Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [176]
When Basil reached for his cup, Sarein noticed that the King and Queen were intensely interested in his every move. Estarra and Peter were convinced that the Chairman would kill them, if they didn't find a way to stop him first. Both of them focused on the cup of coffee. Cardamom coffee. A beverage that no one else drank.
The missing fauldur berries!
Before Basil could take a sip, Pellidor interrupted him yet again; after listening to the whispers, the Chairman scowled.
Sarein's thoughts raced, her emotions clashing like thunderclouds. She feared for Basil, but she could not deny the evidence of the terrible secret things he had already done. He is my lover! Her muscles locked. He tried to kill my sister! She wanted to knock the cup out of Basil's hand, wanted to shout at him, warn him that the coffee contained poison.
But that would be condemning Estarra to death. Even if Basil hadn't actually made up his mind to kill the King and Queen, he would certainly do so if they tried to poison him. She couldn't implicate Estarra. She couldn't!
But she also loved Basil. She had been with him for years. He had taken Sarein under his wing, taught her Hansa politics. She couldn't just look the other way and let him die. Thoughts raced through her mind in a flash. She was reluctant to cause a scene, but how else could she prevent this? Overreaction was an unforgivable sin in Basil's eyes. Years of political training restrained her for an instant.
Suspecting nothing, he lifted the cup to his lips. Sarein shot to her feet. "Don't drink that!"
Conversation died. Basil looked at her with a flare of annoyance, and she had to think quickly. Every excuse that came to her mind sounded ridiculous, and, knowing Basil's stubbornness, she realized he would insist on drinking the coffee, in public, just to prove her wrong. Oh, he would punish her for this--if she had made a mistake.
"I saw . . ." Sarein refused even to glance at Estarra and focused her gaze instead on Mr. Pellidor. The expediter was a cold and often rude man; she knew he must have carried out many of the terrible deeds Estarra had described, like planting the thermal bomb, and even butchering the dolphins. His hands were as bloody as the Chairman's.
Basil frowned at her. "Yes, Ambassador Sarein? What is it?"
"I saw Mr. Pellidor doing something with your coffee. He seemed very furtive about it."
Basil looked at her in surprise. She had never overreacted before, had never done anything to make him question her. "That's a rather strange thing to say."
She held her breath, forced herself to nod. "I'm aware of that, Mr. Chairman. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but it certainly looked suspicious." She swallowed hard. "Isn't it wiser to be safe than sorry?" She desperately wanted to search the faces of the King and Queen for guilt or anger, but she kept her eyes fixed on Pellidor's now-indignant face.
"This is ridiculous, Mr. Chairman. I never touched your coffee."
"I saw what I saw," Sarein insisted.
Someone from down the table commented loudly enough to be heard in the intrigued silence, "Isn't he the one who refused to believe the King's warning about the compies? The man who told us all there was nothing to worry about!"
Since the uprising, media clips had run and rerun Peter's brave speech in the compy factory, when he'd demanded that the operations be shut down until the Klikiss programming modules could be checked. Pellidor had featured prominently as a man whose refusal to listen had cost countless lives.
Hearing the loud muttering, Basil glared at Sarein. "I have no reason to believe my expediter would do me harm." He held up his cup, sniffed it, then extended it toward the blond man. "However, if it makes Ambassador Sarein happy--Mr. Pellidor, please drink this coffee and prove to us that there's nothing wrong with it."
The other man frowned. "I don't care for coffee, Mr. Chairman."
"And I don't care for baseless suspicions. Do it!"
Glaring