Read Online Zotikas: Episode 1: Clash of Heirs by Rob Storey, Tom Bruno - Free Book Online Page B

mysterious
Ortessi heir, who was supposed to be dead and now shows up twenty years later?
Could you imagine the consequences?”
    Imagine .
Velirith had actually put her mind to work visualizing the scene. Feleanna was
a wicked witch with way too many years and ambitions left in her. If she were
paired with a leader of a house she was currently trying to eliminate, the
result would be dramatic, if not explosive. It could make the whole event
worthwhile , Velirith thought.
    “Or imagine the Executive Chair himself, dancing
majestically around the outer circle and ending up with Balfani Telander, that
big woman married to the prime of the power plant house? After the faked magal
shortage was exposed, they hate each other!”
    Velirith felt the excitement of a new idea coming on.
“How do you arrange the dance so that no one is paired with someone they don’t
get along with?”
    “Well, the dance represents social order, families
caring for each other—“
    Velirith let out a snort of laughter.
    “What?”
    Between spasms of laughter, Velirith managed to get
out, “Come on, Moshalli! You just told me how much everybody hates each other.
You don’t see the irony of a dance that symbolizes families ‘taking care of
each other’?”
    By her frown, Moshalli evidently hadn’t looked past
the tradition to see the reality. “In the old days, the groups were completely
random. They would just dance with whoever they ended up with. Now we are more
careful.”
    Calming herself, Velirith said, “Go on. Please.”
    “Well, it’s also called the Mystery Partner Dance.
You’ve seen it, but this is the first year you can actually dance in it, now
that your father has declared you heir-apparent of house Vel. You know the men
are in the outer circle and the women in the inner circle. The two circles move
opposite each other, everyone switching partners until a third of the way
through the music. Then the music changes, the circles stop rotating, and they
dance with that partner for the rest of the song. That way the new partners can
talk and get to know each other better.”
    Controlling her rising excitement, Velirith pictured
what a fouled dance plan could produce in this time when families were anything
but caring.
    Ignorant of Velirith’s inner humor, Moshalli went on.
“The hard part is sorting out who hates who. Once that is figured out, it’s
actually easier than you think to keep feuding families apart. There are two
groups of dancers that never mix; my mother just puts rivals in separate
groups. Like Feleanna will be in group ‘A’ and both Forcheso Parchiki and the
Ortessi mystery man will be in group ‘B’. They’ll never get paired together.”
    “How does that work?” asked Velirith, suddenly
curious.
    “Look.” And Moshalli explained, placing a sheet of
paper with diagrams on top of Velirith’s script. The outer and inner circle
consisted of about forty dancers each, but as they counter-rotated, Velirith saw
how they skipped a person after each short dance interaction, creating the two
groups, odds and evens, or “A”s and “B”s. As long as the groups were equal in
number, everyone would always end up partnered with someone from their own
group. Though simple, it was an elegant, beautiful dance, Velirith admitted,
and very old, dating back to when Velik himself had united the diverse tribes
living all over the three continents.
    But she also saw, more by intuition, that if either
circle lost a single dancer or a couple from the same group, group ‘A’ dancers
would be forced to partner with group ‘B’ dancers. She also noticed the pattern
was mathematical. If a specific dancer was taken out at the right time, a
preset arrangement of the dancers that looked random could actually be
arranged to partner specific dancers with an exact predetermined match.
    One sheet of the diagram held blank circles that were
to be filled in with dancers’ names.
    “Moshalli,” Velirith asked suddenly, as the