Isla answered, “That, neither the Circle, nor Kordas, nor Hakkon will tell me. The most I know is that Kordas said something about salvage.”
Delia snapped her fingers. “‘What one layer knows, the second layer over on each side can’t learn,’ Ceri said earlier. The Circle seem like they’ve always been here, so they must be the mages that Kordas’s father wanted to gather. Now, they are Valdemaran, and nobody questions them being at the manor because—because they’ve always been there, to everyone alive now. And what each of us knows isn’t the same as what every ‘layer’ knows. None of us know the whole plan. Need to know, Dole said.”
“There are three things to do when someone is too close to keep a secret safely hidden. You can tell them nothing, which makes the person resentful or even more curious, and they dig where they shouldn’t. Another way is to tell them everything, which gives them too much knowledge of the whole, which makes it harder for them to maintain the self-control of keeping it all secret. The third option is what we’ve all agreed upon: tell enough that the person knows when to stop asking for details,” Isla confirmed. “Staying away from Court means more than just staying at an inconvenient distance for being stabbed. It means that none of the powerful players in Court recognize Valdemar’s ways as anything but plodding, weird, and harmless. And, since none of them could trust each other enough for a long-term, many-pieced plan to work, they don’t even think to look for one.” She jerked a thumb toward the manor. “Enough so that the Imperial spies think of Valdemar almost as a punishment assignment. Nothing apparently happens here. The highest-ranked spy in all of Valdemar is widely known as the highest-ranked spy in all of Valdemar, and he’s practically retired.”
“Right. A good spy wouldn’t have even been suspected, but someone has to care about their work to do it well. So he found a place to stay drowsy, and keep his rank without the work.”
Isla’s eyes shone with her smile. “All that brilliance and a new foal, too. I’m so relieved that you’re in on it now. Now that you know the general direction and the pace of things, we can include you more when the times come. But first, we need to establish one particular Gate. Kordas plans to ask you to help do that.”
Being stunned by something her sister said was getting to be the norm today. It took her more than a moment or two to gather her thoughts. “But I’m not a mage!” she protested.
“But you have a powerful and precise Fetching Gift,” said Isla. “Jonaton intends to establish a small Portal. It may not be safe enough to reach through with tongs, even, so Kordas wants you to Fetch something small, like a stone or a bit of earth, to serve as the anchor on this side. Then he wants you to send something from here to there to establish the anchor on the other side. When that’s done, an actual Gate can be built. Just a tiny one. Small, shieldable.”
Delia knew for a fact that Kordas had been out all day, so the only way that Isla could know this was by Mindspeaking with him. I guess that’s actually the safest way for them to discuss this, she thought numbly. But—
“I don’t know if I can do that,” she admitted, licking her lips nervously. “I’ve never Fetched anything further away than a few leagues.”
“But you don’t know that you can’t,” her sister pointed out. “We are all going to have to do things we are not certain we can. You won’t be the only one. But there is one thing I do know for certain. If we don’t try, all that is going to happen is that we are going to sit here in this Duchy, doing needlework and raising farm stock, waiting for the Emperor, or someone, to move on us. I’ve lived like that all my life, and I can’t do that anymore. More to the point, I’m not going to have that for my boys.” She lifted her head, and her eyes flashed with determination. “I would rather they wore skins and ate half-raw meat around a fire than sit here tamely, like a lot of Squire Lesley’s pigs, waiting to be surprised by the butcher!”
Slowly, Delia nodded, setting her mind to accept her exciting new ‘need to know.’ “All right, then,” she said. “You can tell Kordas that I’m here to help.”
Isla just smiled, as if she could not have imagined Delia saying anything else. “Then let’s gather some herbs to make good on our deception, and get back. We’ll talk more about this tonight.”
6
Just in case Imperial magicians had been looking for unusual bursts of power in unexpected places within the Empire, Kordas instructed Jonaton to gather his strength and whatever resources he needed, and put off the next stage in the Gate-making magics for a few days. Jonaton protested, but admitted he did have fabrication to work on that wasn’t too physically demanding “for now.” For Jonaton, whose dedication to magic as both art and science could manically consume him, that was a very good compromise.
During those days, Kordas went on his usual rambles, maintaining the outward appearance of the doting Duke of a drowsy Duchy.
Fortunately I’m mind-shielded enough out here that my deeper thoughts can’t be read by friend or foe, Kordas mused as his horse clopped along in no particular hurry. I don’t come across as a second-generation insurrectionist espionage-embezzling thief at all.
Kordas had been through the “proper education” for a child of royalty, in the military compound—school, rather—that indoctrinated all noble children. Unlike most who entered there, and far fewer who left there, Kordas knew what he was made of. He didn’t embrace deceit nearly as much as he knew how to steer conversations so there was no definitive answer given. That skill came to him early at the school, where inevitably—possibly in preparation for their later intrigues as adults—bullies ganged up, split, or formed factions to overwhelm the lesser children. Kordas rode the edge between submission and distraction, honing the ways of deflection and adaptation by the moment. His cleverness did not really come into its own until strategy games entered the curriculum.
There were three, and only three, games taught at that school. All were board games, with no variant rules. One, Faire Trade, was an economic resource-management game with very strict rules about how goods were presented, tracked, bartered for, and taxes deducted. The second was simply called Imperial Power, and while its board was not a representation of the actual Empire, Kordas immediately noticed that the game’s terrain replicated key parts of the actual Empire’s geography, cleverly rearranged. Imperial Power was an outright war game, and its players were to swap resources, build supply lines, make assaults into weaker territory, or lure opponents into unwinnable overextension. The third game, Winding Web, was utterly abstract, using colored marbles and alteration cards to surround and flip the colors of other players’ marbles and pile them in the center of the spiral, until the winner’s tray was emptied. Its players were encouraged to be as hurtful, intimidating, and double-dealing as they could manage, swapping cards and sabotaging others’ plays, strictly by the rules.