Whether with ice cream or wrath, Iwillmake freedom.
Jiran narrows his eyes. “How?”
I smile wide. “I’m not going to react to whatever they’ve planned. Instead, they are going to bring him to me.”
The rogue priest’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Since the Order is evidently already watching you, may I ask a favor?”
Jiran crosses his arms. “I’m listening.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to start talking to people about the ice line yet,” I clarify. “But you have contacts among the Order, right? What I want you to do is to tell the priests that if Teren isn’t present when I go to meet them tomorrow, that they’re going to regret it. That’s all.”
And they’ll do it, because I’m not under their control yet. Any atrocities I commit might make me look bad, but it will makethemlook worse.
They’re still pretending to be on the side of people, and all I’m asking them to risk is a sage.
That’s all; and that’s everything.
“And then?” Jiran asks.
Great question.
I have a whole day to decide, though, and with a day... I can do a lot in only seconds; with hours—since they will not actually allow me a whole day, I’m not stupid—I can do even more.
The prep work for the Quiet took longer than actually creating it, after all.
And this time, I have five hundred years of meditation to make any preparations alotfaster.
“And then,” I tell Jiran, “I will show them and anyone else that I will not accept being controlled by the Order ever again. And if they don’t like it, which they will not, I will make ittheirproblem.”
Jiran studies me. “You haven’t decided yet?”
“I know the important parts.”
Which is: what lines I will not cross.
And what lines I will hold at any cost.
That probably won’t be reassuring to him—
But as I watch, he takes a breath and asks, “Will you undo my binding now?”
Okay, that’s not what I expected.
Jiran reads the surprise in my face and smiles faintly. “The Order is already going to try to make my life harder just for being peripherally associated with you. If you fail, I’ll need all the tools I can lay my hands on.”
Ah.
“And,” Zan adds sharply, “because you don’t think she will succeed, and this will be a symbol that might sway others.”
Jiran inclines his head. “Just so.”
I glare at the rogue priest. He couldn’t have just said that?
Jiran smirks back at me.
Argh, quid pro quo for me not revealing all of my thoughts to him.
