But the games would stop. So would the killing. Keritanima had a plan to deal with that, and that plan coincided with her plan to destroy her father. She had five hundred years to answer for, and she was going to stand up and be responsible for that debt.
The servants in the hallways greeted the Princess with a thin veneer of submissiveness. They all hated her, thought she was a brat, an image she had carefully cultivated in them. They had no reason to change that opinion, and in a way, it felt rather refreshing to be treated that way again. That conception would change over time, but at least it was the one thing that didn't seem tainted by her time away, and the knowledge that Wikuna now knew about her. The nobility, on the other hand, did nothing but stare at her with unmasked curiosity and questioning. They knew who she really was, but many of them wouldn't completely believe it until they spoke to her personally.
The steward escorting them, along with ten Royal Guardsmen, Marines selected because of their outstanding service or their political affiliations, led them through the hallways of the palace in relative silence, aside from the occasional greeting, curtsy or bow from those they passed. They then reached Keritnaima's apartments, which were on the fifth floor of the Palace in the center of the eastern wall, giving the rooms abutting the outer wall a spectacular view of the harbor. The steward, the name of whom escaped her, had opened the door to her chambers, handed Binter the key, and then bowed and informed her that her father had restricted her to her room until such time that he called for her. It was no more than Keritanima expected. Damon Eram didn't want his dangerous daughter roaming the halls getting into mischief, and he also didn't want her to feel that she was so important that he would drop everything to deal with her. It was a game of hurry up and wait. The four monstrous big-cat Wikuni Marines posted outside her door were there to convince her to remain inside, and perhaps to prevent possible conspirators from gaining access to the Princess. Again, it was no more than what she expected. Given the circumstances, she would order the same things if their positions were reversed.
Her old rooms were undisturbed. The crushed velvet theme of the room's lavish furnishings were just as she remembered them, with the mahogany wood panelling covering over stone walls and the rich feel of the Shen Lung carpets strewn across the cold floor. The main chamber of her apartments was dominated by a huge hearth, in which a fire had constantly burned when she occupied the chambers. Keritanima was fond of the fire, of its light and it warmth, and the fact that it allowed her to stand in silhouette against its light and make it hard for those spying on her to see what she was doing. Each room was furnished similarly, except for the room occupied by Binter and Sisska. Her personal bedroom was beyond their room, forcing any attacker to go through the Vendari to get to her. The heavy bars on the window of her room ensured that nobody could scale the precipitous walls of the Palace to reach her either. What they didn't know was that those bars could be easily removed from the inside, allowing the crafty Princess to climb down to the next lower window, which was at the end of a passageway, and sneak out of her rooms. She was quite adept at making the climb after so many years, and the cracks, footholds, and handholds of the rough stone wall were intimately imprinted into her memory. She could make that climb, up or down, blindfolded.
The rooms were clean and neat, just as she left them. All her clothing and jewelry were also present in the room, and from the smell of things, none of her rooms in her apartments had been entered for a couple of days. She allowed no one to enter her bedroom other than the Vendari and Miranda. Not even the other servants of the Palace were permitted in her room, on pain of death. Miranda maintained the room, kept the room clean and changed the sheets on the bed.
"Nice," Azakar said appreciatively, looking at her huge inner chamber. It was dominated by a four-poster bed with a feather mattress, with curtains to shade her from the light and large enough to hold four people. A little stool allowed her to climb up into it, since its rail came up to her chest. A pair of nightstands flanked the bed, and a large hope chest sat at its foot. She had a large, gilded desk on one wall, just over the window-which was what she used to climb up to it when she snuck out-and three clothes armoires lining the wall to the bed's left. The right side of the room was open and empty, except for a large, ornate hearth and mantle, complete with a wrought-iron fence and screen to keep the embers of the fire off the expensive carpets, and a door leading to a large closet. The room was decorated by several small sculptures standing on pedestals, elegant works of art depicting Wikuni, a couple of human busts, and a breathtaking sculpture of some sort of exotic female being. She had paintings on her walls, strange paintings consisting of large pictures of landscapes and Wikuni in relaxed surroundings, yet when one looked closely, those figures and objects were constructed of a myriad of tiny dots and smudges of paint of different colors. Up close, the paintings looked like spatters of paint, yet when one stepped back and regarded the work as a whole, the characters and settings were easily made out. Those portraits never failed to amaze and enthrall the Princess, who would sit and stare at them for hours on end to puzzle out the depth of the genius guiding the hand who had created them.
"I never thought I'd see this place again," Keritanima remarked as she touched the Weave and wove together a hasty spell constructed entirely of Mind and Divine flows, sending the fingers of her spell out to search for sentient minds within the immediate area. She had no trouble locating six of them outside the room, yet so close they had to be just beyond her apartment's walls. The daily spies. Her bedroom was impenetrable by spies, for the rooms on both sides of it belonged to her private apartments. One was the large closet that held the majority of her clothing, and the other was a small privy and bathing chamber, complete with running water. Those two chambers isolated her room within the apartment from physical spying through the walls, leaving on those who could listen into the room either with magic or with certain auditory aides. The only true way to spy into the room was from above, and the room above hers was supposedly unused and kept locked. That didn't stop them from getting in there and making tiny holes in the ceiling with which to spy on her. Before she left, she used to keep her own agents in that room, deaf agents there to kill anyone who knew the secret way to get inside it.
Without so much as batting an eye, she wove together another spell of Mind, Divine, and a touch of Air, a spell that attacked those minds with the power of an avalanche, overwhelming them one by one. A single instruction was implanted deep within them, an order that none of them could possibly hope to ignore, deny, or fail to carry out. One by one, those six Wikuni filed out of their hidden cubby holes, marched to the end of the passage, then threw themselves out the window.
She had to establish her dominance immediately, and unfortunately, that required her to kill off anyone who dared to spy on her. It was part of the plan.
Lula had taught her Wikuni pupil alot more than even the Council suspected. Mind weaves she created wouldn't work on humans, because she was not human, but there was nothing stopping them from working on other Wikuni. Lula had taught her those mind weaves, knowing that her bright student could make the alterations necessary to make them effective on her own kind.
After doing that, she sent flows of Earth through her ceiling, using them to find the tiny peepholes made in the ceiling to spy on her. She wove together a spell of Water and Earth and released it into the ceiling, causing the stone to soften just enough for her magical nudging to seal those holes and cracks, then she dissipated the Weave and wove another consisting of flows of Earth, Divine energy, and Fire. That hardened the stone, made it as strong as steel, and making sure that any attempt to drill through it would be so noisy that it couldn't be missed.