Dark Whispers, Chapter 5

The tall ships sat in Qeynos harbor, and the endless procession of traders loading wagons and hauling them off through the streets of the capital made it a hectic day—and a miserable one due to the rain. Draft horses snorted and heaved wagon loads stacked two or three layers high, and anything that could be damaged if wet was covered with tarps, tied down, with sheets of water dripping onto the cobbled streets below.

In her hand was a glass.

She stared at the nice piece of crystalware. The glass had a small spider etched into the bottom as a maker's mark. This piece had just come back from the lab. The gnomes had their ways of pulling information off of objects. With careful study and alchemical analysis, they could discern a great deal about who held the glass and what was in it, and even recover fragments of things too small for the eye to see. Much of that information was valuable to investigators like her, provided the correct glass was taken into evidence.

She sighed.

She would tell Opal someday. Not now. The lesson would be a valuable life lesson for her, but at this moment, with things so heated, a young lady's confidence in herself would most likely be destroyed, and she would begin to doubt herself. She could not do that to her daughter, nor could she afford to take such a risk with so much at stake. Just admitting a mistake in the case would come down on her from her enemies like a ton of bricks. She would likely lose her responsibilities and be reassigned to a diplomatic post elsewhere, far away from Qeynos, and would no longer be doing the work she loved.

She pursed her lips as rain dripped down the glass like tears.

Nobody forgave anybody anymore.

The world felt so full of hate that it would not surprise her if the rain turned to blood.

But some were beyond forgiveness. Varlikh, his mind-reading pet, and his band of malcontent assassins were still out there. The Queen's counselors included some influential people, and some were hateful toward those seeking shelter in Qeynos. They were men and families more interested in purity than purpose, framing the common good as a small subset of kin and those who profited from war and divisiveness. The more refugees were accepted, the more money and resources went toward them, and the more they felt their livelihoods and lifestyles were threatened, the more their hate and fear grew. People were easy targets when fearful, and they could be manipulated with jingoistic slogans and promises of purity. They could be turned into an army of useful idiots to overthrow the Queen.

She knew what this was about.

Varlikh and his people were trying to destabilize the country, to overthrow the monarchy, and put a despot in charge. Varlikh and his ilk wanted a tyrant on the throne, a strong man who would destroy the lives of the unwanted, and he would be a hero to the fearful. The unwanted would be deported, killed, or enslaved, while those who allowed it to happen would be praised, rewarded, and given positions of power. The Queen's government was too soft for people like Varlikh, who dreamed of conquest and empire. They saw themselves as a wolf among sheep.

And he saw her as one.

A sheep trying to play a sheep's game, to somehow follow the rules and make things right. To find justice through due process, rather than sudden, cruel, vigilante justice. But that is not how it worked. You did not fight a wolf with passivity. You had to fight the wolf with another bigger, stronger, and more aggressive predator that would bite and tear until the enemy died.

She knew he was right about one thing: She had a problem.

She watched the glass fill with rain.

She considered throwing it into the sea.

She sighed.

She knew where it needed to go.