Protector: Foreigner #14 by C.J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online

eavesdroppers on the aiji’s conversation outside this room had been very scant: nobody crowded in on Tabini without a clear signal to do so. But clearly there was something else, something that could not risk report. And they were in as much privacy as could be had.
    “They have put a public patch on the matter,” Tabini said quietly. “But be aware Damiri is entirely uneasy, and unreconciled. She does not trust my grandmother, and I worry for my son’s impression of the situation. You talked to him. Was he upset by it?”
    “Not discernibly, aiji-ma.”
    “Were you warned?”
    “Aiji-ma, I had no forewarning.”
    “She planned it,” Tabini said, with utter conviction.
    “Aiji-ma, one would tend to agree she had intended some discussion on the Ajuri matter—which I think it may have been. But she had not planned it tonight. Not that I know.”
    “Damiri has said—” Tabini drew a careful breath and let it go. “You well know, paidhi, that Damiri has lost one child to my grandmother, and she has requested me to promise not to put this next one in my grandmother’s hands for any reason of security. She has bluntly said, this very evening, and I quote, ‘I am forced to choose my uncle. I have your grandmother on one side and her lovers on the other. They control my son and now they are the only relatives I have. I shall
never
concede my daughter to them.’”
    “Aiji-ma.” What could one say? Damiri had lost her son’s man’chi through no fault of hers. The separation had broken the bond, when Tabini had sent Cajeiri away to space for protection. He had bonded to his great-grandmother. Intensely so. And he felt deeply sorry for Damiri.
    But
not
sorry enough to take her side over Tabini’s, and not sorry enough to regret his own part in bringing up Cajeiri. The boy was alive. And he might not be, if he had stayed with his parents through the coup. If they had had a child in tow, they might themselves not have survived the constant moving and the hiding in wilderness conditions.
    And, damn it all, if Damiri had never slipped into her father’s orbit last year, however briefly, and if Damiri had been less openly antagonistic toward Ilisidi once Ilisidi brought the boy back—
    “Damiri declares,” Tabini said, with a muscle standing out in his jaw, “that she still has man’chi to Ajuri clan. But that she has no man’chi now to her father. She says
she
will take the lordship of Ajuri herself, before she settles to be Tatiseigi’s tributary.”
    My God. “Can she muster support to do that, aiji-ma?”
    “Possibly. I think it has one motive. She views it would set her on a more equal footing with my grandmother.”
    Clan lord or not—it was not likely lordship of Ajuri was going to set anybody equal to Ilisidi. But he didn’t say that.
    “Will you back her in that, aiji-ma?”
    The muscle jumped. Twice. “Ajuri
swallows
virtue. That her father killed his brother-of-a-different-mother to get the lordship, one is all but certain. How the late lord himself got the lordship was also tainted. My wife wants to be lord of Ajuri—in her father’s place—and no, it is not a good idea, and
not
something I support, or will even tolerate, while she brings up my daughter—even if, in every other way, it would solve the threat Ajuri poses.” Tabini folded his arms, leaned back against the massive dining table. “I have a problem, paidhi. She is too proud to be Tatiseigi’s niece, in Atageini clan, even were he to make her his heir—which might happen, and which I would accept. She feels no kinship with them. Would she consent to become Ragi?” That was Tabini’s clan; and Ilisidi’s clan only by marriage and the bond of a son born in it. “I have invited her to take those colors. She is, I think, struggling with that idea. She cannot seem to attach.”
Attach
in the clan sense. In the atevi emotional sense. In the husband-and-wife sense. A human had no idea, except to say that Damiri was not at home