David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

"How dare you-?!" he began.

"Do not presume to dictate terms to me!" Zindel thundered.

"I-" Chava began again, but a third voice interrupted him. It was a youthful voice, a soprano, which had never been raised in that Chancellery before.

"Do not discuss me as if I were not here!" that voice said with icy precision, and every eye turned to the Ternathian delegation.

Andrew Calirath stood there, and the golden strands in her midnight hair seemed thicker, brighter than ever, gleaming as she faced the combined leaders and rulers of her entire planet. She stood in her gown of muted grays and dark blues, the mourning band dark about her sleeve, and her eyes were Calirath eyes, dark with portents of the future, yet hard with the lightning flash of purpose. In some indefinable fashion she looked like both the teenaged girl she was and the avatar of Sharona's future-tall, strong, fearless, and wounded.

Emperor Zindel stared at his daughter, and his eyes were no longer those of an emperor. They were the eyes of a father, stark with fear for a daughter he loved more than life itself. They were the eyes of a man who had been asked for one sacrifice too many, of a man who could not-would not-give his family's juggernaut destiny his daughter, as well as his son. And they were the eyes, Darcel Kinlafia realized, of someone who recognized in this instant one fragment of the Glimpse he and Kinlafia had shared.

That man opened his mouth, his face hard with bitter determination, but the daughter looked up at her father and shook her head.

"Chanaka s'hari, Halian. Sho warak," Crown Princess Andrin Calirath said softly, and her father's face twisted as if the words had been bullets.

Yaf Umani was one of Sharona's foremost linguisticians. He'd never held a position in any university's Department of Ancient Languages-his career as the Portal Authority's Chief Voice had precluded that

– but he had a true Voice's love for languages … and he was one of the very few people in that enormous chamber who recognized the language in which she'd spoken. He was also a man of impeccable integrity, but the shocks had come too hard and fast over the past fourteen hours; his recognition of what Andrin had said leaked out to every Voice in the Chancellery.

"I am your daughter, Halian. I remember."

Silence hovered, and then, slowly-so slowly-Zindel chan Calirath bowed his head.

Andrin smiled at him almost gently. But then she turned to look across the Chancellery floor, and there was no gentleness in the tempered steel of the eyes which fixed themselves upon the Emperor of Uromathia.

"I beg leave to inform Emperor Chava that he is in error," she said clearly and distinctly. "The Act of Unification has been neither nullified nor invalidated by my brother's death, nor will the House of Calirath seek to evade its obligations under that Act. There is still an heir to the throne of Ternathia, and that heir is prepared to accept her obligations under the subsection Emperor Chava has just cited.

"But I am the Imperial Crown Princess of Ternathia, Heir to the Winged Crown of Celaryon, daughter of the House of Calirath, descendent of Halian and Erthain the Great!" Her eyes flashed gray lightning, and her voice rang out like a soprano sword. It was no longer the voice of a teenaged girl, but the voice of the most ancient lineage in human history, speaking through its current avatar, and all the weight of that lineage crackled in its pride and defiance … and anger. "My ancestors were emperors of half the world while yours were still picking lice, raiding their neighbors' sheep, and stealing their neighbors' wives.

You will not presume to dictate to me the man I will marry, Chava Busar!"

Busar's face darkened in fresh rage, but Andrin's eyes were deadly, and she continued speaking with that cold, lethal precision.

"Subsection Three of Article Two requires the Heir to Ternathia to wed a Uromathian royal prince within three months of the ratification of the Act of Unification, and that Act was ratified two weeks ago. Very well. You will submit to me no later than noon tomorrow a list of those you wish to nominate as my husband. You may list every unmarried male of your lineage, if such is your desire. But I, Chava Busar-I, and no one else-will make my choice from all the eligible nominees. I will marry as the Act requires, within the next ten weeks, but do not ever make the mistake of attempting to dictate to a member of my House again!"

"I can't believe she did that," Alazon Yanamar shook her head. "What was she thinking?"

"You know exactly what she was thinking, love," Kinlafia chided her sadly.

The two of them stood in Alazon's office in Calirath Palace, surrounded by her collection of horses as they gazed out the windows. The lamps were turned low, the sun had set hours ago, and a silver moon drifted over the palace gardens. It was a serene and beautiful sight, utterly at odds with the chaos and confusion which had enveloped the people who lived and worked in the Palace.

"You just don't want to admit that she was right," Kinlafia continued.

"Right?" Alazon stared at him in stark disbelief. "Gods, Darcel! She's seventeen! And she's a Ternathian!

The youngest of that bastard's sons is twenty-nine, and they're all just as bad as he is! Can you imagine what will happen to her when she marries one of them? Especially after humiliating his father the way she did this morning? Why not just invite him to rape her on the floor of the Conclave and be done with it?!"

"Yes." The word came out harshly, but Kinlafia met her angry eyes levelly. "I can imagine exactly what will happen. Vothan! Do you think I like the thought? But that doesn't change the fact that she's right.

That we've got to unify, and that we don't have time to give Chava the opportunity to reopen the entire unification debate."

"Yes we do!" Alazon protested. "And if Chava's going to open the door then I say we should use the opportunity he's given us to delete that entire subsection from the Act!"

"You know better than that." Kinlafia regarded her sternly. "In fact, I know you know better than that-

you've been the one teaching me to think in strategic political terms for the last two weeks! Do you really think Chava would have opened this entire subject if he wasn't prepared to announce that Uromathia would use the pretext of Janaki's death and the 'invalidation' of the Act to justify refusing to accept unification after all unless it's revised once again? This time to give him more power, more room to spin his webs? And do you think he waited until after the Emperor detailed his requirements by accident? He wanted every member of the Conclave to accept, gut-deep, just how serious the threat is.

And then he issued his demand.

"He wanted them to know how big a pistol he was prepared to hold to all of their heads. If he claims the Act is nullified, if he refuses to acknowledge Zindel's rightful coronation, then what happens to all of the preparations we need to make? Do you think for an instant that once that sack of snakes was untied, there wouldn't be enormous pressure from other members of the Conclave to give him more of what he wanted in the first place if that was the only way to get him to sign back up quickly now that the Arcanans have proven they're a genuine, immediate threat?

"He might as well have handed us a written memo about his new strategy, Alazon! The way he saw it, he won either way. Either he got to name Andrin's husband under the terms of the Act, or else Zindel told him to go straight to the Arpathian hells before he gave one of Chava's sons his daughter. And if that happened, if Zindel refused to honor the Act's terms, then Chava could declare that Zindel's decision to invalidate the Act absolved him of his agreement to surrender the sovereignty of Uromathia to Zindel … and that would have given him all the leverage in the world, unless we chose to fight that very civil war the Emperor told me last night he wanted to avoid!