Protector: Foreigner #14 by C.J. Cherryh

place with people hunting them. That was what his father and mother had been through.
    And when he and Great-grandmother had gotten back, the whole world was in a mess, and Great-grandmother and nand’ Bren had gone down anyway—they had gotten to Uncle Tatiseigi and started an uprising against Murini. And his father and mother had come in, and they had gone to Shejidan, with the people cheering them all the way. It had felt very good, then.
    Except his mother was very jealous of Great-grandmother, because he had come back older and smarter, and knowing how to do things, and she had not taught him. Great-grandmother had. Great-grandmother was powerful. Great-grandmother did whatever she wanted. And people cheered for Great-grandmother, and for Father—but maybe not so much for his mother, and he did not know what to do to patch things. He knew what he knew. He knew that what Great-grandmother had taught him was the proper way.
    It probably had not helped that he and his father and his mother had had to live all together in Great-grandmother’s apartment with Great-grandmother’s guard and Great-grandmother’s staff until they could take all Murini’s things out of their proper apartment and rebuild and repaint it, top to bottom, for security reasons.
    It had not helped, too, that Grandfather showed up, and Aunt Geidaro, who had once been married to, of all people, Murini’s cousin—who had had nothing to do with the coup, since he was dead; but still, Father had sent
her
home. Maybe Mother had not favored that. And then there was Grandfather—
    Grandfather had pitched a fit, when they finally got into their own apartment. He had shown up at the door when it was just
him
at home—with the servants and his aishid—and Grandfather had wanted in,
really
wanted in, and Cajeiri had locked himself into his room—
that
had been scary. Grandfather had acted crazy. And he had
not
wanted Grandfather in the house.
    Father had had his own fit when he got home, and banished Grandfather from the capital and banished all Mother’s staff, every one of them, from her bodyguard to the maid who had been her nurse when she was a baby—that last had been the one he would have stuck at, himself, but he understood. It was the people closest to you the longest who could be really efficient spies, and could turn and kill you and everybody if you were wrong about their man’chi. She had become a security risk, and so she had to go, and that was probably the person his mother missed the most. That was the person who had been with his mother when
he
was born, but who would not be there for this new baby. His mother was upset about that.
    His father said his mother would be less excitable once the baby came. He hoped so. His mother wanted him when he was absent and wanted rid of him when he was there; and that was the way things were, three and four times a day.
    It had been the worst when all of them together were trying to live in mani’s apartment, and when mani’s rules were what the staff followed.
    He had so hoped his mother would calm down when they got their own apartment back.
    But mani was right. Mani always said: that there was no way to change somebody else’s mind, that
that person
had to change, and that they had to
want
to change, and the older they were, the less chance they were ever
going
to change, so there was no good expecting it to happen some morning for no particular reason.
    That sort of summed the numbers up. No matter which order you added numbers, they always added the same. Mani said that, too: if you ever thought you would get a different answer from the same numbers—you were wrong, that was all.
    So he doubted mani and Mother were really making peace, not in the party last night and not in the sitting room over tea.
    He heard the sitting room door open and close again as he was lying there. He heard footsteps go from the hall to the foyer. And he heard the outer door open and shut.
    Then, farther away, he