Chapter 302 Impromptu Council Meeting
ELIJAH
I didn’t want to go to the meeting.
When the summons came I sat with it for a while and weighed the options and concluded that I didn’t have a compelling reason not to attend. Lana was at the hospital with Adriana, the children were at school, Roy was gone, Leo was in his room working on something he hadn’t told me about, and the alternative to the council meeting was sitting in my study doing paperwork, which was somehow less appealing than the Elders.
I had also caught up on sleep, which meant I had no excuse.
The moment I sat down and looked at the assembled faces, I understood that something had been organized. They had the particular posture of people who had agreed on a thing in advance and were now waiting for the moment to present it. I had seen that posture before and it never preceded anything useful.
The Chief Elder rose.
“My King. We the council have discussed the events of the last session at length and we have reached a unanimous position.” He paused with the gravity of someone who believed what was coming was reasonable. “We would like to formally request a public apology from the Queen. The comments made during the last hearing were insulting to the dignity of this council and—”
“Were they untrue?” I said.
He paused. “My King?”
“The things she said. Were they factually untrue?” I looked at him steadily. “She called you hypocritical. She said you were selfish. She said you held women in low regard. She mentioned that some of you were involved in the efforts to prevent my accession.” I looked around the room. “Were any of those things untrue?”
Nobody spoke.
“Then I’m struggling to understand what she should apologize for,” I said. “If she had said false things about you, I would tell her to correct the record. She said true things. Loudly and directly, which is apparently the only format this council responds to.” I looked at Elder Harry. “You have something to add, Harry?”
Harry, who had been released from the cells that morning on the condition that he had absorbed the appropriate lesson, sat very still. “My King, it is a matter of respect for our position—”
“Your position requires you to give the Crown sound counsel. Not to demand apologies from the woman who sits beside the King because she told you the truth about yourselves.” I sat back. “I’ll have her called.”
Adriana was not in the hospital yet when I sent the guard, she’d delivered Lana into the doctor’s care and was waiting. The message reached her and she came, and when she walked into the courtroom she was still in her ordinary clothes without her crown, and she looked at me and then at the assembled Elders with the expression of someone who was doing a rapid assessment of the situation.
I patted my leg. She looked at it, then at the Elders, then back at me, and came and sat.
“You forgot your crown,” I said.
“I know. The guard said urgent and I came.” She looked at the room. “What’s happening?”
“They want an apology.”
She turned and looked at the council with the specific focus of someone deciding which angle to approach from. Then she stood up and walked directly to Elder Harry.
“Harry. You’re the one who asked for this?”
“The council and I, collectively—”
“Were you or were you not the one who initiated the conversation?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “My Queen, it was a collective—”
“Harry.” She looked at him with a pleasantness that had nothing warm in it. “Guards. Please take Elder Harry to one of the lower rooms. I’ll deliver his apology in person, daily, so I don’t forget.”
The guards moved and Harry’s composure evaporated in real time. As they escorted him out, Adriana turned to the rest of the council.
“Would anyone else like a personalized apology?”
Complete silence.
“Wonderful.” She turned back to me. “Was that all?”
“That was all,” I said.
She got up and left.
I waited until the door closed behind her.
“Let me say something clearly,” I said. “My wife has authority in this court. Full authority — not courtesy, not tolerance, full authority. When she speaks in this room, you treat her words with the same weight you would treat mine, because that is exactly the weight they carry.” I looked around the room. “She is the reason I am a better king than my father was. She is the reason this kingdom is in better condition than when I inherited it. And she is, without question, the reason this court is still being extended the respect of my presence rather than being dissolved entirely, because that conversation has been on the table and it is her counsel that keeps me from acting on it.”
Elder Martins cleared his throat carefully. “My King. We did not mean—”
“You meant exactly what you said. You’ve been meaning it since the day I made Hazel the Beta instead of the man you brought me. You’ve been meaning it since the day I chose Adriana over the political arrangement you preferred.” My voice rose. “You have been consistently on the wrong side of every decision I’ve made about the women in this court and I have been consistently right and you have been consistently wrong.” I looked at him. “I would like you to think carefully about whether this pattern suggests a flaw in my judgment or a flaw in yours.”
He said nothing.
“Good. We’re adjourned.”
I left the courtroom and went to find Leo.
He was in his room with three windows open on his laptop, cross-referencing something I didn’t immediately understand.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
He swiveled the screen toward me. “The footage. The doctoring. I’ve been thinking about how they did it and what it would require.” He pointed at the screen. “Whoever edited that footage had access to commercial-grade video software. The kind of software that’s expensive and specific. It’s not something you download for free.” He looked at me. “It’s the kind of thing a production company uses. Or a security firm.”
I looked at the screen. “You can narrow it down from the technique?”
“I can narrow down the category of tool that was used. I can’t tell you exactly which one. But it’s a starting place.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “The person who did this has been planning it for a long time. This isn’t someone who decided to move against us recently. This is someone who has been building this for months. Maybe longer.”
I looked at my son and felt the specific weight of what the past weeks had cost him alongside a very particular kind of pride.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said.
“I know.” He turned back to the screen. “I want to.”
I left him to it and went to wait for Adriana to come home.