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.