Free Deliberations: A Foreigner Short Story by C. J. Cherryh Page B

and officers, preserving order, balancing powers, conducting negotiations— preventing the aishidi’tat from sliding back into chaos.
    And if his grandmother, as aiji-regent, had decided that her grandson should not see tomorrow, if she had given the order— they had all come from her service, and might go back to it tomorrow.
    He sat with them and drank the tea, as he always had— he trusted Eidi, his major domo, as he always had. Though he could not to this hour say definitively where his staff’s loyalty rested, still, he had trusted them for all these years, and found doubting them more uncomfortable than trusting them tonight.
    Would they take his orders in the other direction, and assassinate his grandmother? They might. He had been in the servants’ care almost from the day of his birth— from the day his grandmother had dismissed the Taibeni clansmen his Taibeni mother had tried to attach to him as bodyguards. She had set her own Guildsmen to guard her grandson day and night. These two had been with him literally from his infancy, setting their lives between him and harm. The four had ridden with him, hunted with him, laughed with him— warned him of dangers. Their Guild could order them independently. There was that, too. But ultimately— their man’chi, their sense of loyalty, their sense of center and balance in the universe, took precedence.
    So he drank the tea his servants made, and wondered what his bodyguards were thinking tonight. Perhaps they asked themselves if he would make a move against his grandmother, and if they would be put to that painful choice.
    “Have we heard from the aiji-regent this evening, nadiin-ji?”
    “From her aishid, nandi,” Nochidi said quietly...they knew what was on his mind, every bit of it. And he would not ask them even yet where their man’chi lay. It could shift in an instant. And when man’chi shifted, at such a time— the whole world tilted. Aijiin rose and fell. People’s lives changed. People died.
    “Was there anything remarkable?” he asked, and Keigan said,
    “Only the advisement of factional meetings, nandi. There will be such, in coming days.”
    “Beyond any doubt.”
    “Your grandmother,” Nochidi said, “thought you would prefer dinner with your own staff this evening, so Cenedi says.”
    He had not been surprised that no invitation had come. He nodded. “Absent her move against me,” he said, which he had not said, yet, this year, “I shall not move against her. Be assured.”
    “You may not have a choice, nandi,” Keigan said.
    “The factions will move without us, you mean.”
    “Order,” Keigan said, “may suffer. They have waited for this day, both for and against.”
    “Neither side,” Nochidi said, “is more reasonable than the other. Either may take independent action.”
    “Not sanctioned by the Guild.”
    “No,” Nochidi assured him. “There is no legal motion afoot.”
    It was good to hear. But the question hung in the air, what he would do, whether he would start proceedings to claim the aijinate, whether he would decide to rule now— or to take his father’s course, and wait, while factions plotted, plots crossed plots, and some died.
    He had given no public clue, made no public statements at all. It was, he thought, wise to plan his moves— and make them decisively; unwise, too, to tell even his supporters what sort of ruler he would be. Everyone had an opinion— most saying that he would be more liberal than his Grandmother. Some were quite wrong in their assumptions. Some thought he would be easy— but he did not decline their support...for now.
    Mospheira had its opinion of him, certainly. And he had one regarding their representative. The paidhi, the translator for the humans— was weak. His father had gotten concessions from Wilson-paidhi that had changed— everything— and offended the traditionalists.
    The traditionalists had willingly backed his grandmother’s assumption of power when Valasi died.