“There is only one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did you take the emerald?”
Nuan Cee sighed again. “Because I was young once and foolish, so I did what my father had done to me to save me from myself. It is a thing within the clans that adults know and children learn when they become adults. The young are so rash, so desperate to make their own money and leave their mark on the Galaxy. Couki is very bright and that keen intelligence will get him into trouble. He will inherit a sum of money when he comes of age. He will use it hoping to prove that he has what it takes to be a Merchant. The bazaars of the Universe are full of greedy sharks and he is smart, but too inexperienced to swim with the worst of them. The brighter they are, the faster they lose the money. Left on his own, he will become bankrupt within months. It will take him another five cycles or so after he reaches the age of maturity to pay back the emerald and the interest. Time enough for him to learn and mature and for the clan to absorb his small mistakes and keep him from making big ones.”
“Nuan Cee was a very bright child,” Grandmother said with a smile. “He almost bankrupted the entire clan twice before his twentieth birthday.”
They trapped their young adults, forcing them to remain with the family. “Do you do this to every smart child?” I asked.
“Yes,” Nuan Cee said.
I rose. I had a couple of things I needed to verify.
Chapter 15
The full enormity of my task mugged me right outside the Merchants door. I made it midway down the curving staircase and sat down right there on the stone steps. How the hell was I going to fix this?
I wished desperately that my parents were here with all of the intensity of a terrified five year old in trouble. I wanted advice. I needed reassurance. What do I do, Mom? Dad? How do I handle this? They all want peace but can’t bring themselves to actually agree to it, and now Sean would die on some hellish planet fighting a war he never wanted to win. He’d signed his life away to save me. Looking into his eyes was like watching ashes rise from a funeral pyre. The vampires hid in their rooms, the otrokari were getting ready to leave, and the Merchants tried to poison me.
How do I fix this mess…
A pressure built in my chest, a dense insistent ache. A tear wet my cheek, made of distilled stress. I fought it back, but the pressure ground on me from the inside. I was ready to burst. Either I cried now or I forced it down, which meant I would have to cry later, probably at exactly the wrong moment.
I was alone. Nobody would hear.
I took a deep shuddering breath and let it go. The damn inside me broke. All of my stress and pain came out with the flood of tears. I cried and cried. I cried because I didn’t know what to do, because I almost died, because Sean sacrificed himself for me, and because I wanted my parents to hug me.
Gradually my sobs began to die down. I felt tired, but light. My head was clear.
A thin tendril slid out of the wall and brushed my cheek. I looked at it. A tiny white bud formed on the tip of the thin branch and opened into a little star of a flower with tiny turquoise stamens in the middle. A faint honey-sweet aroma drifted up.
The poor inn was trying to make me feel better.
I inhaled the aroma. It washed through me, sweet and delicate. That’s right. I was an innkeeper. I had seen the universe and I survived it. I would survive this too. I would fix this.
I stroked the branch with my fingers and whispered, “Thank you.”
If only all of them were as sensitive as Gertrude Hunt. The inn always felt what I felt…
It hit me like a freight train. George, you bastard. You conniving, manipulating bastard.
He knew. The Arbitrators’ database was one of the most comprehensive in the entire Galaxy. He did his research, figured it out, and then he set about finding an innkeeper he could manipulate into doing it. He must’ve approached some of us straight on, which is why everyone turned him down. No innkeeper would do this unless their back was against the wall and mine was.
Was Gertrude Hunt even strong enough? Was I strong enough?
I needed information. I had only seen it done once in my whole life and that was when my mother used our inn to get a murderer to confess. There had to have been others. I got up and went down into my lab.
Two hours later I had my answers. The good news was that Gertrude Hunt was definitely powerful enough to handle it. The inn’s roots were deep. It was possible. But it would have to go through me. I was the weakest link in this chain. As long as I held up long enough, it was possible. My books didn’t cover the last eighty years, but it did reach back three centuries from that point. The bad news was that four out of six innkeepers who tried it during that time went mad in the process.
Lousy odds.