housekeeping [r]

sophia is more appalled at the appearance of their maverick than the sharans are. mostly because she's a lot more up-to-date on irkallan fashions than the empire's envoys. but this isn't the place to embarrass him. not in the middle of such important negotiations. sophia sits quietly and waits to catch every word, like a dish placed under a roof-hole during a storm.

whatever the politicians tell themselves at home, she knows that they are already caught in the rain. she must engineer their victory.

the one other man that irkalla had managed to procure at such short notice isn't stupid enough to deny that the zeppelin is of irkallan-make, at least. the sharans provide several technical details that the civilian news reports were not able to access.

the irkallan secretary takes them down, but sophia weighs the overall picture carefully. she wants to believe that the parts all came from different regions instead of the troublesome conclusion of a government contractor, but it's difficult to say without confirming a few serial numbers. the explosion had made it difficult to gather much of the evidence.

she realizes why they are more than a little suspicious. a zeppelin theft would have been too difficult for their side to overlook. sophia had been reading the news during her trip to shara and found nothing. even so, she has to act.

"if shara will provide us some of the evidence, then we can have someone examine where the materials had come from." or rather, she will be travelling a bit to handle it personally. "it would be best to judge a single group of terrorists instead of an entire city of peaceful people. is that fair?"

she laces her words with honey, and it helps that her magic does not require incantation. it sounds too good to be true. it probably is, but she can at least buy enough time for irkalla to form some proper precautionary measures. hopefully by the time that they have a new emperor, their restructuring will serve as adequate distraction.

with luck, she may even be able to make good on such a promise. she doesn't know why the perpetrators would want the sharan emperor dead, but cutting off a diseased part was better than letting the entire body rot. that much is obvious.
ZAHIR BRAND

the strength from their side comes from somewhere else.

[sophia clenches her teeth]

[the room falls dead silent]

[only the secretary's pen makes any sound in the room]

noblewoman 1: "would you care to repeat that?"

sophia feels the temperature in the room drop before rising dramatically again. she might have suffocated, but she can't. not here, not now. 

in a few days from now, she'll still be thinking about what she could have done and shouldn't have done. what she could have done was drag the upstart out of the room immediately before he continued fanning the fire. except what's done is done and all that she can do for the rest of her days is to live with the consequences.

sophia makes her move on the fly.

[sophia turns to face zahir]

"who are these prominent merchants, exactly? my family runs one of the three biggest-" at this point, she's just being modest. "-trading companies in irkalla, and i assure you that i've heard nothing of the sort."

padding. she needs some padding, something to save face for idiots who didn't deserve it.

"admirable as it may be for you to take on the concerns of the locals-" she places some stress there, more for the benefit of the sharan emissaries. "-the uninformed masses have no place in matters of international affairs." play to the sharan elitism, play to the sharan elitism.

she can only hope that this wave will pass without incident. 

ZAHIR BRAND

if i wasn't grovelling, she thinks cruelly, then half your heads would hit the floor before you realized you were dead. from this angle, she can see the arteries in representative brand's neck.

humans are friends, not food. sophia looks away. she stands up with all the dignity befitting her station.

"whatever bribe they paid you, i guarantee that it wasn't worth the cost of insulting my house."

or rather, whatever the merchants were paying him wasn't worth the cost shara bringing her wrath upon everyone's heads. but that's what humans are like, isn't it? they value their peace so little when they've always had it.

they can learn the costs of maintaining that peace on their own time. not hers.

she's watching a gaggle of children play at war, for sure.

"i assure you all, my method is the most cost efficient manner of minimizing losses for all parties involved." sophia looks several of the sharan nobles in the eyes. regardless of how angry they seem, sometimes anger comes from a seated fear that they can't place. sophia's voice is gentle and certain when she speaks to them. "irkalla has no intention of allowing the opinions of a few outliers hinder her good judgement. trade with the empire has increased by fifteen percent in the last quarter alone. irkalla has no reason to jeopardize that."

she might have to present the numbers in a certain manner for it to look like that, but the truth doesn't matter now. "we are not going to allow terrorists or small businesses to sway good political sense. the dissenters will be quelled." or these businesses will be small by the time that sophia is done with them.

she doesn't want to think how her words would have been received without the careful application of magic. thankfully, she doesn't have to. sophia calls for an intermission before seizing representative brand's arm in an iron grip. she doesn't use enough strength to crush his bones, but he certainly isn't going anywhere.

sophia doesn't even realize how tense her shoulders are until she's dragged him a good distance away from earshot. she thinks that what she needs is to punch him in the face, but she can settle for threatening him until he breaks.

she releases him to allow some circulation to flow into his arms again. sophia can never remember how much a human can take before they start having problems.

she smiles innocently at him. they both know exactly what went down in that meeting room. "i'm always telling people not to be afraid of my father. it's funny because he's a good man. they shouldn't be." sophia steps into his personal space to look up into his eyes and hopes that the man feels like the meat that he is. "people should be afraid of me. and so should you."

hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

sophia is sorely tempted to eat him for the fifth time that afternoon.

war is an abstract concept to her. what she doesn't know from the history books, she pulls from re-imaginings of her own past. lumpy blood across the snow-frosted lake. gnawing on bones that have long since lost their flavor. covering herself with mud to mask some of the smell of gunpowder from the hunting dogs. those years would seem real again, and she didn't leave shara behind to put herself in range of its jaws again.

whatever happens, she certainly isn't going to be sitting at home.

"you aren't making things any better." she hisses. "keep telling yourself that peace is impossible when you haven't even tried. don't think that i didn't know what you were up to. quinctius and sestia aren't that bold when the emperor's corpse hasn't even cooled yet." it doesn't occur to her that nobody seemed very bold after she's threatened them enough.

"this isn't a coffeehouse salon, pretty boy." never mind the fact that zahir brand appears much older than she. "peace isn't bought with a few thousand lives and a couple of treaties. peace isn't that cheap." she speaks with the fierce earnestness that comes with watching her own mother die at the blade of an axe.

irkalla is the last safe place on the continent. if it succumbs to war, then there may not be another haven for years to come.

for a moment, sophia is afraid. afraid that she's talked too much, but what's done is done.

"when we go back into that room, you are going to help me talk them out of doing anything rash." it's his last chance to do so of his own will, whether he knows it or not. sophia takes care not to lean against the opposite wall. she's overexerted herself in that room, but he doesn't need to know.

"no, i'm not surprised." her voice is saturated with an old bitterness that never completely went away. "but it's equally true that humans often mistake their own damnation as opportunities."

she tires of this talk from a mere child. that is fine. as long as he's not a complete madman hell bent on his country's own destruction, there should be a chance that she can latch onto some lingering doubt in his head. somewhere zahir brand feels very small and unsure of his own convictions. all humans harbored such a weakness. sophia has yet to meet the exception.

zahir brand is not exceptional by any means.

she walks up to him and holds his head with both hands, gently as if she meant him no harm at all. sophia looks him in the eye for what will hopefully be the final time. she summons what magic she has left and forces it through his retinas.

"what you want is--" she freezes. 

for the first time in awhile, sophia feels appropriately disturbed. not because she is afraid of monsters, but because of how wrong her estimations were. that wasn't the mind of a child playing at war.

a broken spell has some recoil. this is sophia's first time experiencing it, and it feels like her face was splashed with some acid. she shields her face with her hand, not because she thinks that it would help, but so that he wouldn't see the pain in her eyes. the pain is temporary. pain always is.

then she realizes that she's just left herself vulnerable either way. sophia looks up to him and gives a single nod to acknowledge their stalemate.

"...i misjudged you. i apologize for my generalizations." not for threatening him and causing him bodily harm though, that's for sure.

sophia changes her approach. "are you sure that you don't need to lie down? the meeting has been long." more importantly, she can handle their affairs herself. she doesn't understand exactly what's going on inside of the man's head. all she knows is that she does not want that man back in the meeting room if she can help it. "we have made most of our points, i suspect. i can conclude the talks."

she'll talk circles around the delegates until the mood improves. keeping the man from adding his own commentary would help.