Heir's Revenge (Return of the Aghyrians Book 4)

by Patty Jansen

  Me? “Hang on. You’re not saying you’re getting married to Enzo?”

  Sariandra looked down and nodded. Her cheeks flushed with red.

  Enzo? With Sariandra?

  She tried to imagine there being any kind of spark between those two, and, with all the will in the world, couldn’t.

  That was awful. If she married Enzo, Sariandra would never free herself from her father’s influence, because Enzo was in Asitho Bisumar’s pockets. Enzo would treat her like a whore and a slave and Father . . . She didn’t even want to think about it. Sariandra was too tiny and skinny to do the heavy work of lifting him, and after he’d leered at her or tried to grab her breasts, she wouldn’t want to do it anymore, and Enzo would use her—rightful—outrage to force Father to live as a prisoner in his bedroom cared for by a quick progression of grumpy nurses.

  Sariandra shrugged. “Look, don’t worry about it. Let’s talk about the play.”

  “I do worry about it. I worry about my father.”

  Sariandra gave her a is-he-still-alive? look. “You think I can’t look after him?”

  Ellisandra closed her eyes and sighed. “No, I don’t mean that at all. It’s just that . . . he’s not very healthy and sometimes he gets into these moods where he’s not very nice.” That was putting it mildly. “He might be my father, but I wouldn’t wish him on my worst female enemy.”

  “Good thing I’m worse than your enemy then.”

  “Stop talking rubbish! Who has been talking this nonsense into your head? Have a bit of confidence. Be proud of yourself.”

  “You don’t understand!”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  Sariandra gave a small sob.

  “I understand perfectly. Your father is a first class arsehole. He’s got you so frightened that you think you’re worth nothing. He’s got—”

  “It’s not like that at all!”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s all my fault! Just leave me alone. You can’t help me.” She turned and ran out of the office and down the stairs.

  “Sariandra!” Ellisandra ran after her, but Sariandra ran across the rehearsal hall, through the corridor to the state door, which she opened—

  Ellisandra yelled after her, “It’s cold out there!” She didn’t even have her cloak.

  —the door slammed.

  Well, damn it. Ellisandra ran back up the steps, almost crashed into Tolaki who was coming the other way and pressed herself against the wall, eyes wide.

  Ellisandra ran into the office, grabbed her own cloak and Sariandra’s. She felt through the pockets of that cloak, and dumped their contents onto the desk. She didn’t think that the listening device was amongst all the assorted debris that bounced over the table.

  Then she ran back out the office, again almost crashing into Tolaki.

  “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  “Sariandra has some kind of trouble. She ran out without her cloak.”

  “That girl is a lot more trouble than she’s worth.”

  Ellisandra stopped. Met Tolaki’s eyes.

  A small frown crossed Tolaki’s face. “It’s true, isn’t it? You spend so much effort helping her, you might as well make those costumes yourself.”

  Ellisandra stared at her.

  Her first reaction was, What, are you jealous that I help someone in trouble?

  The next reaction was, How dare you say something like that? Have you no idea what sort of arsehole her father is?

  Then the third reaction was that Tolaki probably agreed with the arsehole, and she did not want to go there and lose a friend.

  And that brought a deep chill to her insides. She liked Tolaki and didn’t have the time for a lengthy—and possibly unpleasant—argument, so she said only, “See you later.”

  But as she ran down the steps, the chill spread. If she ended up going too much against Asitho Bisumar, she risked losing a lot more than just his support.

  She ran through the rehearsal room, the corridor and out of the theatre, down the steps and into the alley. It was cold and misty out there. The cold air bit into the exposed skin in her neck.

  The form of Sariandra just disappeared around the corner into the street.

  Ellisandra sprinted down the alley as fast as the slippery ground allowed. Sariandra had run into the main street and was going downhill towards the lower end of the commercial quarter. She was the only person in the street not wearing a cloak, with just her arms clamped around herself against the cold. Where the hell was she going? It was freezing cold out here, even with a cloak.

  Sariandra turned another corner into an alley that led past the back of a number of shops and business buildings. A man came out of a door and down the steps into the alley. He was no more than a shaggy shape in a thick cloak and Sariandra crashed into him—no, she threw herself in his arms. He held her in a hug. They kissed, not just a peck on the cheek, but a full-on passionate kiss.

  Well, that certainly explained something.

  She retreated into a niche next to a stack of packed snow, and watched, her heart still thudding from running down the street. The man drew Sariandra into the warmth of his cloak. His hair slid over her shoulder until his strands of hair mingled with hers. He held her tight as Ellisandra had hoped to be held by her husband, in an embrace of passionate love.

  Then he let her go. Hand in hand, the two of them then went further down the alley, down a set of steps and disappeared into a cellar under a shop. Ellisandra followed at a slower pace.

  The entrance where Sariandra and her mystery man had disappeared was underneath a bread shop in the lower end of the commercial quarter. She knew the place. A reliable baker, and not too expensive. A lot of Nikala from the nearby high-rise residential area bought their bread there.

  She stopped at the top of the stairs. This was one of those old cellars that was half in the ground and half out. They were good for storing things that could not be allowed to freeze, since the warmth from the earth would keep the temperature above freezing point even during winter nights. The sound of many voices—mainly male—drifted into the alley. They were too far away for Ellisandra to hear what was being said.

  She slowly went down the steps and put her ear near the door, but although the voices were louder, she still couldn’t discern clear meaning. If only . . .

  Ellisandra tried the door handle. It turned and the door opened a crack.

  The voices continued as if the people inside hadn’t heard her. Carefully, she pushed the door further open.

  She found herself in a little dank foyer with a bare and worn stone floor where it smelled of mould. Down another set of steps was a larger cellar, in which the ceiling was upheld by rows of columns. On the ground, on cushions, sat a number of people, a mixture of Endri and Nikala. Sariandra was one of them.

  Now that Ellisandra had entered the cellar, they stopped talking and all of them looked at the door. Most of the people she had seen before. They were artists, second and third sons of Endri families or merchants. Some of them were associated with the free theatre, the kind that, unlike hers, didn’t get a regular audience or pay, but didn’t get prescribed which play to perform either. There were about fifteen of them, seated on cushions with their cloaks covering their legs. Her eyes met those of one of the men.

  “Jintho?”

  Another Endri man rose and came towards her. “What are you doing here?”

  “I followed Sariandra. She . . . um . . . forgot her cloak.” Ellisandra held out her arm with the garment. He didn’t touch it.

  “How did you get in?”

  “The door was open.”

  The young man said, “You’re going to have to leave.”

  Jintho said, “It’s all right. She’s my sister.”

  The man turned to Jintho. “I know she’s your sister. She’s also in the council’s fucking back pocket. I don’t want her here, mate.”

  “I tell you, she’s all right.”

  This was followed by
an intense silence.

  Ellisandra noticed the carafe of menisha brew and glasses on the floor.

  So this was where he spent all the time he wasn’t at home: drinking with a bunch of artists who had nothing better to do.

  Sariandra met her eyes, her expression defiant. How had she ended up with a group like this one? Ellisandra had expected better of the High Councillor’s daughter. In fact, she expected better from her own brother.

  He shrugged, his face sad. “We started meeting here to talk art. For fun, really. You all know how much art gets sold in Miran. We’re trying to figure out ways to survive without having to rely on our families. We all want to have our own houses eventually, too.”

  “That explains the business with the shop.”

  Did he cringe? Did several people, including Sariandra, cast him a sharp look?

  She was involved in it? That made a lot of sense. “What is it about opening a shop that can’t see the light of day?”

  “Because we’re Endri, and because Endri don’t have shops,” Sariandra said, her voice sharp.

  “Because we’re planning to sell a wide range of designs, including non-Mirani ones,” a Nikala man said. “Young people want to look modern and in tune with the times. They don’t want to be dictated what to wear by old-fashioned men with no sense of fashion—”

  “All of whom wear uniforms anyway,” someone else added.

  “We’re planning to employ mainly artists. The tailor’s association is not going to be happy, because we’re not going to adhere to their standards.” This was another young man, who could have been Keldon Nirumar’s twin brother for all his daintiness. He even wore a jewelled clip in his hair and had his fingernails painted.

  Another said, “No one is going to be happy about this, especially not our families.”

  “How far along is this plan?” Ellisandra asked.

  “We’ve got the designs, we’ve got the fabrics. We’re starting to source people to make the clothes for us.”

  “What about the shopfront?”

  “Working on that.”

  “And the permit?” She met Jintho’s eyes.

  “Yeah, that.” He looked down. Sariandra glanced at him and the others fell quiet.

  What about the permit? Enzo needed to sign it? And Enzo, and Asitho Bisumar, clearly had some sort of hold over Jintho that she didn’t understand. Or maybe she did.

  She was beginning to think that the man Sariandra had kissed was her brother Jintho. If that was so, why was Sariandra now going to marry Enzo?

  “Please let me try this, Elli,” Jintho said. “I know you think I’m no good for anything—”

  “I never said that.”

  “No, you haven’t, unlike some, but you’re very bad at hiding your feelings. Just for once, put away your objections and reasons why this is never going to work.”

  “Whether it will work is up to you, but I am worried that this is going to fly in the path of the council’s import restrictions. Even I run into problems with the theatre. For the last production, we needed silk. The best silk comes from Barresh, so I can’t buy it. They also produce some silk in Kesilu, but it’s been a bad year, so it’s far too expensive for my budget, and besides, that product is substandard and I’m not going to pay what the growers are asking. Do you think I can convince the council to let me import it? If you’re going to sell modern, non-Mirani designs, you’ll need non-Mirani materials.”

  “We are working on that.”

  “I can’t see how you can work on it unless you’re going to rely on illegal supplies, and if you start selling those in a shop, you’ll be on the wrong end of a very hot poker very soon.” The council had people everywhere in the form of the Citizens’ Groups.

  “Trust me, we’re working on it.”

  She stopped asking because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to know more. “Be careful, Jintho, because it’s not worth getting in serious trouble.”

  “We will. Don’t worry about it. We will be fine.”

  She wished she could be so convinced.

  17

  IT DIDN’T LOOK like Jintho knew that his brother was set to marry his girlfriend, and Ellisandra desperately didn’t want to be the one who told him. Sariandra obviously knew, but she seemed too terrified to tell him . . . or maybe she had other plans, and Ellisandra desperately didn’t want to know about those either. The less she knew, the less she could be accused of not telling people in authority. She had a theatre production to run. It was none of her business.

  In the next month, Jintho went into a frenzy of activity. It seemed he had finally found something useful to do. She was still sceptical about the potential for success, but time would tell and it was out of her hands.

  Sariandra came back to the theatre. Costumes were made. The orchestra practiced. Snow fell, rather a lot of it. The actors learned their lines. Ellisandra watched the rehearsals, and was still wavering on going ahead with her plan to make the last scene gory, and making up her mind whether the resulting outrage would be worth it.

  The blood and gore would be shocking to many people who hadn’t done anything that deserved being shocked. There would be children in the audience, and besides the fact that she didn’t like the play, what point was she trying to make with that final scene?

  This is your country: one of cruel barbarians who kill people just for being foreign.

  Could she be jailed for saying that?

  Despite the fact that serious progress was being made on the Andrahar house, Vayra came to every practice. He chatted with the players about culture and music, and seemed to enjoy himself. He looked at her often, but Ellisandra stayed away from him, and made sure that she was never in a situation where she was alone with him or where he could tell her anything that she would have to tell Nemedor Satarin.

  She dropped into the Accountkeepers’ system occasionally to gawk at the huge amounts he was spending. During the day, he had many builders on the site. The roof was almost on, they’d installed windows and were doing the inside. The pace of progress was incredible. When paid and fed well, this team could build an entire city in a month.

  At night, at least three or four guards patrolled the site. They were barely recognisable in their strange-looking helmets and dark jackets. When they first started work, a month back, they wore all-Mirani gear, black leather, fur cloaks and crossbows, but there had been a subtle shift to body armour underneath the cloaks, and guns in addition to the crossbows. One by one ditched the cloaks and donned helmets.

  It looked like not only had Vayra managed to get himself into Miran through the back door, but he was still bringing in material. She had thought that he was using the nomads, but they were now staying in town and no longer travelling out of the city.

  Often, when she watched the orchestra rehearse, Vayra’s eyes would meet hers over the heads of the other players, and he would probably wonder what he’d said wrong for her to be such a cold fish.

  She also hadn’t decided if she cared that he might think that. She probably shouldn’t because of Jaeron, but she was beginning to feel certain that she didn’t care much for Jaeron, or for that matter, for Tolaki, after what she had said about Sariandra. Worse, the whole subject of her upcoming wedding made her feel ill. One night, she even dreamed that she sneaked through Jaeron’s yard with a knife to kill him so that she couldn’t marry him. She was arrested by the guards and taken to the prison—which looked exactly like the set Loret and his team were building for the third scene—where the floor was covered in blood.

  That dream was so bad that she woke up in a sweat and had to run to the bathroom to vomit, after which Darma decided that she had a fever and had probably caught something in the draughty halls of the theatre. Ellisandra stayed home by the fire for half a day, already feeling much better, and glad for the rest.

  It allowed her to complete the project she had set for herself: to read through every page of Foundation Law. Next to her bed she kept a little notebook in which she wrot
e all the strange laws relating to Foundation families that she had never heard before and that no one seemed to enforce. Her list grew quite long. She guessed the law was due for an update, but simply getting rid of all these little provisions was not the answer.

  Because if, for example, the council wanted to make a top-level decision, like approve a budget, change a law, call an election, oust a misbehaving member, or, for that matter, declare war, no one would be able to stop them. No one would have the authority to step up and ask for a recount, a re-trial or reconsideration. No one could challenge the decision on moral grounds. The council couched the changes in a trivial just cleaning up the laws justification, but it was much more than that, and yes, she didn’t think many people had an idea of the seriousness of the situation.

  That same evening, Enzo came to her when she was about to go and bring Father his meal.

  “Elli, do you have a moment?”

  “I’m about to bring Father his dinner. You could come.”

  “I’d rather not. Come with me.”

  He preceded her into his room, where it was warm and a lusty fire burned in the hearth. He offered her his chair by the fire and sat down opposite her. On the little table between them stood a carafe of brew.

  Wow, he really did drink a lot.

  “It’s about my wedding. I need to get it organised.”

  She frowned at him. “Why are you asking me? You should ask a planner.”

  He clasped his hands together. “I should. But you see, they’re booked out.”

  Her frown deepened. “When are you wanting to have this?”

  “Next month.”

  “Next month?” she burst out. “What? Why the hurry?”

  “I don’t like wasting time.”

  “No, you’re wasting my time instead. I’ve got a theatre production to run. I don’t have time to organise a wedding.”

  “Aw, Elli . . .”

  “No. And no, and if you’re asking, no. Wait until spring, like a normal person.”

  “I can’t. I promised.”