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  She had been saved, literally, by a knight on a shining horse.

  She’d managed to be fervently grateful, but the second she laid eyes on her sister, she’d broken down and started crying her eyes out. Isla had taken her to these rooms, let her cry until she couldn’t cry anymore, then put her to bed.

  And when she’d awakened, every one of the treasures that had been carried away had been lovingly installed here. Her clothing had been put away in the wardrobe. The family heirlooms Kordas had helped her abscond with were on prominent display in a suite of rooms that was easily a match for the ones her father had occupied. Where, in fact, those treasures were now. If she looked up from contemplating her mead-cup, she could see them all over the room. Here the gleam of the arm of a delicate statue, there the sparkle of gemstones in an ornamented cup, yonder the glint of gilding on the spine of a book. It was all still here, and all hers.

  The only things that weren’t still here were all the books on magic. She wasn’t a mage and couldn’t use them, so she had given them to Kordas and Isla.

  Now that she thought about it, that moment when she had looked up at the Duke of Valdemar and realized he had come to save her out of the kindness of his heart was probably the moment she had fallen in love with him.

  She hadn’t realized that, of course. She’d only been thirteen. All she’d known then was that she worshipped him like a god, and would have done anything he asked of her.

  And I still would, she admitted to herself. Then shook her head. She was just ridiculously lucky; she had a sister who loved her, she had a brother-in-law who could not have been more unlike most of the Emperor’s nobles, she was fed and housed in ridiculous comfort and had the freedom to do practically anything she wanted.

  And I need to start concentrating on all the good things I have, and not on the things I can’t have.

  Good things, like that adorable little filly. A Valdemar Gold! Never in a million years would she have imagined she’d ever own a Gold!

  The memory of the darling little beastie being thoroughly cleaned by her dam made Delia smile with incredulous delight. And she’s mine! Which means that rather than sitting here in my cups feeling sorry for myself because my brother-in-law regards me as a sister, I should be thinking of a name for her.

  She glanced down at the cup in her hand—one of a set of six she and Kordas had made off with. Something to do with honey or mead? Isla’s mount was “Sundrop,” after Isla’s favorite flower.

  I know! she decided, swallowing the last of her drink. Daystar. Star for short. It had a nice sound to it.

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

  2

  “Well, 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.”

  “If ‘that bumpkin’ is what they both think of me, we can all live with that,” Kordas replied. “Better to be inconsequential in the Emperor’s eyes. I am grateful to be small and poor.”

  That was not quite true, although it was true that Valdemar was by far the smallest Duchy in all of the vast Empire. In fact, truth to tell, Valdemar was smaller than many Baronies. And Valdemar was not precisely poor; it just was not rich. They produced enough from the farms to feed the Duchy and store back a bit against bad years, but not more than that. The real wealth of Valdemar was in its horses, all the more especially because the Ducal lands were more suited to grazing and mowing than tilling and farming. Money from the sale of those horses was what had gone into filling all those storage rooms here at the manor.

  And it was going to be a good year in the Valdemar meadows, as long as there were no problem births. Every mare above the age of four and below the age of sixteen was in foal. There were five different lines that Kordas sold outside of the Duchy—the Valdemar Golds (rarely), the Charger line (which were heavy horses favored by knights for tourneys), the Tow-Beasts that pulled the barges along the vast Imperial network of canals that handled almost all of the cargo of the Empire, the Sweetfoot palfreys, and the Fleetfoot racehorses. Valdemar paid its tribute to the Emperor in horses, all of them as four-year-old, tamed and trained beasts. And until now, none of those had ever been Valdemar Golds. The Golds were the rarest, in part because of the color, but mostly because he was so careful about his breeding and bloodlines.

  “Are the Emperor’s fake Golds ready?” Isla asked. “Because if he actually reads the dispatch, being told about a Gold foaling is going to make him want the ones you promised him.”

  “All this year’s tribute horses are ready,” he assured her. “The two I earmarked for him as Chargers have shed their coats four times, and each time, they grew back gold. At four, I know they won’t change their coat-color. The magical work Cestin and I put in on them when their mothers ‘caught’ took hold perfectly. Ridiculously detailed spell—takes forever. But it would take a mage with expert knowledge of horse anatomy to even think to look for it, much less find signs of it.”

  “And it won’t matter if they don’t breed true?” she asked anxiously.

  “He doesn’t have any Golds to breed to,” Kordas pointed out. “He won’t be able to determine if they breed true or not. Not,” he added, “that he’ll care. He pays no attention to his stud book, or to his breeding farms, much less anyone else’s. All he knows is that when there’s a parade, he has the most impressive horse in the Empire to ride, and a bonus if it’s rare. And even better if he has a pair of them that can pull a carriage three times as big as anything anyone else has. There’s nothing in the Empire rarer than a Valdemar Gold, and nothing more impressive than one of my Chargers. Combine the color with an impressive horse, and he’ll be happy. Chances are he’ll keep them in the Imperial stables at the Capital, and never breed them at all. After all, if he wants another, he knows where he can get it. We’ve made sure I have more Chargers in that color coming up.”

  “But you’re giving him a warhorse,” she objected. “And you have no idea whether or not he can handle it.”

  Now he laughed, and tossed down the last of his drink. “Actually I have a very good idea of what he can handle as a rider. Remember, I was a hostage at the Imperial Court until I was eighteen. He’s a terrible rider. And the two Chargers are from an entirely new line I started for my farmers here, crossed with Tow-Beasts. They have the looks, strength, and stamina of the warhorses, but they have the tempers of a good, steady dog, and their preferred gait is a walk. He’ll probably have a new, gaudy carriage built, one with gilding everywhere, and he’ll
have them pull it rather than riding them.”

  “When did you start that line? And why didn’t you tell me about them?” Isla asked, a little surprised.

  “They’re not all that interesting, and I didn’t think you’d care,” he admitted, and gave her a pointed look. “The number of times you’ve put on that expression of ‘yes, dear, I am listening to you’ when I’m droning on about the horses has not been lost on me.”

  She shrugged apologetically. “Well . . . why another line? I should think that five are enough to handle.”

  “I’m breeding them as an alternative to oxen, for heavy plowing. Thick hides, broad feet, smart enough to read what’s around them. Won’t win any races, but could pull for a week. The first lot is trained and waiting in the Westfields, ready to be loaned out any time.”

  “Loaned?” she said. “Why ‘loaned’?”

  “Because it’s unlikely any of my farmers could afford one,” he said frankly. “And they’re horses, not oxen. They need more particular care than an ox or a mule. So I’ll be loaning them out with a drover who will also act as groom and keeper, and we’ll see how that goes. One horse, one drover, to a village in each sort of terrain. It’s early days yet, and I don’t have so many of them that I can’t absorb them all into the Duchy farms, then sell the rest to my lords and end the experiment, except for the ones I’ll keep around to send to the Emperor.”

  This was all small talk, really. He was not asking the question he really wanted her to answer, which was “How are the children?”

  It was a question fraught with pitfalls, because officially, he and Isla were childless.

  Neither of them had been prepared to surrender one or more of their children into the Emperor’s household where they would become, as Kordas himself had been, hostages for their parents’ behavior. So all three of Isla’s pregnancies and births had been conducted in absolute secrecy, with only three people being aware of the truth: Cestin, Delia, and Kordas’s cousin, Hakkon Indal. The last was a necessity because the children were supposed to be Hakkon’s bastards. And they were being raised not by Isla and Kordas, but (officially) by a nursemaid, a tutor, and a body-servant hired by Kordas to tend to all of the children in the manor. There was quite a little pod of those children, and Kordas was doing as his father and grandfather and all those who had come before had done: rearing all the children in the Ducal household with the same education, whether they were the offspring of servants or those with nobler blood, with the eye to putting them in training for positions of responsibility in the Duchy when they were old enough.