The first time I came to tell my mother my plan, hope had rekindled in her eyes at the chance, however slim, of restoring Arlen to at least some of his former glory. She'd taken my hands in both of hers and told me to save Arlen and leave the rest to her.
Now I was about to find out what leaving the rest to her actually looked like.
Hopefully, she'd been more successful in her endeavors than I had been in mine. My inquiry into the assassination was going nowhere, which was telling in its own way. The twins knew nothing, of that I was certain. I'd spent an evening drawing them out over drinks, but as I had suspected, they were as oblivious as they appeared about everything other than court gossip about who was sleeping with which envoy.
They hadn't been plotting a coup.
If they had, they were exceptional actors, and I didn't think they were.
Avren was conducting a thorough investigation into the assassination attempt, which should have put him above suspicion, but the truth was that he wasn't doing that because of loyalty to Arlen or our father but rather for the joy of the hunt.
He'd settled his theory from the get-go, and he was bending the evidence to fit it. He suspected the rival provinces, the two or three great houses that had spent generations trying to pry the Head of the Council position out of Catonian hands, and he might even be right.
I thought that it was a mistake to rule out the Sitorians, but he dismissed it the way our father did, with the same flick of the hand and the same phrase about a distant fire that couldn't reach us across the Federation.
It worried me as it always had, but even more so now. Avren was too certain about the origin of the threat, so he wasn't looking anywhere else, even if the Sitorian threat was a clear and present danger.
They were the reason I had embarked on the Elucian adventure. Well, that and my dream of riding dragons. Spending five months among people who faced the Sitorian threat day in and day out and had built their entire society around resisting it reinforced my conviction that this was the horizon we should be looking at.
And that wasn't the only thing Avren seemed to be oblivious to. He either really didn't know about our parents' maneuvering to find brides for all five of us or pretended not to know.
My suspicions arose when he'd let something slip about a possible tie with one of the rival houses and a particular princess he wouldn't mind marrying, though he doubted she'd returnthe sentiment. He'd said it lightly, in his typical self-deprecating manner, and then watched to see how I'd react.
I'd come away from that conversation with a suspicion that Avren wanted to be nominated the heir. He hadn't said so. He was far too disciplined to let that slip, but it was there in the dismissive, almost insulting way he'd talked about Arlen.
Avren had no patience for weakness and showed no interest in helping Arlen recover. I suspected his true motive was his own ambition to someday claim the throne, despite the twins preceding him. He knew Father would never entrust either of them with Catonia’s or the Federation’s future .
What he didn't know was that our parents had told no one but Arlen and me that I was the heir in waiting. If Avren was scheming to get the nomination, he was going to be disappointed.
If he'd known, he might have helped me heal Arlen out of spite. It made me want to tell him just to see his reaction, but regrettably, I couldn't. Maybe once Arlen was reinstated as heir, I would tell Avren just to make sure he didn't plot anything against him.
I put all of that aside as I reached my mother's door.
The two guards posted there bowed to me, and then one of them opened the door without knocking, which I found odd until I caught a glimpse of what was going on inside.
My mother's receiving room had become a war room.
She'd had the delicate couches and chairs pushed back against the walls, and in the cleared center stood three small writing desks, and at each desk sat an assistant, and all three were penning correspondence. My mother stood among them like a general, but instead of a uniform, she wore a plain, comfortable gown, her grey-streaked hair pinned out of her way. She was dictating to one assistant while reading over theshoulder of a second and holding out her hand to the third for a page to check.
"Alar." She didn't look up from the page she was scanning. "I'll be with you in a moment." She turned back to the flustered assistant. "Davna, the phrasing in the second paragraph is too warm. The queen will read warmth as weakness and immediately demand more concessions. Make it cordial and immovable." She handed the page back, corrected something on the next, and only then turned to me, with a bright smile and a sparkle in her eye.
She didn't look like a woman whose heart was failing. She looked like a commander in the middle of a winning campaign. Whatever was wrong with her, if anything was wrong with her at all, it had been conquered and subdued because there was work to be done.
"I'm impressed," I said. "Your sitting room looks like a command center."
"I have a campaign to run." She crossed to one of the chairs that had been pushed against the wall, sat, and gestured for me to take its twin. "Your plan has complicated my work. Before you came home, I had almost everything arranged, but now I have to keep more options open, because I don't yet know which one of you will assume which role. The betrothals have to match the stations, so I keep them all in the air and commit to nothing, and that's a serious juggling act since I need to appear fully engaged with each of the houses I'm dealing with without letting them suspect that anything is uncertain."
So that was what leaving the rest to my mother looked like.
I think her job was the most difficult one. I understood most matters of state, but I could never untangle the complicated web my mother was spinning.
"Why do you need three of them?" I nodded at the assistants, who all seemed to be flustered and sweating. "Aren't you afraid of leaks?"
"I need three because there is a lot of correspondence, and each one needs to be written precisely and error-free. It's not as easy as it seems." She smiled fondly at the young women. "They are loyal to me, fully and completely."
I didn't know how and why she seemed so certain of that, and I wasn't going to ask. I understood why she needed three of them, though. It was a laborious process.
"So, you are just signing the letters? You do not write them yourself?"
