I frowned. “They shouldn’t be. They told me to head north. I ignored them.”
“Yes, well. They said you would do that.”
“Dammit,” I muttered. “I need to stop being so predictable.”
“Mama knows Morgan and Randall?” Ryan asked me. “Why does that terrify me?”
“Because it should,” I said. “Oh, and Mama doesn’t like Randall. And vice versa.”
“Oh dear gods,” Ryan said. “That’s… not good.”
“And Feng and Letnia are with them,” Tall said with a wince.
“No,” I groaned, my face in my hands. “No, no, no.”
There was an elected figurehead in Meridian City, and some semblance of a government. People voted in official elections for council members and mayors and whoever else they wanted, but it was essentially a façade. Because everyone, and I mean everyone, knew the city was actually run by three different people.
Mama.
Feng.
And Letnia.
Feng ran the weapons and the gangs.
Letnia ran the drugs and the booze.
Mama ran the entertainment district.
No one crossed them. And if they did, chances are they probably weren’t heard from again.
But they were good people. Well. Mostly. The King had yet to see a need to put an end to their reign. Meridian City was… different. This was accepted. And the King knew that Mama, Feng, and Letnia would fall in line behind him should he call for it. They respected him, even if they didn’t always agree with him.
And given that everything in Meridian City was taxed heavily, it saw a lot of money going toward the Crown, money that was then turned into schools and hospitals. It went to orphanages and farmers who grew crops for Verania. It funded programs like putting more teachers in the slums. When I asked him about it, asked him how he could let them do what they did, the King had told me that sometimes, the path for the greater good was paved with unseemly things.
But having Letnia, Feng, Mama, Morgan, and Randall all in the same room?
It was like my nightmare had become corporeal. And to make things worse, I still wasn’t on even ground with Morgan and Randall after all they’d kept from me. I wondered if it was too late to run into the Dark Woods and never come out.
“Let me guess,” I said, dropping my hands. “They are demanding my immediate presence.”
“We were ordered to bring you as soon as you arrived,” Tall said, sounding rather apologetic, like he understood just how much this sucked.
“No one in my training class is going to believe this happened to me,” Short said, looking awfully green.
THE SOUNDS of normalcy we’d heard had been a lie.
Sure, there were still people on the streets of Meridian City, moving amongst the stalls in the market or standing on street corners, hips cocked, winking lasciviously at anyone who happened to catch their eyes, but there was more than that.
Meridian City didn’t have the army that the City of Lockes had. It didn’t have the knights like the castle did. But it did have a collection of ex-convicts, volunteers, and those voluntold to pick up a weapon and become part of the Meridian City Guard. They mostly were there to keep the peace in the streets, throwing out the riffraff or handling the crowds at one of the many (usually mostly nude) festivals Meridian City seemed to throw. Since Verania had been at peace for decades, there hadn’t been any need to do much beyond crowd control. In fact you rarely saw them, their dark uniforms blending into the shadow and grime until it was absolutely necessary for them to make their presence known.
But now?
Now they were everywhere.
They lined the streets, standing an arm’s length apart, spears and swords and shields at the ready. They walked the ramparts of the wall around the city. They’d probably seen us coming long before we landed. Which meant word had probably already gotten back to Morgan and Randall and it was probably too late to pretend we’d never arrived.
The sheer number of guards suggested they were taking Myrin’s threat seriously. It still didn’t explain how Morgan and Randall had known about it, but that was yet another question I either would or wouldn’t get an answer to.