very well,” Caius said, resting his hand upon my shoulder. “Do you suppose that your lord Temur knows of what’s happening? I really will be crushed if he is not the man I believed he was.”
Josette sighed, a heavy sigh, from deep in her chest. “I don’t believe he knows. Not for the reasons you might be thinking, Greylace, so keep that to yourself, but… In my opinion, he’s not aware of it.”
“He’s one of the seven warlords,” I said, unsure. “If he doesn’t know what’s going on, then who would?”
“It might be an imperial order,” Caius murmured, in a way that made me feel like maybe we’d come to the heart of the matter at last—what we’d been trying to say all along, and what we’d had to dance all around first, while Caius tested the waters. This was what little Lord Greylace had been planning on discussing from the very beginning, and Josette and I had somehow managed to stumble right into his trap like painted marionettes.
Well, I, for one, wasn’t going to make things any easier for him than I already had. I didn’t like what was going on, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to pretend that I understood it, of all things.
“You mean he went right around the warlords?” I asked, lowering my voice too, just in case the guards got bored with their pacing and decided to linger next to my door a little, because odds were there was something exciting happening in here.
Well, that was what they got for sticking me in a room next to a madman. That’d teach them.
“I don’t know that he would go that far, my dear,” said Caius, looking at me with the same fondness a man reserved for particularly talented house pets. “I merely believe it possible that he made the decision without their knowledge, then presented it to them as a resolved matter—one which they would have no choice but to agree with lest they seem like traitors themselves.”
Josette leaned forward, elbows braced against her knees. “What reason would he have to do something like that?”
She looked as though she was trying to work it out on her own, frowning and gazing off to one side the way she did when negotiations weren’t going our way. I knew that look. Any minute, Josette would leap up and turn the tides for us. Or at least explain things for my benefit, which no one else had bothered to do.
“Maybe he got sick of listening to their yabbering on and on about nothing,” I said pointedly. “Maybe he just wanted to get something done.”
Caius looked almost disappointed. “Do use your head,” he said imploringly. “I know you can.”
“Unless, unless…” Josette was muttering to herself, toying with her too-long sleeves. She’d been dressing in the Ke-Han style of late, which suited her about as well as it suited Caius. Whether that was another mark of diplomacy that I’d somehow missed—dressing like the enemy to flatter them or whatever—I wasn’t sure. What I was sure about was that no one, not even Caius Greylace, was going to get me into another one of those complicated dresses again. They were too damned hard to run in, and I didn’t see any of the Ke-Han warlords dressing like us. We’d only won the damn war, but we weren’t supposed to expect any flattery?
Josette suddenly sat up straight, as if she’d caught a nasty splinter somewhere unfortunate.
“Unless this isn’t the first decision he’s made without their approval,” she hissed, looking at Caius with triumph like she’d solved a riddle I hadn’t even known we were trying to solve.
“Hang on,” I said, still trying to untangle the whole mess of what was going on. Why couldn’t we just tell a person something instead of making him work it out like it was a fair question, which it wasn’t? “Why do we even care if he’s the one making the decisions? Isn’t he the man meant to be making the decisions? Th’Esar doesn’t have a court of nannying diplomats waiting around to slow down his every decision, and we do all right, don’t we?”
“But is the current Emperor really the sort of man who seems like he ought to be making decisions all on his own?” Caius inquired slyly.
I thought about the Emperor’s eyes when he’d come at me in the outdoor training grounds, and the look on his face when he’d slit the moon princess’s throat.