Chapter Text
There was a cacophony in the council room. It was the middle of the night and all the councillors, the King especially, would have loved to be in their beds. The subject of their meeting could not wait. Only last week there had been another attack. The woman who had been targeted was fine apart from some minor damages to the clothes that had marked her for the attack in the first place. Still, this was the fifth attack in as many months and the situation, which most of them had hoped was going to get better, was slowly getting worse.
Nia stood in the corner of the council room. Visible and yet unseen, moving only to refill the jugs on the table in front of her. She did not remember being given a name for who had called this meeting when she had been pulled out of her bed by the Head Steward.
There was a sudden crack, loud as thunder. Nia’s head popped up from where she had been examining her sandals. The king’s hand was curled into a fist, running from its point of contact on the table was a large spider web of cracks. Nia winced, her cousin was one of the palace’s carpenters and he often complained to her about the damage done to the furniture when the King felt he needed to capture the attention of the council.
Despite her cousin’s complaints, it was an effective technique, to a person the council was silent. Those who had been standing when the King moved had since retaken their seats. Every eye in the room, including those of the guards and Nia, was on him.
‘In the time you have spent over this petty argument, we would have been finished with the issue and in our beds!’ His voice was pleasant to the ear, slightly rough but deep and rumbling.
‘My King, su-,’ the councillor who had spoken quieted as the King turned to look at him. If Nia was not mistaken, he was the councillor who had raised the issue of the Prince’s marriage in the first place. From the look in his eyes, Nia was sure the King remembered this as well.
The King glanced around the room, daring anyone else to try and raise the subject again but even in their sleepy and bad-tempered moods, the council was aware that this was a horrible idea. Nia watched as one of the women on the council, the Head of the Metalsmith Guild if she was not mistaken, inched her finger under her head wrap to scratch the edge of her hair and then repositioned it carefully.
‘The matter of my son’s marriage will be settled later, the reason,’ his voice strained out the word, ‘that we are here tonight is to discuss what can be done about easing the assimilation of the members of the Lion and Crocodile cults’ into the People.’
Nia blamed her mother for what happened then. She hadn’t meant to do it. Her mother was the person in their family with opinions and though Nia had happened to agree with this one she could not imagine that the royal family or anyone on the council felt it was the place of a serving girl to have opinions on matters of state. Still at the word ‘assimilation’ she had winced. None of the council members noticed, she was at the opposite end of the giant room for the king and she suspected that even if she had been standing in front of say the Palace Historian and dancing naked, it would not have been enough for him to acknowledge anything but her inquiry about whether he needed his glass filled.
The King, on the other hand, was a completely different story, maybe being the eyes of the goddess Bast on earth made it difficult for him to miss anything that happened. And he was looking straight at her too.
She held her breath, waiting to see if he would acknowledge what he had seen but instead he reminded the council about the incident that had happened last week.
Nia had already heard the matter discussed exhaustively by friends and family both of course, though as far as she knew none of them had a familial connection to the woman. It was just common sense to keep track of the areas where things like this could happen to people like them.
She released the breath she had been holding and went to go refill the glass of the General.