Page 5 of Beyond

And on that positive note, and feeling better just thinking about that lovely creature who was now her very own, she went to bed.

ell, at least this time you don’t stink,” Isla said, as Kordas entered their suite. She was sitting by the fire, and had clearly been prepared to wait as long as it took for him to get back from his errand. “Something to be said for the rain.”

“More to be said for it staying warm until we were just about back inside,” Kordas replied. “Is that a hot toddy?” he added, staring hopefully at a steaming pitcher on the table beside her.

She laughed. “It is. Go strip off and get into the robe I’ve left out for you, and you can have some.”

“Yes, oh most benevolent of mistresses,” he responded, and did as he had been ordered. This did require going up two floors—suites in the towers were made up of vertical sets of rooms rather than horizontal ones, with a staircase going up along one wall—but the prospect of a lovely fire and a cup of spiced and spiked mead was enough to carry him up to the wardrobe floor, where Isla had, indeed, left out a nice warm (and thankfully dry) robe for him. He left his possibly ruined clothing in the proper place; Isla would have given him a piece of her mind about making extra work for the servants if he’d just left it on the floor. Isla was imperious in her own way, but there was nobody Kordas would have rather been ordered around by.

As he padded back down the stairs in bare feet, he saw Isla had already poured two cups and was holding one out to him.

“Are you in need of a bath?” she asked, sitting back down in her chair by the fire. This was diplomacy on her part; she could have leaned over and obviously sniffed him, then given him a Look. Isla was so skilled in projecting her meaning by precise expressions that it was nearly an entire language of its own.

“Thankfully the rain took care of the mess.” He took his seat across from her and sipped at the drink, sighing gratefully. “It was a breech birth and I needed three hands when I had only two; I’m just grateful that Delia turned up and sorted it out. I had no idea the Fetching Gift could be used to maneuver a stubborn foal inside its mother. I gave her the filly afterward.”

“She doesn’t give herself enough credit for how useful her Mind-magic is,” Isla mused. “That was tremendously kind of you, since it’s Arial’s foal.”

“I can’t think of anyone I would trust more with Arial’s foal. She’s more than old enough to learn how to train her own mount from the beginning,” he pointed out, and relaxed into the padded back of his chair, blinking at his wife a little sleepily. “If she’s going to be a Valdemar, even by marriage, she needs to learn every aspect of horsemanship.”

These Imperial manors were meant to be detrimental to their owners. They were supposed to impress upon you how all-powerful the Emperor’s mages were. And their very impracticality was supposed to make you squander resources. You were supposed to look at this gorgeous piece of architecture, realize that nothing you owned would look anything other than shabby within its imposing walls, and spend money you didn’t have to fill all the enchanting empty rooms with suitable furnishings. The more you spent on show, the less you had to spend on anything else. And if you overspent on show, the Emperor could use the fact as proof that you were not fit to be in charge, and replace you with someone else.

They were quite lovely poisons wrapped in attractive sugary coatings.

But when Kordas’s grandfather had been “gifted” this thing, he hadn’t actually moved into it immediately. Instead, he and his people had studied it, and instead of doing what the Emperor assumed they would do, they adapted the manor to how people in this Duchy lived, rather than “living up to” the manor. The result was that entire sections had been given over to storage—there was enough food alone here to feed the entire human population of the Duchy for two years at this point. There were plenty of other things in storage too; the Emperor would probably not approve of the “other” armory hidden here. Kordas adored his grandfather’s cunning, and he built up odd skills and cultivated his own versions of the canny old man’s resourcefulness. A summer’s spare time was spent creating secret caches inside everyday settings, to impress Grandfather. Bump-out hidden drawers, hatches disguised in mosaic that revealed tubes to drop items to other rooms, even hollowed chambers in saddles. Grandfather heartily approved.

It wasn’t a secret that rooms were being used for storage—but only Kordas, his cousin, Isla, and a few choice servants under his cousin knew just how much was stored here. He and his father had had a plan …and with every year that passed, the feeling never left any of them that the need to implement that plan became ever more urgent.

Well, they had an idea, rather than a plan. They still didn’t have every part of the idea figured out. And when (not if) they did see that idea through—it had to be iron-clad and foolproof. They would never get a second chance, and the repercussions for failure did not bear thinking about.

Isla stirred a little, interrupting his thoughts, and he smiled at her. She was staring at the fire, and he wondered what she was thinking.

If he had not known that Isla and Delia were sisters, he never would have suspected it. Isla was gifted with a lush figure and a cascade of red-tinted brown hair; Delia was small, thin, and dark, and did not look sixteen at all. Isla had wide, luminous green eyes and a perpetual expression of pleasant welcome; Delia had dark gray eyes and a constant look of brooding, even when nothing was wrong. Neither were conventionally beautiful, though Isla had an edge over her sister. The place where both sisters were a match was in their heads; both of them were smart and very clever. Smarter than he was, he often thought, and blessed the fact that neither of them had ever turned their formidable intellects against him.

“So you have undoubtedly given the Emperor’s little bird something to sing about again,” Isla observed with amusement. He had to laugh aloud at that.

“I’m going to enjoy reading that particular dispatch, though I confess it would have been even more amusing if I could have somehow coerced him into being there for the foaling,” he replied, the thought sweeter than the mead. “Arial was particularly gassy.”

She laughed at that. “You will never get him near the stable after Delia’s old pony nearly savaged him.”

“Delia’s pony is a good judge of character.”

She chuckled, and fell silent. There really wasn’t much to say, and he was enjoying the peace and comfort after the ordeal of the foaling. He was perfectly content to sit and sip in the quiet.

The “Emperor’s little bird” she referred to was the lord of one of the fourteen manors in his Duchy, a man who had been there as long as he could remember, although he was not in any way related to the original lord who had held that land and title. Whether Lord Merrin had been specifically planted there during Kordas’s father’s tenure, or had volunteered for the position of “Emperor’s ‘secret’ informant” after taking over the property, was a mystery he wasn’t particularly concerned with solving. Getting rid of the man was the last thing on Kordas’s mind. Much better to know who all the informants were, so he knew exactly what the Emperor was being told at all times.

The fellow actually thought he had a foolproof method of sending his reports to his master; he wrote them by hand and placed them in a box on his desk. The box had a spell on it that caused anything placed in it to travel to an identical box somewhere in the Emperor’s Palace. Probably not directly to the Emperor’s private office; Lord Merrin was a very small bird, and Kordas was an equally small fish.

Merrin, however, is absolutely sure that he has the ear of the Emperor himself. His attitude of smug “I know something you don’t know” was a dead giveaway. If Kordas hadn’t already known Merrin was the resident spy, that attitude alone would have told him.

What Merrin didn’t know was that the magnificent desk he had in his private office also had a spell on it. Anything that he wrote on it was reproduced in Kordas’s study, on stacks of paper kept in a drawer in Kordas’s desk for just that purpose. The drawer and Merrin’s desk were made from the same tree, which had made the spells trivially easy for a competent mage to create. Kordas had done it himself as one of the first pieces of magical business after his father had died and he had been confirmed as the Duke.

It had also been trivially easy for him to get Merrin to want that desk. It had taken the sacrifice of one of the Duchy’s most magnificent deramon elm trees, a tree which featured amazing grain and spectacular color. And it had taken the best cabinetmaker in the Duchy most of a year to produce the beautifully carved, ornamented, and polished desk. After that, all it had taken was for Merrin to see the desk, and hear the sad and entirely fictitious story that the cabinetmaker had hoped to sell the desk to Kordas, but that Kordas had laughed and said, “What do I need with a desk when I already have one?” That piqued Merrin’s curiosity, and the low-but-not-suspiciously-low price for it, coupled with the cabinetmaker’s eagerness for more work, had cemented Merrin’s avarice.

This had also enabled Merrin to flatter himself that he had infinitely better taste than “that bumpkin” Duke Kordas, and that was that. One look had been all that it took to seal the deal. And within days, Kordas knew every letter of every word that Merrin sent to the Emperor.

I do regret losing that desk, a little.

“I can just see the dispatch,” Isla said, breaking the silence. “After all the bowing and scraping and sucking up, the next words will be that bumpkin Kordas spent all night in his stable personally attending to the birth of a horse.”