He nodded.

This wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation, but I didn’t really care.

I walked to the back of the ballroom. Where would be a good place… To the side? No, I’d want them to be in a circle around me. I stopped in the center, where the mosaic floor offered a depiction of Gertrude Hunt circled by a stylized broom. This had to be the best spot.

A hole opened in the center of the mosaic, small, but growing larger and larger, swallowing the mosaic pieces. That was okay. I would redo it later.

George walked into the ballroom.

“So this is your first assignment,” I said.

“Yes.”

The hole was now three feet wide. Good enough. I raised my hand, coaxing one of the inn’s bigger roots out. Thinner roots wouldn’t work. They were capillaries and I need a nice thick vein, a direct access to the heart of the inn. This would take a while.

“Was this supposed to be a feather in your cap? Your first assignment, which you must accomplish without any regard to the cost to everyone else?”

“Feathers are for people who seek recognition,” George said. “Recognition does not matter to me.”

“People don’t seem to matter to you either. You came here and appealed to my trust. You pretended to know nothing about the inns or how they worked. Then you systematically manipulated the events and chipped away at my resolve until you brought me to this point.”

“You wouldn’t have reached it unless you were desperate,” he said.

“Yes. Did you know Sean was Turan Adin and he and I had a history?”

“Yes. There was a chance that his presence would give you that final push. Nuan Cee was growing increasingly frantic. His back is against the wall. Both the Holy Anocracy and the Horde are martial cultures, and the lees are not. The prolonged war is harder on them than on any of the others. Ancestral worship is so ingrained in the lees’ society, they’ve killed each other over the privilege of taking care of their elders. Nuan Cee is half-exile; his obsession with forging the cast-outs into a clan has dominated his business strategies for the last twenty years. He did take the time to cover his tracks, but when you examine his financial maneuvering with his ancestry in mind, the pattern emerges quite readily. When he finally acquired the rights to Nexus, it must’ve felt like a triumph. Finally he could make his people whole. He jumped the gun with colonization. It was quite possibly the most emotion-driven decision of his entire career. Then he saw it all fall apart. Without peace, there is no clan, no shrine, no closure. He wanted to bring Turan Adin into the negotiations, because he is their biggest weapon. I just needed to give him an excuse. With the negotiations breaking down and the Khanum’s eldest son having died on Nexus in the past year, she would need the Autumn Festival. It was her only chance to see her son again. She would do almost anything for it. So I suggested to Robart that sometimes people do not truly understand the situation until they had a chance to see it through their own eyes. His budding alliance with House Meer was tenuous; he was blinded by grief over his beloved. House Meer understood this and placed very little confidence in him, so when he offered them a seat at the metaphorical and actual table, they jumped on the chance and sent three of their finest to ruin the negotiations.”

“When?”

George arched his eyebrows. “When what?”

“When did you suggest that to Robart?”

“On the second day of the peace summit.”

I stared at him.

“It was the kind of seed that needed to be planted in advance. Robart is a sensitive man, possessing an unfortunate combination of nobility of spirit and certain inborn belief in the fairness of the world. His instincts tell him that if only he does the right thing and makes sure that everyone around him does the right thing, life will respond in kind and reward him for his efforts. He is a more sophisticated version of the proverbial knight in shining armor who believes that if he slays the evil dragon, he will rescue a beautiful princess who will love him forever and they will live happily ever after in their castle. He worked so hard, he had fought his way past the dragon, but his princess is dead and his castle stands hollow and empty. He’s come to learn that life is a bitter bitch. She is inherently unfair. She took his happy future and crushed it, grinding it into dust. That realization is too much for him; he is emotionally volatile, swinging from one extreme to the other. A man in that emotional condition isn’t able to make quick, reasoned decisions. I had to give him time to process the nudge, until his emotions finished churning. Meanwhile, the interaction with his opponents began to foster some sympathy in him. He had come here with the desire to burn everyone and everything to the ground, and yet here he was, feeling compassion toward his enemy. This created a conflict within him, one he wasn’t capable of resolving, so he did what I suspected he would do – he reached out to his allies, hoping that they would assess the situation and point him in the right direction, eliminating his doubts. He came to the inevitable conclusion that the Meer should witness the summit for themselves.”

He couldn’t possibly be human. No human being could calculate the odds that far in advance.

“The rest fell into place,” George said. “The poisoning was a wild card, but it worked in our favor. Given a choice, I wouldn’t have poisoned you, Dina. It was too risky. I need you for the final act to this drama and I am genuinely fond of you. For all of my ruthlessness, my friends are very dear to me. That’s why I have so few. I try not to form friendships.”