“Control, probably,” Sean said. “Both the Otrokar and the knights give in to their emotions. They rage. They lose themselves to the battle. They think of their fallen and their honor, and they let it fuel them on and off the battlefield. That’s easy. What’s hard is to maintain control in the middle of chaos. But what do I know? I’m just an innkeeper.”
“Another round?” Qoros asked.
“Why not?”
They headed back to the lawn.
The inn shifted slightly. I checked the Drífen quarters. Saro had snuck onto the balcony and was trying to climb off it into the orchard. He tried to find purchase on the wall, but it was too slick. He hung off the rail, torn. Finally, he jumped. I caught him in midair with my magic and let him land by the patio. The little beast froze, shocked. He had expected to land in the orchard, and he had no idea how he wound up here.
I walked over to him. Saro saw me and shivered, a look of determination on his furry face.
“Can I help you, honored guest?” I asked gently.
The little beast blinked at me, looking as if he expected me to sprout fangs and bite his head off.
I waited.
“I lost it,” he whispered in a sad tiny voice.
“What did you lose?”
“My pouch. The liege made it for me herself out of thread and I lost it. I have to find it. Don’t tell.”
I concentrated. The Drífen magic stained their items, and because Gertrude Hunt didn’t like it, it tried to form a protective bubble of its own power around anything Drífan. Finding a knot of magic on the stairs by the Drífan door took less than a second.
I opened my hand. A wooden tendril slid out of the wall and deposited a small purse into my hand. It was crocheted out of soft white yarn and tied with a leather cord.
Saro’s eyes opened so wide, they took up half of his face.
“Is this it?” I asked.
He nodded wordlessly.
“Here.” I offered the purse to the little beast.
He snatched it from my hand with its tiny paw hands, hugged it, and spun around on the lawn, his tail fluffed out. “I found it,” he sang. “I found it, I found it.”
“Would you like a lemon muffin?” I asked. “I won’t tell.”
Saro pulled the leather cord open and showed me the inside of the satchel. He had stuffed half of a muffin into his mouth, and his cheeks bulged out like he was a chipmunk who tried to eat a walnut.
I looked. A small chunk of wood stained with some brown crud. Perfectly ordinary.
Saro hugged the purse to him. “The old liege did my clan a big favor. When I was young, I had to come to serve him at the Red House. It’s a big house on top of the mountain.”
He raised his arms as far as they would go.
“Big. Many buildings. Around the buildings is a thorn fence. It obeys only the liege and it will only open to those who have a house talisman. The steward gave me a talisman and duties to go in the woods and harvest herbs and berries. There was a kurgo in the woods.”
His voice dropped. Clearly the kurgo left an impression and not a good one.
“He would come up to the house and nobody would chase him off, because he had done a favor to the old lord. He didn’t have a house talisman, but he would come up right to the fence and tell me I was tasty and that he would eat me.”
Saro shivered.
“And the old lord tolerated this?”
“The old lord was grieving. He withdrew to his rooms and wouldn’t come out. I’m a small thing. Life is hard for small things. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed me. I had to go to the woods to do my duties, and the kurgo would find me, and I would run and hide. Liege Adira had no power, she was just a cook, and everyone was mean to her, but she always let me hide in her kitchen. The kurgo would stand outside by the fence, right by the kitchen door, and scream at her to give me to him. He called her names and he told her he would kill her when she went out to the woods.”
“And where was Zedas when all of this was happening?”
“Zedas is very important. Very old. He doesn’t notice things unless they’re important to the liege.”
My opinion of Zedas plunged even lower.
“One day the kurgo caught me, bit off my finger and ate it.” Saro showed me his stump. “He said I was too tasty to eat all at once. I ran real fast to the kitchen. The kurgo tried to chase me but the thorn fence wouldn’t let him through. The kurgo screamed and beat his wings, and the liege Adira found me in the cupboard. And then she took a big stick and told the thorn fence to open and let her through. She had no house talisman, but the fence obeyed. The kurgo came onto the grounds, even though he was forbidden, and then she beat him with a stick. And she hit him, and hit him, and hit him.”
Saro waved his tiny fists. “And the kurgo cried and called for the lord, and she hit him again until the stick broke.” Saro smiled. “She gave me a piece of the broken stick, so I wouldn’t be afraid anymore. It still has the kurgo’s blood on it. Sometimes when I get really scared, I take it out and sniff it, and then I’m not afraid anymore.”
Sean and Qoros had paused their rematch and were looking at us. They both seemed a bit disturbed.
“Do you want to sniff it?” Saro offered.
“No, thank you.”
The little beast put his satchel away and reached for another muffin.
“Saro, do you know why Zedas doesn’t want your liege to visit Earth?”
“The liege is the strongest on the mountain. She has many enemies. Many, many. Zedas worries that if she’s off the mountain, her enemies would hurt her.”
“I won’t let anyone hurt her,” I told him. “This inn is my mountain. I keep it safe.”
The koo-ko chamber exploded.
I had been watching the debate, but splitting my attention three ways made me slightly slower, so when a small pink koo-ko vomited the silver capsule of a gas grenade, I didn’t react quickly enough. By the time my brain processed the visual input, the koo-ko had compressed the capsule between his hands. A plume of purple smoke erupted. The inn screamed a warning in my head about a paralyzing agent. I blew a hole in the koo-ko chamber, venting it to the lawn, and activated the sonic attack.
A terrifying howl, like an elephant and a tiger screaming in unison, blasted into the chamber. Hearing the cry of their worst natural predator short circuited the koo-ko’s brains. The predator was behind them, a hole flooded with sunlight was in front of them, and so they did what koo-ko did best. They fled.
A gaggle of koo-ko burst out onto the lawn, scattering as they ran, squawking and screeching, straight at Sean and Qoros. The Medamoth’s eyes flashed. He clasped his hands into a single fist, went down to one knee, and pressed his forehead against his fingers, chanting “I will not chase, I will not chase, I will not chase, Devourer give me strength, I will not chase.”
Sean planted himself next to Qoros and put his hand on the Medamoth’s shoulder. I sealed the chamber, vacuumed it out, refilled the atmosphere, and launched the outdoor nets. They flew from under the roof, falling onto the koo-ko, and contracted, pulling the philosophers together into three big clumps on the grass. In a breath, it was all over.
Saro stole another muffin.
“It’s over,” Sean told Qoros.
The Medamoth exhaled.
“Your brother is a good soldier,” Sean said. “Come on. We have places to be. We can talk on the way.”
They left the lawn.
I walked over to the big balls of netted koo-kos and fixed First Scholar Thek with my innkeeper stare. He swallowed.
“I am not amused,” I told him.
“Our apologies.”
“You guaranteed that none of your people would bring weapons.”
A root of the inn burst from the ground, holding the culprit aloft. A thin tendril wrapped around his beak, muzzling him.
“He’s young,” Thek gasped. “He didn’t understand the consequences of his actions. We plead for mercy.”
I faced the would-be assassin. “Why? What was so important?”
The tendril unwrapped enough to let him speak.
“The truth,” he chirped. “The truth was being suppressed.”
I muzzled him again and looked at Thek.
“The young one’s faction had used all of their allotted time,” the First Scholar explained. “They were unable to complete their argument.”
“And that justified killing everyone? That is a rhetorical question. The answer is no.”
“He didn’t think it through,” another koo-ko piped up.
“He swallowed the capsule before arriving here. That’s premeditation.”
“Mercy,” Thek squawked.
“You don’t understand the fervor of a spirited debate,” a koo-ko from another cage said.
“Some debates aren’t worth having.”
An outraged chorus of squawks protested.
“There is always a benefit in the debate,” Thek said.
“Name one debate that’s not worth having,” another koo-ko called out.
“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”
A stunned silence answered.
“Obviously the chicken came first,” a voice called out. “Someone had to have laid the egg.”
“The chicken had to have hatched from something,” another koo-ko countered.
I amplified my voice to a low thunder. “It doesn’t matter. No value can be gained from debating it. No benefit to society, no improvement in the quality of life or advancement of science. It’s a pointless question. None of you are looking for the truth. You simply like to argue and brawl.”
My captives stared at me in outrage. I had done the impossible. I had unified the koo-ko.
The young koo-ko dangled from the root, looking sad and pitiful. I could jettison him from the grounds to some terrible planet. I could put him into solitary confinement which would almost certainly drive him mad. Ultimately, half of the responsibility for this disaster rested on my shoulders. I should have scanned them more carefully when they entered, and I should have reacted faster. I wasn’t an amateur. I knew the koo-ko reputation.