4.73: Political Assassination

I’d expected some exasperation from the Council. Some comments about the interruptions getting ridiculous. But there was silence, when Malas entered.

I looked back. All nine of them had stood up. Even Alania.

“Kuracar,” the Grand Master said.

“Grand Master,” Malas said.

“Why are you here?”

“I received an anonymous message that my future apprentice was meeting with you. I thought he might need supervision, to be sure he doesn’t get hurt. Again.”

“Your message was in error,” Alania said tightly. “Mr James is not, in fact, the focus of this meeting.”

“Really? Because I could hear you from the corridor, and it really sounded like – ”

“Nor is he your apprentice, as of yet. You have even less claim to be here than the Fiore did last time.”

Malas cocked his head. “Do you really want to do this right now?”

She crossed her arms. “Do you?”

“Kuracar,” the Grand Master said, “this is a private meeting, and I must ask you to leave.”

He glanced over the small crowd in the room. “It looks positively public to me.”

“Nevertheless.”

Malas crossed his arms.

“Kuracar,” the Grand Master snapped, “we have rules and protocols, and you have no place here. If you won’t leave, then I’ll be forced to have the guards escort you out.”

There was something off about this whole thing, I realised. Malas had said he was here out of concern for me, but that was clearly wrong. Whatever was happening here had nothing to do with me at all; he’d barely glanced at me since coming in, and nobody seemed to have notified Talbot or Hua’s surveyanti, or Cheryl’s master. Or my surveyanto, for that matter; if someone wanted to call someone in for me, they would’ve called Fiore. Malas had no legal guardianship of me yet.

He was here for some other reason.

“He’s my civilian witness,” Demeter said suddenly.

“What?” someone asked, at the same time as Solus said, “He doesn’t count! He’s not a civilian!”

“Actually, he is,” Demeter said. “And we’re each allowed up to two witnesses. He’s my witness, and he can stay so long as he keeps his mouth shut and stays out of proceedings.”

“Is this going to be a trend, now?” one of the other Masters asked. “Dragging in whoever we want with the witness rule?”

“To be fair, that’s why the rule exists,” Lord Solus said. “If Demeter wants him – ”

“Why do you want him here?” Alania asked.

“What I want,” Demeter said, “is to get out of this cursed meeting sometime today. I want to not spend half an afternoon in a pointless pissing contest with the kuracar. So I propose that he stays quiet and that we move this thing along. It’s already taken far longer than it should have.”

The Council settled back down.

“Where were we?” Lord Solus asked.

“I believe the next step would be attempting to find some kind of agreement with these three that would make them feel safer in joining the school,” Alania said.

“This is a surveyanto’s job,” Demeter grumbled.

“Yes, well, today it’s ours,” Alania snapped.

“We’re not gonna reach an agreement,” Alan said, “because you break your agreements. You’re still sending Kylie off, right? Still shrugging and sitting on your hands over Kayden having to go with her? You say you’ll play nice now, but once we’ve been through the Initiation, what’s to stop you changing your mind if you can do that to them?”

“This is a waste of time,” Helen said. “They’re not going to do anything. We should all just go home.”

“You’re all considering leaving the school?” Malas asked sharply, and I realised why he was really here. I’d been right; the message that had brought him here hadn’t been about me. Instruktanto Cooper was in charge of Australia, but the law that had brought in the younger witches, the one they were apparently looking into expanding into England and America… that was Malas’ pet project, wasn’t it? Or at least he was invested enough in it to have manipulated me over it as an initiate.

“We’re not sticking around somewhere that treats its students like this,” Alan explained. “If they’re gonna do this to Kylie, we don’t want any part of it.”

Malas traded a glance with Cooper, who offered him a tight smile.

“Well,” Malas said, “that certainly is something that needs to be addressed.”

“If you’re going to stay, you need to be quiet, Mr Aksoy,” Demeter said. “Children, I fail to understand what the point of this meeting is if you won’t even entertain the idea of an alternate agreement. Why come here at all, instead of just quitting? You have to know that this Council isn’t going to reverse important political decisions over this.”

“Why not?” Malas asked. “The decision should never have been made. Kylie is entitled to this school’s protection, Mr Acanthos’ death removes any immediate impetus for such a surrender, and Kylie and Kayden are not only both extremely valuable but best kept under my medical observation. We – ”

“You were told to be quiet, Aksoy,” the Grand Master snapped. “Abide by the decisions of this Council or be escorted out.”

Lord Solus added, “Perhaps none of you appreciate how serious the matter of the theft of an ancestral spell, intentional or not, and the murder of an envoy actually is. One of the major reasons that Refujeyo was founded was to avoid mage wars. We have no intention of starting one.”

“But you can pay them off with something else, right?” Jamil asked. “I mean, you guys deal with smaller mage nations all the time. This can’t be the first time you’ve pissed one off. there’s got to be something you can do to negotiate for the Faith of Fionnrath for one measly human lifetime.”

“I don’t think you understand the sheer cost of such a negotiation.”

“Right, of course,” Talbot said. “Far cheaper to trade two human lives, right?”

“This isn’t going anywhere,” Alan said. “Let’s go.”

“My mum is going to hear all about this,” Jamil mumbled as they turned to file out.

“Still not responding to threats, young man,” Demeter told him.

“Apologies for the confusion, Master,” Cheryl cut in smoothly, “but nobody is threatening you.”

“Are you sure?” Jamil asked. “Because I was definitely trying to threaten them.”

“Only because you don’t have all of the information.” Cheryl glanced at Malas and Cooper, steeled herself, and continued. “Jamil wasn’t giving you a threat,” she said. “He was offering you a lifeline. If you go ahead with sending Kylie to Fionnrath, you’re absolutely going to want these initiates to go to the press. You’re going to want Australia to reverse its act and kill any chance of any other country passing it. If you send Kylie to Fionnrath, then totally destroying that law will be about the only thing you have going for you when it comes to avoiding a very probable civil war.”

Absolutely everyone in the room except for Cheryl looked confused. Including the initiates.

Cheryl continued, more quietly, “We must remember that Parveen Surya was almost killed under your protection, in the Pit.”

If this was relevant, I didn’t see how. Nor, judging from their expressions, did anyone else.

“Um,” Hua said, “what does that have to do with anything? I mean, it’s not great, but an accident is an accident, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It sucked, but Saina’s fine. She’s even still coming to school. I mean, she had bodyguards, but…”

“The High Crone may have made the baffling decision to continue to entrust her daughter’s safety to Skolala Refujeyo,” Cheryl said, “but she’s not the only politician. Nor is she the only politician with kids at this school. There are whispers. Obviously, put a bunch of powerful heirs in one location and you’re going to attract problems; assassination attempts at Skolala Refujeyo aren’t completely unheard of before now but – ”

“To be clear,” Lord Solus cut in, “the Pit was examined very thoroughly by multiple experts after that incident, and no evidence of tampering was found. There’s no reason to suspect there was any assassination attempt at all. Most likely, there was some sort of minor error in the Pit itself, and the student actually hurt was a matter of luck.”

“I didn’t hear any announcement about the Pit being damaged,” Hua said. “I know it’s closed, but...”

“It’s closed while the investigation is underway,” Lord Solus explained. “We don’t know the exact nature of the flaw, yet. It hasn’t been replicated in any of our tests.”

“Which is why there’s still a pretty strong suspicion that somebody tried to kill the High Crone’s daughter,” Cheryl said. “Your investigation hasn’t come up with any better explanation.”

“The investigation is ongoing,” Lord Solus said tersely.

“Hold up,” Talbot said. “The Initiation’s in a few weeks, right? I haven’t heard any announcements about delaying it.”

“You can’t delay an Initiation,” one of the Masters said, like this was obvious.

“So you’re going to send a semester’s worth of students into a broken Pit?”

“The Pit isn’t broken,” Alania said, sounding exasperated. “There was one incident involving a failing safety feature that’s only used for some Pit sports. It’s not even used for Initiations, so it isn’t relevant.”

“And students already know that the Initiation is dangerous,” Demeter added.

“Um, no we don’t.” Helen crossed her arms. “We know that the spells in there might kill us. But nobody said anything about it being extra super dangerous for us this semester because the Pit itself is broken.”

“It’s not broken,” Alania repeated. “At least, no part of it that you’ll be using is broken. You don’t shut down an office building because a fire alarm on the top floor keeps going off for no reason.”

“Yeah, you do,” I said, “if you can’t find the reason it’s going off. You don’t know what broke, right? So, yeah, it was a safety feature that failed, but without knowing what caused it, how do you know the Pit isn’t more dangerous for the Inititates?”

“Even if the relevant parts of the Pit were somehow damaged, it still wouldn’t be exceptionally dangerous this year,” Demeter said. “The Initiation gets safer and safer every time. You could strip out all the current enchantments and it’s still be safer than when your parents went through it.”

“Our parents didn’t go through it,” Kylie pointed out. “Witches.”

“People in previous generations got worked to death in coal mines, so no workers alive today should complain, right?” Talbot added.  “If there’s added danger, the Initiates should know.”

“There is no reason to believe that there’s added danger,” Lord solus said. “The incident with Miss Surya was a one-off. It hasn’t been replicated.”

“Of course not, you shut down the Pit right after,” I pointed out. Realistically, I thought he was right. None of the glitches I’d seen in the school had happened more than once. They didn’t seem to be creating long term problems, and the Pit was probably perfectly fine. But I couldn’t help myself.

“I meant in testing,” he said, testily. “We have no indication as of yet that anything is even wrong with the Pit itself.”

“Well, either there’s a flaw, or tampering,” Cheryl said. “Either your Pit is damaged, or someone tried to assassinate Parveen Surya. One of these things is true, right?”

“The investigation is ongoing,” Demeter said.

“Right, right. I’m just saying, if an important person is almost killed on school grounds, and everyone points to the possibility of assassination, and then the people responsible for keeping her safe say it was an unrelated error but they can’t actually produce any evidence for the error, you know how that looks to some suspicious people, right? You can see what kind of whispers are going around Politikala Refujeyo right now. I mean, occasional accidents, even occasional assassination attempts are par for the course, but given that this was the second attempt on the High Crone’s daughter’s life within a year and she’s sending her son here next semester – ”

“Second?” Instruktanto Cooper asked.

“I believe Miss Surya was at Duniyasar when the Fionnrath visitor was killed, yes? I don’t know what happened there; I don’t have the clearance to access those records. But I’m sure everyone on the esteemed Council has read them. My question is, why was she there? A Refujeyo student heads out to a Point of Power to kill a foreign power and just so happens to drag the High Crone’s daughter along with him? What, people might wonder, was Mr Acanthos’ actual plan that day?”