Bang! Bang! “Cenedi! Do you hear me?”
Cenedi might be twenty years dead for all he knew. He sat frozen like a child on a footstool, arms about his knees, ready to defend his head and shoulders if Ilisidi’s whim turned the cane on him.
But to his relief, someone did show up, an atevi servant he took at first glance for Banichi, but it clearly wasn’t, on the second look. The same black uniform. But the face was lined with time and the hair was streaked liberally with gray,
“Two cups,” Ilisidi snapped.
“Easily, nand’ dowager,” the servant said.
Cenedi, Bren supposed, and he didn’t want tea, he had had his breakfast, all four courses of it. He was anxious to escape Ilisidi’s company and her hostile questions before he said or did something to cause trouble for Banichi, wherever Banichi was.
Or for Tabini.
If Tabini’s grandmother was, as she claimed, dying… she was possibly out of reasons to be patient with the world, which in Ilisidi’s declared opinion, had not done wisely to pass over her. This could be a dangerous and angry woman.
But a tea service regularly had six cups, and Cenedi set one filled cup in the dowager’s hand, and offered another to him, a cup which clearly he was to drink, and for a moment he could hear what wise atevi adults told every toddling child, don’t take, don’t touch, don’t talk with strangers—
Ilisidi took a delicate sip, and her implacable stare was on him. She was amused, he was sure. Perhaps she thought him a fool that he didn’t set down the cup at once and run for Banichi’s advice, or that he’d gotten himself this far in over his head, arguing with a woman no few atevi feared, and not for her insanity.
He took the sip. He found no other choice but abject flight, and that wasn’t the course the paidhi ever had open to him. He stared Ilisidi in the eyes when he did drink, and when he didn’t feel any strangeness from the cup or the tea, he took a second sip.
A web of wrinkles tightened about Ilisidi’s eyelids as she drank. He couldn’t see her mouth behind her hand and the cup, and when she lowered that cup, the web had all relaxed, leaving only the unrealized map of her years and her intentions, a maze of lines in the firelit black gloss of her skin.
“So what vices does the paidhi have in his spare time? Gambling? Sex with the servants?”
“It’s the paidhi’s business to be circumspect.”
“And celibate?”
It wasn’t a polite question. Nor politely meant, he feared. “Mospheira is an easy flight away, nand’ dowager. When I have the time to go home, I do. The last time…” He didn’t feel invited to chatter. But he preferred it to Ilisidi’s interrogation. “… was the 28th Madara.”
“So.” Another sip of tea. A flick of long, thin fingers. “Doubtless a tale of perversions.”
“I paid respects to my mother and brother.”
“And your father?”
A more difficult question. “Estranged.”
“On an island?”
“The aiji-dowager may know, we don’t pursue blood-feud. Only law.”
“A cold-blooded lot.”
“Historically, we practiced feud.”
“Ah. And is this another thing your great wisdom found unwise?”
He sensed, perhaps, the core of her resentments. He wasn’t sure. But he had trod that minefield before—it was known territory, and he looked her straight in the face. “The paidhi’s job is to advise. If the aiji rejects our advice…”
“You wait,” she finished for him, “for another aiji, another paidhi. But you expect to get your way.”
No one had ever put it so bluntly to him. He had wondered if the atevi did understand, though he had thought they had.
“Situations change, nand’ dowager.”
“Your tea’s getting cold.” He sipped it. It was indeed cold, quickly chilled, in the small cups. He wondered if she knew what had brought him to Malguri. He had had the image of an old woman out of touch with the world, and now he thought not. He emptied the cup.
Ilisidi emptied hers, and flung it at the fire. Porcelain shattered. He jumped—shaken by the violence, asking himself again if Ilisidi was mad.