“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 as 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.