“The raven was your good neighbor there,” she replied, equally drily. “He informed me that forcing someone into a social engagement and then standing them up was a very common sort of rudeness. When we get home, I’m promoting him. He’s much more sensitive to courtesy than Father ever was.”
Beyond the lift of an eyebrow and a delicate snort when he mentioned looking into her people, she was quiet and intent, taking in information. It was good to have something to focus on, like doing figures in one’s head or reciting the Catalogue backwards, to distance herself from this fetid, jogging box speeding across a tultharian city. Land-splits. That she understood. Trust the tultharian to get themselves in that sort of jam anyway; no one ever got anywhere with two owners pushing and pulling over the same patch of land and it was always the vassals who suffered for it. Tenants. They didn’t have vassals here. But tenants implied they could just leave if they wished; they weren’t beholden, not by fealty or duty. Why didn’t they? Momentary curiosity aside, she barely considered the question. They shouldn’t have to move. Two hundred years was two hundred years, even by Tuatha standards (although in the back of her mind, she had a vague, nagging concept that the same people had been there for two centuries), and in any case, they were a secondary matter.
Still. Aja Islands. A mental tickmark went beside the name. Could be she knew them by some other name. It wouldn’t hurt to find out where the islands lay. How near they were to home. How likely it would be for information to trickle to them. For all she knew, they could be one of the places they had spies set, though most of those were on the coast, not on an island that she knew of.
Two hundred years was two hundred years, but two hundred years was not long enough by Tuatha reckoning for information to be out of date.
But not now. He was waiting.
“Could always go over one or the other’s head and fund them for a buy-out,” she mused aloud. “That’s what I would do. I don’t suppose you could do it yourself, though.” She gave him a critical, doubtful once-over, frowning. “Not to insult your means, but if you want to keep your name well out of this, flashing money about isn’t the way to do it. Plus if it ever gets out, people will start pressing you for loans all the time.”
Another reason this partnership, however brief, was bound to go agly was that she had even less information than he, but also far, far fewer qualms. A born meddler with a quick sense of justice, her sympathies went at once for the people themselves, while their various landlords were cast as equivalent obstacles. Her nails lightly tapped on the seat as she considered, though she smiled at his hand gestures with a touch more wistfulness than the situation merited. It was exactly how her bard sculpted things in the air when she was trying to explain a point.
“My concern would be whether or not this lesser laird—noble,” she corrected quickly, with a scowl and a shake of the head, “ whether sh—he, would even be able to hold onto this land even if he gained majority over it. If he’s already…what’s the word? Strapped? then could be he’d end up in the same pit a few years down the line and lose the holdings anyway. Particularly if the trouble’s cyclic.” Her hands flopped down in frustration, and she gave him a plaintive look. “I don’t know these people, Glenn Elias Burnie; I can’t make a good prediction how this might play out. My instincts would be to make sure the greater one took the whole of the land because one could be more certain that he’d be able to retain it, and because it mightn’t be such a loss if he couldn’t collect a season’s worth of tributes every now and again. And then let him know quick and plain I’d be watching him like a hawk between times to make certain he didn’t take advantage. But you can’t do that.”
With a quick twist of the head very like the raven’s inquisitive expression, she snapped back to the present to regard Glenn with a touch of suspicion. She had questions. Quite a lot of questions, actually: how sure could he be of these men’s motivations? Sure enough to be certain that either would fall for the bait? Was there actually a military action forthcoming, or did he plan to spread the rumor himself (she would enjoy seeing how that worked without glamorie)? How on earth did this voting business function? But one rose above the others. “Is this all purely intellectual, or do you have some sort of investment in the outcome?”