Tarashana by Rachel Neumeier (little red riding hood ebook TXT) 📕

a moment of puzzlement, I realized why. Exasperated, I said to the three soldiers, “I tried to kill him a long time ago. Everything is different now. Lord Aras knows I am not thinking anything of the kind. Look at him! He is not guarding himself at all. You should trust that, but if you do not and you truly believe I might attack him now, you should be standing much closer to him! If I wanted to kill him, none of you are close enough to stop me!”

Aras was leaning against the table, his arms folded, the scepter laid aside for the moment, smiling. Esau glanced at him and snorted. He said to the other soldiers. “Ryo’s right, you know. Right about the whole business. You’re too far back.” He, alone of them, had come up close enough to grab me, but now he stepped away again, his shoulders relaxing. He said, “Sorry, Ryo. You’re the one who brought it up. Makes a man nervous.”

“I know you are mistrustful of everyone,” I told him. “I am not offended. But I will be if you will not leave now.”

“I’m sure that’d worry me,” he said in a dry tone. But he glanced again at Aras, then nodded to me, jerked his head at the other men, and walked out. They still did not want to leave me alone with Lord Aras, but he raised his eyebrows in the way he does. One of them glared at me openly, and the other two were not happy either. But they went out. I shut the door behind them.

“Esau only suspected your intentions for a second,” Aras told me. “He didn’t really believe there was any chance you’d do anything of the kind.”

“I know that,” I answered. “I do not need sorcery to know that. He tries ideas like that quickly, all the time, even ideas he does not like. Even ideas he thinks are stupid. He would be very difficult to make into a fool. Even a sorcerer as powerful as you are would probably find that difficult. If I had wished to kill you now, he would have guessed it and he would not have let himself be persuaded otherwise.”

Aras was smiling at me. I frowned at him. “If I had realized you wanted me to say all that out loud, I could have done it long ago.”

“I knew you weren’t offended by Esau’s suspicion. I don’t believe I realized how well you’ve come to understand some of the ways we Lau guard ourselves against sorcery. Nor how well you’ve come to understood Esau in particular.”

“He is not the only man I understand. Aras, you cannot put all those people to death in that way. You cannot do it.” I crossed the room, poured wine into a fragile goblet of blue glass, and brought it to him. “You are upset. Drink this and decide now you will not do it. Then you will be able to think more clearly.”

He took the goblet, but he said, “I don’t think there’s any possible way to avoid it. The attempt couldn’t have been more clearly an attempted assassination if the young man had written my name on the shafts of those arrows. He poisoned the tips.”

I had not guessed that. I said, “It was very clear already he meant to shoot only you. But Geras did not say the arrows were poisoned. I am sorry to hear of it. Terau is dead?”

“Not yet. But he will die soon. Geras doesn’t know about the poison. I asked the surgeons not to mention it. I’ll ask you to refrain as well. It’s assassination either way, but the punishment for using poison is even worse than the one prescribed for using a bladed weapon.”

I did not see how it could be worse.

“If you’re going to hang someone upside down and cut his belly open, you can give him something first that will dull the pain and hurry his death. For some punishments, it’s not possible to handle that sort of ... adjustment ... with sufficient subtlety.”

I nodded. But I said, “No matter how you adjust the punishment, you are speaking of putting very many people to death in this way. For Ugaro, it would be ten twenties of people. More than that. Perhaps many more than that.”

“Yes, if his family is at all typical, I’d expect at least two hundred people will be swept up in this gods-hated mess. Twice that, if his family is large.”

I had never become comfortable thinking of numbers as the Lau do and could not easily visualize two hundred people, but I nodded. “Women,” I said. “Children. People who had nothing to do with the attempt. Even if someone else of this family knew what the assassin planned, most of those people did not. Aras, you cannot possibly do this.”

“I can’t refuse. I can’t decline to pursue it. I can't grant clemency for it. I have the right to grant a royal pardon for certain crimes, yes, but not this one. Failing to apply the full penalty would be a terrible breach of my duty to my king.” He paused, looking at me. “There’s good reason for this law, Ryo. We really can’t have assassins attempting to murder our kings. Bad as this is, that would lead to worse problems.”

I was completely exasperated with him. “I am not saying it would be wrong for anyone to order such a thing. I am saying it would be wrong for you to do it. If I had known this, I would have killed him myself. Your uncle could not have set any fault against you for that.”

He sighed. Then he said, “That might have been better, at least in some ways. But I can’t let anything like that happen now. If you were thinking of trying to kill him before I can question him, please