screeches fell away into baffled silence. I stopped screaming on the instant, and moved into my third tactic: taking charge.
“The conference will go to plan,” I announced. “I understand your frustration, Graça, but we need you. Where are your keys? Ah.” I swooped the handbag from the ground and plucked out her keys before returning it to her. Then I marched to the car, got her suitcase from the trunk—I was assuming the flowered turquoise one was hers—and shoved it into her unresisting hands. “The conference begins in a few hours; you need to have breakfast first.” I took her right arm in my right hand and placed my left hand on the small of her back, the better to guide her to the front door. “Your room’s upstairs—it’s the same one as usual: end of the hall on the right. I’ll take you to the stairs. Breakfast’s on the ground floor, in the dining room next to the stairs. You’ve been under a lot of stress trying to plan, so I want you to relax. Everything’s going to be taken care of from here on out.”
I opened the front door and propelled her neatly through. She moved stiffly, tensely, but she moved and she didn’t swear at me. “I know it might not mean much, coming from me,” I went on, “but I’ve always admired you. There aren’t many women prefects, and you’re a force of nature. You put up with so much. I’m only beginning to realize how difficult your job is, and you’ve dealt with it for years. Well, for today, I want you to relax and let me deal with everything.” I took her to the foot of the stairs and released her there, frowning seriously. “We’re going to do good work this week, the nine of us. And we can’t do it without you.”
Lindo’s shoulders plumped back and forth, pride battling mollification. I kept my face stern and honest, and she gave in with a sniff. “Place would fall apart without me,” she said, hoisting her suitcase. “Save me some toast and marmalade.”
“I will,” I promised, and stopped by the dining hall to make good on that promise. In fact, Gina hadn’t even begun setting out breakfast. It was that early. The sunlight remained cool and distant behind the easterly mountains, and the breeze nipped my face as I stepped back outside.
“I see what you mean about having things under control,” Avior commented. He’d gotten his suitcase out and was sitting on it, waiting for me. “You sure controlled her.”
Torben was nowhere to be seen, though I trusted him to pop out again like hair in soup—at the most inconvenient moment. In case he popped sooner rather than later, I kept my voice low and my smile sheepish as I approached Avior. “Is she always like that?”
“Only when stressed,” Avior said, not like he cared about her, “and she’s usually stressed. Although maybe not this stressed.” He laughed humorlessly. “You talked up Jon so much I didn’t realize that his assistant’s starry eyes hid a powerhouse. I honestly believed you knew nothing of the conference. I should have remembered—all exceptional men must have exceptional assistants. Tell me, how did he know to send you here in his place—or do I have it backward? Do you control him like you controlled Lindo?”
He was lying to me. Not in any of his words, but in the way he was pretending not to mind being fooled—being handled, as it must seem to him, the way I had handled Lindo.
I cast my gaze to my feet and shook my head. “Don’t call it that. I didn’t control her. She just wanted someone to listen to her. To understand her. I get that.” I raised my eyes to him, pulsing patho
s. “You’re talking like I tricked you, but I didn’t. I knew the conference was happening, but not the rest of it. Sr. Nordfeld doesn’t discuss stuff like that. And I wasn’t supposed to come to the manor, not like this. But things kept happening—Prefect Silvertip knew you had come to see me, and he wanted to know why.” I steadied my mouth, certain and determined. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that I’m going to do my best to make sure everything runs smoothly. Only . . .” I let the vulnerability shine through, the determination slip and shrink inside my voice. “Only, I would like to know where Sr. Nordfeld is. He isn’t really in prison? You’re going to get him out, aren’t you? And bring him here?”
“That was the plan, before I knew you were here.” Avior tried a winning grin. He should’ve practiced it more first. “One doesn’t need the master when there’s a well-trained apprentice available. You are well trained?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Nonsense,” Avior said, standing up from his suitcase. “You’ll do just fine—or you will if you ever want to see Jon Nordfeld alive again. I’ll see you later, prefect.”
“Prefect,” I half replied, half echoed.
Chapter 25:
Misinformation
If you predict the variables thoroughly enough, Sr. Nordfeld had told me, you can predict every move in advance so completely that you can instruct someone else on what to do when, so that they can win even without you being present—even without that someone understanding what they’re doing.
But that’s the problem with people: they’re only predictable to a point and, unlike a game of chess, random factors will intrude. Where factors were stable, Sr. Nordfeld had predicted perfectly: the spy equipment was in place; the prefects were gathered. But his plan had hinged on one or both of us being present to collect the information from the spy equipment. He had not taken into account Silvertip arresting me or Lindo arresting him, and now a pawn was out of place.
Bargaining Power Page 27