Aftermath: I Love Democracy

The manor lay like a statement against the plains, it’s walls a blade of white stone and glass set into the long swell of green within eyeshot of the southern borders of Theed. It had been designed for sightlines: every corridor aligning to a horizon point, every balcony engineered to catch the afternoon wind. From the western terrace, where the dunes of tall grass rolled in velvet waves, the antiquity from the spires of Theed glimmered far off and polite, as if distance alone could make the capital seem benign.

Ravion had built his manor and ranch for control. The long haunches of the Falumpasets grazed beyond the low stone wall; the paddocks were combed and immaculate; and the stables for the property’s premium bred Fathiers smelled of cedar oil and fresh hay; even the river stones arranged around the reflecting pool had a geometry only a human eye would notice. Control invited calm. It encouraged the long breath.

Tonight though, the breath snagged.

On the terrace, a trio of holoprojectors cast their cool light over the table. Results scrolled in elegant vertical bands. The Naboo Senate race had been a street of huddled figures and muttered arguments for weeks; tonight it congealed into clarity. Dominion was never quiet, not even when it wore the shape of a polite bar chart.

Dominic Praxon’s name rose in pale blue numerals over the map of Naboo. Majority. It clicked into place with the smug inevitability of an elevator reaching a floor.

Ravion’s jaw tightened. He ran the pad of his thumb along the base of the wine glass until it sang. He did not blink for a long count of five.

“Sir?” said Myl, his steward, hovering with that tangible talent of old Naboo servants: the art of being present without presence. “Shall I bring up the second feed? House Trozky is...”

“Mute it,” Ravion said.

Myl’s hand moved; the secondary windows went soundless, Priory blue lips still forming words. Ravion watched Dominic’s numbers tick with the rhythm of a metronome that refused to be bribed. Praxon. A name that was evidently still capable of being new and old at once. New enough to electrify a public tired of dry dynasties; old enough to clasp hands with them in halls where the marble whispered inherited secrets.

He had tried to get a foot past those doors, he had failed every time. The Praxons were public charm, private granite. Their connection with the Trozkys knitted half a dozen salons into one. His invitations had come back handwritten and kind, which rankled more than open snubs. The Trozkys enjoyed art; they bought it from him gladly. But buying a painting from Ravion was not the same as letting Ravion hang a painting in one’s home. There were degrees of intimacy the aristocracy understood as well as any lover.

He told himself that it was fine, that there were other doors. A man could tunnel under if it was needed. He could buy the hinges when the time arose or he could merely set a wing of the house on fire and walk in through the smoke.

He had learned, lately, that patience was the key and to pick the lock that mattered most.

The glass stopped singing with a soft thud. His thumb had pressed too hard; a hairline crack shimmered in the stem.

“Sir,” Myl said again, and then stopped. Ravion, who was stood at the terrace rail was no longer god of breath and control, and servants learned in childhood the smell of weather changing.

Ravion threw the glass.

It did not shatter spectacularly; unfortunately these things never did; they popped in a small, unsatisfying way and left a glittering crescent on the stone. He stood over it, surprised by the honest pettiness of the act. Surprise hardened into anger because he disliked discovering himself with the rest of the species. Temper was for other men. He had always cultivated the long game, the glass of brandy sipped while the building burned two districts over. He moved through crisis the way dancers moved through a room: controlled and amused.

The map updated again; Dominic’s majority had widened.

Ravion’s breath came fast, finally, and it felt like an insult. “Off,” he snapped.

Myl dimmed the projectors, but the terrace lights still traced Ravion’s cheekbones in a clean line; anger lived there with a youth that did not belong to his years. He scraped a palm over his jaw as if a beard he did not wear might give him gravitas. When he spoke, the syllables were edged. “Get Ferris. Now.”

“Ferris is in the east meadow with the training pair,” Myl began, and then swallowed the foolishness of the sentence. “Yes, sir.”

“And bring me the Malastare briefs.”

Myl vanished with the manner of a magician retreating into his hat.

Ravion let the plains return. The tall grass lapped the wall. Far beyond, lamps could be seen upon the distant cliffs of Theed, the palace causeway knitting it’s yellow beads; the city’s profile looked composed, like it could be easily tucked away, all that unspoken scandal folded to a manageable size.

He went inside.

The manor’s main salon had been styled with a hard and clean edge: legs of chairs too fine for a guest to be quite comfortable; a fireplace that burned without smoke in a matte-black trough; the discreet roar of the river calmed to a line by the glass wall. He had hung the Corvalis collection along the eastern side; the pieces that meant something to him in a way beyond their utility. An oil study of the Lake Country done by a painter who loved ugliness more than she loved light; a bronze of a woman reading, her head bent; three old scrolls from the Atrisian embassy, four hands, three centuries of poetry. The statues of the Naboo lovers in the far corner, hid a private holopit between them like a well of light.

He stood at the pit and called up the feed he had sworn he would not check until morning. He told himself it was strategy; the narrative insisted on the truth: Ravion knew it was borderline compulsion.

Malastare.

Some time ago, the alarms in the Republic complex had gone from rumor to teeth. He remembered the cheap weight of the brandy glass in his palm, the way theatrical fear had lodged so easily in his throat. He remembered touching the concealed pad in his vambrace and feeling the old joy of motion when the spike obeyed him and began to peel the seals off a network like wet paper. He remembered deciding how much of himself to bruise to look afraid. He remembered choosing a villain to fit the crime he had written.

In the morning, there had been Senators to blame the thunder on.

Malastare’s sitting senator had been handcuffed with dignity. He had been escorted out under the choking flash of lights. He had been booked with his mouth a straight bar of disbelief. And then he had been held in a quiet room with nice chairs and a pot of tea until the weight of the Republic fell on him, not like a hammer, but like a mattress. He did not break, he deflated.

The feed bloomed with gassing commentary, legal analysts at desks that did not look like any desk in a legal office, old footage of the Gran Guild building spliced with new footage of the courthouse. Over the last three days, the phrase “by special election” sat beside the word Malastare more often than not, like a whisper nobody wanted to hear.

The first challenger had been the obvious one: a name with dust on it and votes in it. Epurgal; once an Independent Systems senator before the Republic had come into power had made the word independent mean a dozen different things and some of them unlovely. Older now, the sort of older that had gravity but not weight. He spoke slowly and did not look at the camera. His one hold, he was a local to Malastare. Local the way a tree was local; you could cut around it, but the stump would leave a history in your dirt.

Then a second name had arrived on the table as if it had always been on the table and everyone had simply been polite enough to ignore it until now. It had the strange gleam of legality brushed against morality until both picked up smears of the other.

Ravion Corvalis.

There were loopholes for the men who wrote laws and those who wrote the footnotes. Citizenship was a matter of record. Residency was a matter of interpretation. Service was a matter of narrative. The High Republic made it easy for him to craft his narrative as carefully as he had crafted his glass walls. When you had spent months visiting township councils on moons whose economies were one mine and a bar, when you had stood under rain that smelled like copper while a comms tower swung like a drunk street sign, when you had told the little worlds they were not little; if you had done those things with cameras that did not look like cameras, with well placed people who didn't look like they weren’t local, you could clip together a truth that anyone would believe.

Malloo from Algara II had cried in his arms when the relief crates came. The clip took three edits to be perfect; all three were genuine.

Ravion had talked about corruption like a man who had seen it from the inside and was tired of the smell of its breath ; he had said the word noble the way you said a dangerous spice: rare, delicious, and liable to make you gag if you took too much. He had stood up for the small Republic worlds, the dry hamlets, the places nobles used in poetry but never in their diets. He had let them stand him up in turn. “A voice,” said a grandmother on Algara II with the hollows under her eyes clean from tears. “He listens. He looks you in the face.”

They had dubbed him a local hero in places where the High Republic’s center was a rumor printed on bright paper. It was a rot, the way admiration lodged under the skin. He felt a complicated shame at how easily he received what he had arranged to be given.

He had not expected Malastare to come up so soon. He had expected a season of more subtle groundwork, a handful of dead men and one living rumor. But the raid had come when it came. And the senator had not weathered it. Which meant an invitation he could not refuse dressed itself as a challenge he could not ignore.

His name had been put into place and the people cheered their voice of the low, allowing his approval graph to climb like the clean slope of a new roof, the backdrop the fight against the corruption they had all experienced and seen beneath the rule of their previous Senator, the man who let the criminals run Malastare.

He felt anger knot again when Dominic’s graph rose beside it in his mind. He was too practiced to confuse one fight with another, but he was also human, and the two lines together made a shape he did not like.

Footsteps announced the moment Ferris filled the salon doorway with dust on his boots and honesty in his stance. He was chief of security and had a soldier’s face that made charm an affectation instead of a habit. Myl slid in behind him with a stack of slim cases under his arm.

“You wanted me,” Ferris said, with the tone of a man who would have preferred those words in the past tense.

Ravion gestured to the table. “Sit. Both of you.”

They did, which meant the salon lost the stiff, museum quiet it always brought to meetings and slid closer to the kitchen table of decisions made at three in the morning. Ravion stayed standing. He always stayed standing when he was angry, as if height were leverage.

“Dominic Praxon will take the seat,” he said, because disdain needed naming or it started to taste like fear. “I will see the official results in the morning and pretend surprise in public. In private, I will not waste a single hour trying to get an angle with him while he is high on victory and everything smells like roses.”

“Wise,” Myl said.

“Epurgal has announced,” Ferris said, and the name in his mouth sounded like something he did not enjoy chewing. “He’s not a fool. The broadcast was clean. No stumbles.”

“The gravity,” Ravion said. “People like gravity after storms. They like to feel their feet. He’ll try to make us look like the foreign storm.”

“You’re polling ahead of him,” Myl said, sliding one of the cases open and pushing a datapack across the table. “In three of the five Gran prefectures, by eight points in two, four in the other. The Dugs are split; Coro had some ugly footage of Epurgal from twenty years ago that is surfing around again.”

“Vere preserve me from old footage,” Ravion said lightly, because if he did not keep his voice light it would break. He thought of Dominic, framed with pride in some home-tapped speech, light on his hair like a blessing. He thought of trying to buy an invitation and getting a handwritten apology that treated him like a synthetic flower. His hands wanted something to break again.

He did not throw the nearest sculpture because it was by a friend and because tantrum had tasted rancid, like a cheap candy you spit into a napkin when no one is looking. He placed his palms flat on the table and bent over the data until the numbers were his only centre.

“Senate Investiture Week starts in five days,” he said. “That’s five days to make the narrative into a habit. After that, the gravity of ceremony does half the work for you.” He tapped a row of datapoints that clustered like bees. “We are going to Malastare tomorrow.”

Myl’s brows flickered. “We have the Theed luncheon with…”

“We’re going to Malastare tomorrow,” Ravion repeated in the tone of good furniture. “Send the regrets. Make them sound affectionate. Use the phrase prior commitment and let them fill in the blanks with something philanthropic.”

“And when we get there?” Ferris asked.

“We walk,” Ravion said. “We do not ride in a silver speeder. We walk three blocks in the Guild district and we take a drink in a place that does not wipe the glasses well enough. We let someone recognize me who is not paid to. We visit the court building and we look grim for the cameras without looking hungry. We ask for a tour and then pretend to be too humble to accept it, so they insist. While we’re in the hallway, a courier arrives with records showing that Epurgal declined a hearing for the miners’ petition in; when was it, Myl?”

Myl flicked a glance at his pad. “Nineteen years ago. The footage is bad. He says parliament cannot overstep the Guild.”

“We do not leak it. It leaks. Let it have an anonymous choke.”

Ferris sat back, the line between his brows easing because plans were the language he trusted. “Security?”

“We’ll take the ranch detail. Low profile. You know how to make a low profile look like an accident.” Ravion raised his eyes at last, meeting Ferris’s with the small, savage grin he had always reserved for the first cut into a clean canvas. “Also, Epurgal likes morning market walks. He buys fruit like he wants people to say he buys fruit. We will be there. We will let him say something patronizing. And you will not let me ruin the moment by showing joy.”

“I can try,” Ferris said.

“It would be an act of mercy,” Ravion said, and suddenly laughter creased the edge of his voice, not because anything was funny, but because he appreciated how well his men could hold him up to the mirror when he wanted to break it.

The anger receded the way storms did when they found a mountain. It did not vanish; it wrapped itself around the peak and waited. He liked that about anger. You did not waste it; you decanted it.

“Myl,” he said, more quietly. “Make sure the outreach committee on Algara II has their talking points. No mention of Malastare directly. ‘We appreciate Mr. Corvalis’ standing up for the smaller worlds, even when it inconveniences him.’ They think that’s poetry.”

“I’ll have Kessa script it,” Myl said. “She’s good at provincial poetry.”

“And Praxon?” Ferris asked, unable to help himself.

Ravion went still. The house hushed around him. A wind moved the taller grasses outside; the paddock gate clicked as if the wood had teeth. He thought of a teenage boy he had met once at an auction in Deeja Peak, black hair and bright impatience, the name he carried like a chalice and the way a young man carried his coat on a holiday: easy, because he assumed the air would always be kind to him.

“We say nothing,” Ravion said. “We send a gift.”

Myl’s silence made a paragraph. “Sir.”

“Something uninsulting, the boy did just manage to gain control after that girl he keeps company with lost her mother.” Ravion went on. “An antique map of the Gallo Range. A decent one, not the cheap reproductions. With a note in my own hand: ‘For the Senator’s new walls. May the view be worth the climb.’ No signature flourish. No seal.”

Ferris snorted. “That is still sharp enough to draw blood.”

“Not blood,” Ravion said, though he liked the image. “Just a line.” He lifted his head toward the terrace. Beyond the glass, the long dark looked like a thing that could be cut. “There are ten thousand rooms in the palace and I have keys to three of them. He has keys to twenty. That does not mean he has keys to the particular door I want.”

“You have the door you want,” Myl said, and placed the Malastare case in front of him like a plate.

“There is still one door that has been presented to me as an opportunity that I would rather like to be the first to have the key to.” His words were quiet as if only meant for himself as he opened the case.

Inside lay the practicalities that made a loophole real. Affidavits establishing auxiliary residence on Malastare as a member of the High Republic dating back to his time purchasing Guild art, there was indeed a building that he owned as a residence on Malastare even if he had never set foot in it; letters of introduction from Gran subprefects who liked him, all of which was truly earned with lunches and meetings; the ragged cuttings of small-world papers calling him stubborn and decent; the transcript of a speech he had given on Fornax where he had not used any of the words consultant showing initiative, and desire for legacy. The packet smelled faintly of old paper and pride.

Five days.

“Sir,” Myl said. “Clothes?”

“Not black,” Ravion said. “Too grave. No white; we’re not washing anything clean. Brown. A Naboo cut that doesn’t look Naboo on Malastare. Boots I can ruin. Leave the cufflinks. If anyone should notice me, let it be because I’m taller than average.”

Ferris coughed into his hand.

“I will take that as affirmation,” Ravion said dryly.

They stood together, the three men more intimate than family for a moment because the plan sat on the table between them like a child, breathing.

“Go,” Ravion said. “Sleep, we are up early. Although Myl, before you do reach out the Abrantes House, I wish to be at their table the day we return back from Malastare, I have found some connections I need to pull the strings on. Also, try and find out some information about that young Sal-Soren girl, the rider. The one Praxon seems to be affectionate towards.”

They left with the silence of competent people who liked one another and did not have to say so.

Ravion walked back out to the terrace. He did not bring a new glass. He did not relight the projectors. The dark did a better job with him than light did, and it was cheaper.

Below, a stable hand led a Fathier along the fence; her steps sounded like measured applause. The breeze picked up and with it the scent of mown grass and the river’s iron tang. He leaned his elbows on the banister and let the anger lift its head inside him like a falcon that wanted release. He had learned to keep such creatures on his wrist, not on his shoulder. The wrist gave you a line to pull when the bird went too high.

For a minute, alone in the long night, he let himself be ugly. He felt the tantrum he had tasted earlier rise again, pure this time, not for show. He imagined flinging the whole holopit into the pool, shoving the neat stack of cases onto the floor, scratching the clove-dark finish of the table with his ring just to mark it. He imagined shouting Dominic’s name into the dark until the dark learned how to mouth the syllables back to him. He imagined what he had already been caught imagining: walking up the palace steps and not stopping at the place where his invitations normally let him end.

He rolled his shoulders. Ugly faded in the exhale. He straightened.

Inside, the map of the Gallo Range waited for his ink. The ugly had wanted to tear; the man who had built this place wanted to draw. How time changed a man.

He turned back into the salon and crossed to the desk near the bronze reader. He took out the letter paper he used for things he did not want to see archived in someone else’s machine. He began to write.


He paused, tasted the word on his tongue and didn’t like it, he left it anyway.


He smiled, crossed that line out so hard the nib stuttered.

No snideness. A line, not a wound.

He tried again.


He wrote the rest with the elegant economy he was famous for among people who liked words too much: three sentences that read like compliments and were actually measurements; a date offer for a meeting at a place so public Dominic would have to accept or look insulated; the reminder of a mutual acquaintance who was harmless and therefore dangerous. He let the ink dry and sealed the envelope without varnish. It looked right in his hand. Sincere, in the way a spear could be sincere.

He placed it in Myl’s tray with the map request along with an earlier drafted letter of condolences for the Sorelle Family and stood for a time at the window with his hands behind his back, looking east where morning would come like a blessing.

On the far side of the glass, the plain breathed. That was the thing he sometimes forgot in the city, in the corridors where flags hung like absolutions. The world where people farmed and brushed their daughter’s hair and drank sweet tea on concrete steps would be there after any Investiture Week. If he played well and was careful with his appetites, they would applaud him when he walked by, even if he did not deserve it. He tried on the thought and then put it down. The metaphorical falcon shifted on his wrist and settled its weight.

He remembered a boy once, him, standing at a fence not unlike this one, his palms black with grease from a machine he could not afford not to fix. He remembered vowing something without yet knowing the nouns to attach it to. He remembered deciding to get very good at whatever men got good at who did not want to be told no.

He smiled at the landscape because landscapes did not care. “Five days,” he told it. “Five days and a walk, to make them believe what’s already true,” he said, voice even.

“That it belongs to me.”