Book 8: Chapter 61: Public Statement
Sen put up with the bowing and creepy chanting for a little while before he encouraged everyone to return to their homes or duties. He wasn’t expecting them to get much done the rest of the day. Catharsis might be good for the soul, but it tended to be a tiring thing in his experience. Plus, he wasn’t entirely done for the day. While he waited for the guards to drag out the rest of the prisoners, he turned to Grandmother Lu and Lo Meifeng.
“So, how do you think it went?”
“Well, they’re dead,” said Grandmother Lu. “That’s the definition of success with an execution.”
Sen was mostly sure that was meant as some kind of dark joke. He supposed it was enough that she hadn’t actively criticized the whole show, and it had been a show. He’d felt so pompous and ridiculous throughout the whole thing. Still, Lo Meifeng had told him that he needed to project a certain air if he wanted to pull all of this off in the long run. He couldn’t just say he was a lord. He needed to act like a lord, or at least what people thought lords should act like. It all seemed very silly to him, but nobility and everything attached to it were new to him. He had to trust that people with more experience than him knew what they were talking about.
“I doubt you’ll ever have the full loyalty of the Xie family members who grew up being nobles,” said Lo Meifeng. “There’s going to be a part of them that will hate you forever. But they also lost some people in that attack. This will have gone a long way toward making sure they hate you quietly.”
“In other words, take the little victories?”
“Exactly. Are you sure about this next part, though? It’s provocative, to say the least.”
“Sure about it? No. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s enough for people to simply hear that I killed the perpetrators. That’s just another rumor. If people see it, it becomes a reality.”
“You do realize that it’s going to be distorted into rumors by the end of the day,” said Lo Meifeng.