“Everyone. Literally almost everyone in this Duchy,” Isla replied sternly. “Including you. This isn’t some bit of gossip, this is something that puts the lives of everyone who knows about it, and plenty who don’t, in danger.”
“All the more reason to tell me,” Delia said, doing her best to sound calm, rational, and above all, trustworthy. “I want to help, and I happen to have a lot of free time. Right now, about the only responsibilities I have are to Star and my pony. I can take on more. A lot more. And I can go places and do things you and Kordas can’t, because I’m just the youngest daughter of a Baron with no Barony anymore, who doesn’t even have a good dower or astonishing good looks to her credit.”
Isla sat silently, looking at Delia as if she was weighing a lot of heavy options.
Although they were sisters, Delia really did not know that much about Isla. After all, they were nearly twelve years apart in age. Isla had been living at Valdemar since the age of thirteen, fostered there—supposedly—to learn the running of a manor from Kordas’s mother. She hadn’t even come home when their brother, a year older than Isla, had died while at the Capital. Delia had seen her only once between that time and when Kordas came to take her away to Valdemar, and that had been at her wedding to the Duke. They had been playing catch-up since then, but not as much as one might think, since Delia wasn’t particularly interested in learning how to run a manor, and had been left more or less to her own devices. Which, to be honest, consisted mostly of shadowing the manor Artificer as much as he would allow, and reading everything in the manor library.
So she had to assume that Isla also didn’t know as much about her as she would have preferred, given what she’d just said.
Finally her older sister spoke. “All right. You are never to talk to anyone about this except for me, Kordas, and Hakkon,” she said fiercely. “And only when we tell you that we’re safely under ward.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Delia replied meekly. This—fierceness—was a side of Isla she had never seen before.
“Not even the Circle,” Isla prompted. “Nor Jonaton, nor any other mage at Valdemar. Not unless they bring it up first.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Delia repeated. “But—they know this? What you’re going to tell me?”
“Yes, they do. But they have ways of knowing when it is safe to talk, and ways to make sure it is safe to talk, and you don’t.”
Not for the first time, Delia regretted her lack of mage-talent.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said for the third time, and followed it with, “I promise.”
“Delia, this is the kind of promise that you’d rather be maimed or exiled for, before giving it up. You need to be certain that you have that kind of strength. There are people in our world who’d treat us all like moths in their web the instant they knew. Are you sure?”
Delia felt Isla’s grip on her hands and knew this was nothing near a joke. She shuddered and responded, “I swear.”
“All right, then.” Isla sighed, leaning back, and her eyes lost focus. “We are escaping Imperial reach. We are taking as many allies and resources as we can with us, and it will probably be within the year.”
“What?” Delia stared at her sister. “But—where—how—why—”
“This was Kordas’s father’s plan,” Isla interrupted her. “He became convinced that no matter how small and insignificant we try to make ourselves look here, eventually the Emperor would give the Duchy to one of his favored underlings, or strip it bare of everything worth having. Valdemar isn’t essential to the Empire, but the Empire consumes all it can reach. Valdemar has hidden away as unimportant, but land is land, and if we aren’t stripped bare by the Empire, we’ll just be given away to someone the Emperor favors the moment he runs out of plums to pass out. This was begun, as a concept, before Kordas was even born.”
“But you’d have to go—” She was reasonably familiar with the maps of the known world, and the Empire was huge. She shook her head. “—you’d have to go far outside the borders of the Empire! And how would you cross all the land between us and there? I mean—” She tried to wrap her head around the idea of packing up thousands of people and all their worldly goods—and travel how? By wagon? That would take an impossible number of horses, mules, and oxen. And who would let such a caravan cross his lands? Could they go by canal? That was more feasible; after all, a Tow-Beast could haul as many as ten barges depending on what they were loaded with. But again, who would let such a caravan cross his lands? And then, once they got past the last of the canals, what would they do? They’d have to find a river or—
“We. You are part of this now. And as for how, by Gate,” said Isla. “Or, to be more specific, by barge and by water-Gate.”
“But that’s—”
“Hard, but not impossible. We needed to assemble trustworthy mages to build and lock Gates, then work out how to assemble a receiving-Gate far away. In the unknown. Last night, one of them not only worked out how to do it in theory, he worked out a link to an actual place.” Isla waited for that to sink in.
Delia’s mouth sagged slightly open with shock. Did this have anything to do with the earth trembling this morning? No, Ponu had said that it was something to do with the Capital, and she didn’t think he’d lie about that, and she was certain he was correct about his guess. But—
“But this is incredibly dangerous,” she protested. “Aside from if the Emperor finds out about it, it’s dangerous to do magic that requires that much power, and—where would we go, anyway?” All the choices seemed fraught. East past the Capital was nothing but ocean. North was cold and inhospitable and full of enemies of the Empire. South was worse; there was an active war going on down there right now. And West—every league that the Empire had moved westward had involved moving into lands where magic was unpredictable, into wilderness where there were monsters and other hazards—
“I told you. Very far west,” Isla said. “West, so far as we can tell, is mostly land that has gone wild. I know you’ve been in the library almost every day since you arrived here. You’ve read about that, surely?”
She nodded numbly. “But—”
“As hungry as the Empire is, if that place is wild, that means it’s too costly for the Empire to expand into. The way things are going, Kordas sees it—and, word has it, the Foreseers, who have ever more distressing visions—it’s either be preyed upon by monsters there, or by the Emperor here,” her sister said, with a clenched jaw. “I’ll take the monsters. At least they’d be honest about destroying us.”
“But—” Delia began, then paused. “You say that Foreseers are making predictions? How would you know that? How would Kordas know what visions Foreseers have?”