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I rose. Beast jumped off my lap. I bowed my head to her. She bowed back. I straightened my robe and walked out of her quarters the same way I came.
27
When we last left our intrepid heroes, Lady Wexyn turned out to be the Priestess of Revenge and revealed her history with Kosandion. But he will never marry her, because she is entirely too dangerous to have around. Oy, what a twist. Now the selection might be cancelled.
Will he get married, won’t he get married? This is ruining our emotions! Enough with the suspense already! Get on with it!
“…Conduct unbecoming an innkeeper,” Frank Copeland droned on. “That shitshow should’ve never happened.”
I resisted the urge to take a page out of Sean’s playbook and growl at the screen. The Innkeeper Assembly was perturbed by how Game Day had ended, so they’d decided to call me first thing in the morning, over Zoom of all things, and take me to task. To be fair, most of the condemnation was coming from Frank Copeland and Dawn Phillips. The two of them ran large-venue inns, Frank in California and Dawn in Alberta.
At least I wasn’t dealing with the entire Assembly, only with the seven members of the North American branch council.
“You approved this shitshow beforehand,” I pointed out. “Quote: ‘Make all reasonable efforts to accommodate the Sovereign’s wishes.’”
“Reasonable!” Dawn said. “How are two dead guests reasonable?”
“For the last time,” Brian Rodriguez recited, “Nobody died. Everyone is alive. Nobody sustained permanent injuries.”
“And we’re just supposed to believe that?” Frank demanded.
“Yes.” I sank some steel into my voice. “I am an innkeeper. My word is sufficient.”
“That remains to be seen,” Frank said.
“How about my word?”
I felt cold magic bloom behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony’s red ad-hal robe ripple as if touched by wind.
Frank clamped his mouth shut. That just annoyed me even more. I’d been an innkeeper for years now and apparently the only way my word counted was if I had an ad-hal to back me up.
“Help,” Sean whispered in my ear. He was down in the oombole enclosure.
“Urgent?”
“Somewhat.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“What I want to know is—” Dawn started.
“Enough. This is my inn. I determine what is reasonable here. I don’t need you to hold my hand. I don’t need you to tell me how you would have handled it. Mind your own business.”
There was a moment of shocked silence.
Aiyo Iwata clapped. “Finally.”
Manuel Ordóñez clapped as well and muttered something in Spanish under his breath. It sounded a lot like “estúpido.”
“Finally, what?” Frank demanded.
“Finally, someone shut you two up,” Aiyo said. “It is her inn. You are not her supervisor.”
“We all know why we’re having this meeting,” Brian Rodriguez said. “The two of you were contacted by the Dominion with an offer to host this selection and you passed.”
“What are you implying?” Dawn asked.
Brian leaned into his screen. “I am not implying, I’m saying it. This is sour grapes.”
“You were offered a chance to do it, you declined, she did it, and she did it well.” Magdalene Braswell crossed her arms on her chest. “You don’t get to complain about it. She went a week with twenty Dushegubs in her inn and they all left alive.”
“Oh, they can complain about it,” Aiyo said, “but it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to waste any more time listening to it.”
“I have a legitimate point!” Frank pounded his fist onto his desk.
Magdalene snorted. “Bless your heart.”
“Remind me, Frank,” Tyrone Brightwell said. “Who made you king? I didn’t vote for you.”
“Ahahaha!” Aiyo cracked up. “I see what you did there!”
I looked at Tony, who had shifted back into his regular clothes. He nodded. We quietly switched places, and I hurried through the inn to the oomboles. I’d had it up to my ears with the Innkeeper Assembly and its branches.
We had modeled the oombole section after massive observation aquariums. The walls of their connected tanks were transparent, and the tanks themselves stretched fifty feet high. Walking between them was like strolling on the bottom of the sea.
The entire oombole delegation swam in a school inside the largest tank, the size of an Olympic swimming pool. I found Sean on the side by one of the smaller tanks connected to the larger one by a narrow channel. He was watching Oond. The spousal candidate was making tight counterclockwise circles.
Uh-oh.
I approached the transparent wall. Oond ignored me.
“How long has he been like this?” I murmured.
“Forty-five minutes,” Sean answered. “He keeps circling, secreting stress pheromones, and urinating.”
Everything about this was bad. The oomboles were not solitary. They didn’t go off by themselves, and they didn’t swim in small circles. They were foragers, which was why we had to make a giant tank for them. Oond was in acute distress. A guest in our inn was having a nervous breakdown. My parents would be aghast. I had shamed the family.
