Finn and Ziva brought up the rear as Kira took her leave, departing from the box and descending toward the arena floor.
“This is disappointing. I was hoping he’d hold out for at least one more ship,” Jin whined. “I had a whole thing planned. It was going to be beautiful.”
“I would have liked to have seen that,” Kira said, reaching the floor of the arena.
She stepped onto the sands, advancing toward where Devon was congratulating an exhausted Joule. Raider and Elena had a head start on Kira and were already halfway across the sands.
Ziva stopped a few feet onto the arena floor. “I recognize that man.”
Kira looked back to find a serious look on the girl’s face. Ziva’s forehead was wrinkled in a frown as she stared down at the sands.
“My father, the Overlord of our House, and his First met with him several times right before.” Ziva stopped speaking, her expression threatening to crumple in a way that made any need for clarification unnecessary.
Before her House’s fall. Before her parents’ deaths and the loss of her world.
Ziva lifted her gaze to meet Kira’s. “My parents were always very angry after meeting him.”
Kira looked at Finn to find the oshota with a dark expression on his face. “Could Terrel and Votair have had anything to do with House Maxiim’s fall?”
As far as she knew, they’d been nearly wiped out by pirates. An admittedly unusual happenstance given the strength of the House but still within the realm of possibility.
Finn hesitated, his desire to deny her suggestion warring with the things he’d learned since being in Kira’s orbit. Things like how the Tuann weren’t immune to betrayal from within.
The faintly ill look on his face told Kira all she needed to know.
“I picked up a few interesting tidbits of information on Terrel and Votair while I was snooping,” Jin said. “From what I’ve gathered, Terrel is ambitious. Very ambitious. Word is he’s been trying to raise his House’s standing from that of a middle tier House to reach the power and status of one of the five Majors.”
“That’s not easy to achieve,” Kira guessed.
Finn shook his head. “No, it’s not. While Votair is considered a large House, I wouldn’t go so far to say it is close to becoming a major power.”
“How so?” Kira asked, not quite understanding how a House became a major one.
Finn paused to consider how best to explain. “If we were to judge based on the merit of numbers or size of territory, Votair would be considered more powerful than Roake.”
Kira blinked as she took that in. Was Roake that small? Or was Votair that big?
“Papa said to be considered a major House you had to be more than just strong,” Ziva chimed in. “You had to offer something that no other House had.”
Finn nodded. “It comes down to influence. Luatha is known far and wide as having the best artisans. Roake, the strongest warriors. Each of the Houses has something that sets it apart. Whether that is in the affinities of their bloodlines or the niche they’ve carved out for themselves. In that respect, House Maxiim was far closer to stepping into the ranks of a major House than Votair.”
Ziva’s nod was sad. “We were known for our ships.”
“Both the design and their ability to fuse the House’s shielding ability into its defenses were highly coveted among the rest of the Tuann,” Finn agreed.
That made their fall to space pirates more suspicious than it already was.
Kira had the fortune of meeting what remained of the House’s oshota when she’d saved Joule and Ziva. Though their warriors weren’t as highly trained as Roake’s, they were still skilled. A House filled with them shouldn’t have fallen so easily.
Unless things weren’t as simple as they appeared.
Movement behind Ziva attracted Kira’s attention as Selene and Alexander crossed the sands toward them.
Kira frowned. There was something her senses were trying to tell her that she wasn’t picking up on. At least not enough to understand this unsettling feeling that was growing by the second.
A looming disaster she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Did it have something to do with what Ziva and Finn shared?
