Laura Gilman - Burning Bridges

“A onetime event, in the confusion of battle…”

“Council member!” Beyl had the best mock-shocked voice Wren had ever heard, like a fourth grade schoolteacher. The Retriever stifled the totally inappropriate urge to giggle. “Are you defending these vigilantes?”

“Of course he is not,” Ayexi said, so smoothly Jordan didn’t even have a chance to get huffy at the accusation. “He is merely playing, dare I say it, devil’s advocate. We must be aware of all possible interpretations, in order to make the best countermoves in our defense.”

Ayexi was good. He was cool, and smooth, and on the surface you might think he was discussing china patterns, or the price of something he had no interest in buying. But Wren could see the faint twitch over his left brow, the one that meant he was sweating inside. The Council was taking this seriously. Good. It was their fat in the fire, too: you didn’t get a stamp on your forehead that said “council” when you joined; anyone gunning for Talents wouldn’t discriminate based on your internal allegiances. That much, Wren was pretty damn sure about. More, Madame Howe, the head of the Eastern Council, was pretty damn sure about it, too. Enough to cover all her bases, by sending her people to this table for parlay even after doing her damnedest to break the local lonejack community to the Council’s yoke. It might only be for appearance’s sake, but if Jordan and Ayexi were willing to take it seriously, they could maybe accomplish something despite the politics.

“No matter their reasons, by attacking indiscriminately, both human and fatae, these…vigilantes showed that they do not distinguish. They chose not to distinguish.” Beyl was definite on that.

“The associate of my enemy is my enemy,” Ayexi said.

“Exactly.” Beyl’s feathered head gave a decided nod of agreement.

Wren could feel Sergei wince, beside her, even though he didn’t move. The answer to that was not to be the associate of the enemy, an answer they couldn’t afford the Council to make.

So far, everyone was falling into their preconceived roles: the fatae calling for attack, the Council wanting to hold the status quo without too much risk, and the lonejacks wary of either position—and of making any decision at all. Time to shake things up a bit.

“There have been reports.” Michaela looked down at the material Wren had given her before the meeting started, all the details she and P.B. could recall, from all their meetings and discussions and overheard conversations over the past twelve months. “There have been reports of these…bigots taunting fatae. Calling them animals, yes…but also calling them on their use of magic.”

“Fatae do not use magic!”

Jordan sounded almost outraged at the thought, as though a fatae had dared snitch something of his own possession. But he was right. Fatae, for the most part, were magic, deep in their bones and sinews, but they didn’t use it. They weren’t designed to channel current the way Talents were. In their own way, they were as Null as…as Wren’s mother.

Okay, she amended that thought. Nobody is as Null as my mother.

“You’re missing the point,” Michaela said.

“You’re pushing the point. And I’m not entirely sure I buy into your argument.”

Beyl leaned into the table, a feather coming loose and floating, slowly, to the floor. Wren found her attention focusing on that, and had to bring herself back to the discussion at hand—and talon—with an effort.

“We are the Cosa Nostradamus. If that is to mean anything, it must mean something now. It must mean solidarity. It must mean accountability. It must mean that we can count on each other—for support—and for shared defense. In their eyes, we are all one, and worthy of disdain, fear, and violence. We must show them that we are also one in our response, and that response must be worthy of respect—and teach them to leave us alone.”

Beyl built a pretty good case for a counterattack against their enemy—except that she couldn’t, for certain, say where the attacks were coordinated from, assuming they had any single source at all. Any attack the Cosa made would be based on reactive information, not proactive. Wren wouldn’t have wanted to go on a Retrieval with such sketchy info, ignoring the fact that she already had, once.

And see where that landed you? Learn from it!

“We can’t afford that sort of attack.” Michaela was parroting what Wren had been beating into their heads from the beginning: that without something concrete and significant, any large-scale act of aggression would be met with even fiercer aggression and even more justification from their enemy. She had been talking about the Council at the time, but it was even more true here.

Although lonejacks were better at violence than they were at organization, as a rule.

“We can’t afford not to, either.” Ayexi looked surprised to be agreeing with the fatae—almost as surprised as Jordan looked, to hear his advisor taking the lead. He went on, undaunted. “You are correct, Michaela, Madame Griffin. If this threat is to all Talents—to all the Cosa—then we need to take action. Before it spreads beyond this city.”

Wren got it. From the exhalation of breath from her partner beside her, he figured it out at the same moment, as well. Michaela was a little slower, but she got there. Beyl’s feathered eyebrows rose in puzzlement. The fatae were clearly not as au courant—pun intended—on Talent politics as they should be.

The de facto leader of the New York City-area Council, KimAnn Howe, had just brokered a significant—and tradition-breaking—merger with the San Diego Mage Council, bringing their leader into a subordinate level to her own. It was a risky, distinctly ballsy move that, if it hadn’t been for the attacks, would have been the primary concern facing the lonejacks—had, in fact, been the primary concern just a few months earlier, when the Council was being twitchy while she made her moves.

If Madame Howe could not now prove to the local members of the Council—and the other Councils across the country—that she could control things in her own city, then she would lose the power amassed by that merger.

KimAnn Howe did not let go of power easily, if at all. Especially not after what she had gone through to get it.

“You are proposing…?”

“A truce. A…cessation of any probing for weaknesses, or maneuverings, or any kind of hostilities, overt or otherwise. On all sides.”

Wren, by sheer force of effort, didn’t roll her eyes in disgust. In other words, do nothing.

“Too passive. And entirely within your best interest, but doing nothing for the fatae. What can you give to us?” Beyl asked.

Jordan started to spread his hands, as though to say he was out of ideas, when a new voice piped up.

“What about reinstituting the patrols?” Beyl’s assistant, the until-now silent gnome, poked his head up over the tabletop and peered at them all, black eyes sparkling with interest. “They did the job proper, they did, back then.”

Wren almost fell off her chair. Oh, perfect! Damn it, as one of those former patrollers, she should have been the one to think of that! They’d done it twice, actually; once when the piskies decided to take their pranking to near-dangerous levels, and had to be sat on, and then again more recently, when there had been a series of attacks on the fatae—attacks that, in hindsight, were probably the first inroads of vigilantism, the early attempts of the so-called “pest exterminators” to clear the city of what they perceived as an infestation of nonhumans. So it had the value of precedent, wasn’t so proactive as to unnerve the Council, but gave the fatae something real to work with….

“It was only a short-term cure,” Michaela was saying, dubious. “A preventative…”