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  Beltran blushed a little, but didn’t disagree.

  “Beltran is also high enough in rank to go anywhere with me, but low enough to be ignored on his own,” Kordas added. “Delia, you’re going to be your sister’s messenger.”

  “Because no one is going to pay any attention to a girl, but I’m high enough in rank no one is going to try anything with me,” the girl agreed.

  “And because thanks to those lessons you’ve been getting from my Weapons-Master, I know you’re one of the best shots in the manor,” Kordas told her, and felt a brief moment of amusement at her startled look. “What, my insouciance got you fooled into thinking I don’t know what’s going on under my own roof? I’d appreciate it if you’d add sling to those lessons. Maybe quarterstaff. In my humble opinion you’re too small to risk close-quarter combat, but I’ll leave that up to Weapons-Master Klemath. The Plan will go right on ahead. Get the first, temporary Gate up, get Ivar across to scout the position for the one we’ll actually use, and start moving people out as soon as the main Gate is established.”

  Wis cleared his throat, getting Kordas’s attention. “On that note . . . we might as well tell you now that Jonaton’s had a brainstorm.”

  All eyes turned to Jonaton, who cleared his throat uneasily. “Well, anyone could have had it,” he demurred.

  “But the fact is, you did, not anyone. So?” Wis prodded.

  “Once Ivar has the location for us, I can have a new Gate up and powered and running within a day,” Jonaton said modestly. “Maybe two at the worst.”

  Kordas stared at him. “But—how?” he stammered. So far as he was aware, the construction of a major Gate took a fortnight at the very least.

  “I did some probing to the West after the Circle and I got the two stones linked and I could work through them,” said Ceri. “There’s an ancient reserve of power in the immediate area that I am fairly certain we can draw on. It dates back to that ancient conflict you were asking about not long ago; somehow it managed to not get caught up in a Change-circle, scattered to the winds, or contaminated.”

  “And I found a way to make Gates quickly,” Jonaton said proudly. “It turns out you don’t have to make a Gate entirely out of stone. We do it that way because that’s the way it’s always been done, but that doesn’t mean it’s the way we always have to do it. In fact, the only reason we make Gates out of stone is because timber doesn’t last. I’ve tried horn, wood—even wax! They all work. They all work well. It’s just that the weaker the material, the faster the Gate degrades. One made of wood won’t last a year.” He laughed. “And those made of wax last just about long enough for one trip.”

  “So we make two arcs out of timber, right here, in our workshop. We carry them through the temporary Gate with their foundation stones, set them in place, power them up, and—” Ceri spread his hands wide. “We don’t need a Gate that lasts. We don’t want a Gate that lasts, because we don’t intend to go back.”

  “In fact, it might just be a very good idea to have a Gate we can burn behind us,” Sai pointed out.

  “This—is unexpected good news.” Kordas managed not to stammer. Then he took a deep, deep breath and settled his mind. “Right, then. We always knew our deadline for getting the last of us out was going to be the Regatta. This is just a minor deviation from the Plan. I’m not that powerful a mage that you can’t do this without me.”

  “But—” Isla bit her lip. “What if you’re still under the Emperor’s eye by the time of the Regatta? How will you get out?”

  “The Plan isn’t about me,” Kordas said, with force, so he could be sure they understood he meant this. “The Plan was never about saving whoever was the Duke. The Plan was always about getting the most of us out that we can. I’ll do my level best to join you. If I can’t, I’ll do my level best to hide somewhere, even if I have to live the rest of my life as a stablehand.” He did not mention what would happen to him once the Emperor discovered their deception and escape if he was ever caught. He didn’t have to. But he preferred to be optimistic.

  And after all, the life of a stablehand wasn’t all that bad.

  “Now, let’s see about working out a clear schedule,” he said. “There literally is no time to waste.”

  * * *

  —

  Delia hardly knew what to say during that meeting. Over the course of the past couple of days she had somehow gone from being essentially her sister’s hanger-on to one of the lynchpins of a desperate plot.

  But what bothered her the most about all of this had nothing to do with her. Because all she could think about was the peril that Kordas was walking into. Willingly! And he knew very well what he was doing!

  This is insane . . . .

  But if it was insane, it was the sort of insanity that made more sense than the “sanity” of the Emperor’s toadies.

  She found herself agreeing to help Jonaton and the Six with the creation of the temporary and “permanent” Gates—apparently she was useful, not because she was a mage, but because she was not. She wouldn’t be affected as much, or at all, if certain things went wrong, it seemed. And once the big Gate was up, she had an even more important job, since it would be her task to carry messages from Isla to coordinate the exodus . . . .

  “I don’t understand how this is going to work,” she finally confessed to her sister, as Kordas left the planning group to consult with Grim about the tribute-horses, Hakkon and the other non-mages went off to continue the charade that the only important event in the entire Duchy was that the Emperor had demanded his tribute early, and Jonaton and the Six went into a huddle to decide exactly how they were going to create two curved, wooden horn-like objects that were two stories tall.

  “You don’t understand how what is going to work?” Isla asked, motioning to her to follow.

  “How are we going to keep the Emperor’s spies from noticing that people are disappearing?” she asked as they headed for Delia’s rooms—those rooms being the ones least likely for anyone to be using as a scrying point to spy on the people in the manor. After all, who was she to the Empire? A mere female of no importance.

  Isla shrugged. “They won’t notice, mostly because so far as the people in power are concerned, the ones that will disappear were invisible in the first place.” Isla opened the door into Delia’s rooms, motioned her inside, and shut the door again. “Let’s just take Lord Merrin as an example. He is the Emperor’s spymaster in Valdemar. As such, he is a very minor functionary in the Emperor’s service. Do you think that outside of his hand-picked spies, his personal body-servant, and perhaps his steward and his seneschal, he actually knows any of the people who serve him?”

  “I—don’t know,” Delia confessed.

  “Well, I can tell you for a fact that he doesn’t. Because I have three spies of my own in his household. One is a housemaid, because housemaids are almost literally invisible and yet see and hear an amazing amount. One is a gardener for the same reason. And the third is one of his minor clerks. He might take notice of the clerk, but only because he might need something written or fetched from the library or archives, and even then, all he’ll see is a pair of hands. The others? For him they are faceless nonentities, to the point that my housemaid was once forced to stand on a staircase facing the wall because he paused on that stair to have a long and quite interesting discussion with one of his spies, and a housemaid’s orders are to draw no attention to herself, ever, which she would have done if she’d tried to go down past him. It literally never occurred to him that as she stood there, as dumb as her broom, she was busy listening to every word he said.”

  “But—these people are doing things, doing the work of the Duchy!” Delia protested. “Won’t Lord Merrin notice if that work doesn’t get done on the other manors and holdings and farms?”

  “What if the work isn’t there to be done?” Isla replied. “Remember, we’re stripping as much as we can a
s we leave. As people leave, their work will leave with them. The spies won’t notice if more fields are fallow, or if there are fewer sheep in them. They won’t notice if there are fewer shepherds or coppicers or thatchers or threshers if there is no work for those people to do. Just like Lord Merrin, the spies are going to concentrate all their attention on Hakkon and to a lesser extent, me. The important people of the Duchy, the people who do the most hard work, are the ones that are beneath their notice.”

  “But they’ll have to notice eventually—” Delia pointed out.

  “Well . . . Hakkon says he has a plan for that, which I should not ask about. I’ll take his word for it. Very likely I would not like it,” Isla admitted.

  “Oh.” Delia licked her lips, thinking that there were a lot of things Hakkon could do about Lord Merrin that would come under that heading.

  “In the meantime, you and I need to work out something plausible that will send you all over the Duchy carrying messages for me,” her sister said. “Something important to me, but which will seem utterly trivial, even frivolous, to a man like Lord Merrin.”

  * * *

  —

  As Hakkon had stated, the tribute was very generous this year—five horses more than were actually required. Ten of the horses were Chargers, ten were Fleetfoots, and ten were Sweetfoots, and leading them all were the two False Golds. The Emperor did enjoy horse races, and of course he enjoyed always winning, so one third of the tribute was always in Fleetfoots. Kordas had cleared out the general stable to put them all in one place for the convenience of seeing that they were in top condition, their hooves were trimmed, and they were properly shod. This was not an easy task, since the False Golds, the Fleetfoots, and the Chargers were all stallions. Mature stallions. Fortunately, they were also all well trained, or things could have gotten chaotic or worse.

  The Fleetfoots pretty much had to be stallions; there is no point in racing a horse you couldn’t send out to stud if he was a winner. And the Emperor’s dunderheaded idiot Knights of the Throne would refuse to ride a mare or a gelding. This made absolutely no sense at all, of course. If Kordas had been an enemy commander, one of his first moves would be to send a loose, wild mare in heat out onto the battlefield as soon as the Knights put in an appearance, but in the Empire, when masculine ego came into play, logic flew right out the window.

  The only reason the entire yearly undertaking didn’t descend immediately into chaos was that there were no mares in the herd. Since the Emperor had never expressed a preference for the gender of the Sweetfoots, the Duchy always sent geldings. There had never been an objection, so he saw no reason to change that now.

  Merrin’s spies were bumbling around the place like fat flies, standing out by always being in the way, until Grim got sick of them and put them all to cleaning stalls. Two of them vanished as soon as Grim turned his back, and the third looked thoroughly miserable, which cheered Kordas up no end.

  But he should have realized that extreme interest meant that something was going on, other than Merrin making daily reports. What that something was, he discovered when at last the herd got put into harness and he and Grim sorted them into their “strings” for the trip.

  Now, normally, one did not put horses into harness to move them from one place to another. Normally, you would just herd them, like cattle. But these were mostly stallions, and allowing them to be loose in a herd was not just asking for trouble, it was sending trouble a hand-made, gilded, and highly decorated invitation. So instead, they were harnessed up in three “strings” of ten each. There would be a groom riding the lead and tail horse of each string, and Kordas and Beltran would each ride one of the False Golds, one at the front of the procession, and one at the rear.

  Kordas was hoping that someone in the Emperor’s staff would take pity on them and send them straight from the Valdemar Land Gate to the Imperial Palace Gate, but he wasn’t expecting that. This was why each of the horses carried a bag of oats and a skin of water, and each of the humans had a small rucksack of provisions.

  They had formed up in front of the stables and were ready to ride off, when suddenly, a swarm of servants followed by Isla came racing out of the manor. The servants were burdened with four large packs, and Isla was accompanied by his seldom-employed valet, carrying a full Court outfit.

  The full Court outfit, complete with the ceremonial rapier, and the Ducal sidearm. A “Spitter.”

  Oh, how he detested that thing, not for what it did, but for what it meant!

  Only a noble could carry a Spitter. It was an awkward contraption used mostly for duels, a sort of hand-held crossbow, except instead of being a bow, it had a rolled-steel tube one loaded a bolt into—the bolt diameter and the tube’s inner diameter built, of course, to Imperial standard sizes. The Spitter’s tube ended in a simple cast-metal chamber, reached via a hinged “break” mechanism operated by linked thumbspoons—one on each side, for ambidexterity’s sake. One loaded a round pellet (a “robin’s egg,” they were originally called, being light blue) into the pellet chamber, folded the weapon back until the thumbspoons re-engaged, and the Spitter was considered “live.” To load a bolt, one would drop a beribboned ball into the barrel’s muzzle, push the Spitter-bolt in until the ribbon was folded in tightly against the ball, and that was it.

  A Spitter’s pellet would break with a noise not unlike someone spitting—hence the name—when the trigger forward of the handle was pulled back very hard. Skilled Spitter marksmen tended to aim below their target, to counteract the upward motion caused by the trigger pull. The pellet contained highly compressed air, and the manufacturing of the things was a closely guarded secret, but involved magic, of course. A Spitter’s bolt would erupt from the end of the tube at high speed, much higher than one could get from a crossbow, leaving behind a burst of frigid but harmless gas, the bolt stabilized by a vapor-wrapped weighted ribbon faster than the strongest bowman could loose.

  Kordas’s Spitter, formerly his father’s, had been modified with an unobvious difference. If its thumbspoons were pressed upward, a second break in the upper handle would open. If the handle’s decorative grip-ring was twisted halfway, a mercy-kill piston, pointed at each end, was dropped from its locked state in a short barrel to a ready position. If a pellet was inside that second chamber and the Spitter was used as a club, the impact of the piston’s exposed length would break the pellet, and fire the piston only about a hands-breadth’s distance with the same force as a bolt fired in the conventional way. If an animal had to be put down, better to kill it instantly that way than let it suffer trauma from a bolt.

  The reason he hated the things was because although they were supposed to be used only for duels, they were most often used in acts of casual cruelty by the nobility. He’d seen that in play far too often when he’d been in fosterage. Servant annoy you? Put a bolt through a shoulder or a calf to teach him a lesson. Someone’s pet in your way? Kill it with the Spitter. Want to show off? Put some hapless servant against a wall and outline them with bolts.

  But you also resent what that weapon means to you, because of what you have done with it. The things you did with it, thinking, “I am the Duke, and the Duke must serve executions personally,” except you knew all along you could just order it done, without even your presence required. It says a lot about what you really are, Duke or not. You wanted to feel deadly, yourself. Not deadly by proxy, but you. Executing. You wanted to know how it felt to kill, with your own hands.

  “Ceri Foresaw you are going to be ‘invited’ to stay,” Isla said tensely. “Strip and change.”

  Beltran had already dismounted, and was pulling on his formal tabard with the winged white horse device that marked him as the Valdemar Herald on it. Kordas gritted his teeth, stripped to his trews, and donned his own Court garments, right there in the stable-yard, ending by buckling on his Court Saber and baldric and shoving his Spitter into his belt. The trews didn’t matter; they were hard-w
earing leather suitable for a long ride. And his riding boots had just been polished. Anyone who went on a long ride with shoes and linen trews, in his opinion, was an idiot. But gods! The fancy shirt with a ruff, no less, the long waistcoat, and the overly-elaborate two-colored greatcoat, made him angry just to look at, much less be forced to wear. And if this journey stretched for a full day, they’d be unbearable by lunchtime and look terrible when he finally arrived at the Imperial Palace.

  “One more thing. From the Circle. You’ll be among strong telepaths, and maybe worse. Take this stone amulet and fix it in place behind your Ducal crest. They said, picture this as the skies over Valdemar, and then think into it—they said you knew how—of what you love about Valdemar. ‘Springs to sunsets’ and the more, the better. Just nothing about the Plan, including them. Especially them. Then they laughed. It’s supposed to play your emotional memories about Valdemar instead of what you’re actually thinking at the time. But recharge it daily. Add new bits. They said that Imperial telepaths would dismiss you as a homesick hick.” Isla half-smiled. “Which you will be.”

  “That obvious, is it?” Kordas asked sardonically. “This amulet is just what I need. This could save me from exhaustion, trying to stay veiled-shielded the whole time I’m there. But I do have to say—it won’t be entirely deceptive. I’ll be thinking of Valdemar the whole time I’m away.” He spent a while picking at the Crest of Valdemar. It had many layers behind the escutcheon’s leather foundation, made up of almost an embarrassment of wards, locks, and memory enhancers, to which the stone amulet was pinned in place. Kordas traced fingers across the amulet and murmured, “I’ll try not to lose too much of myself there,” He held his breath a moment, then returned the Crest to its place on his baldric and sighed.

  “You look splendid,” Isla soothed.

  “I feel like a fop,” he grumbled.

  “You’ll be fine,” she promised. “And just think what would have happened if you’d turned up looking—”