Star spoke up, unprompted. “Everything he has said is true.”
“Star,” Kordas said carefully, “are we being watched?”
Star held up its hand, the one with the crest pin, which it did not cover.
“All right,” Kordas said, fury still smoldering. “But this had better be good.”
“Not here,” said Merrin, and crooked a finger. He led Kordas and Star to a Gate, held up his bracelet, and said, “Meditation Room.”
They stepped out into a perfectly egg-shaped room that was like a jewel. Every fingerlength was covered in geometric mosaic patterns in blues and greens made of fragments of glass no bigger than an apple seed. There were blue cushions scattered about, and there were no windows, just a single soft white mage-light up at the top of the ceiling.
“What . . . is this place?” Kordas asked.
“Found it by accident. I had a horrible toothache and I’d packed my mouth with clevis oil pads. I tried to say ‘Healer, Dental, Medication Room’ and ended up here. Look there, and there, and there.” Merrin pointed, and Kordas clearly made out anti-scrying runes among the patterns. Merrin pushed his rapier out of the way, plopped himself down on a cushion, and with a gesture invited Kordas to do the same. “Nobody ever comes here. There is no one in the entire Palace who is self-aware enough to meditate.”
Kordas choked on the laugh that the statement startled out of him. This . . . didn’t sound much like the “idiot” who had been spying so ineptly on him!
“Kordas, I’m on your side. I have been since the Emperor acknowledged my title and directed me to spy on you.” Merrin looked sincere, and Star kept nodding. Kordas hardly knew where to look. “I—I was never a hostage, but Father took me with him on his yearly journeys here, then on journeys into other Duchies, ones that were ruled by the Emperor’s lickspittles, and took care to point out all the ways in which life was miserable there as well as in the Capital. When I was dazzled by luxury, he showed me the cost of that luxury. Then, when I inherited, and I came every year to the Regatta in his place, I saw even more personally what a hellhole the Emperor and his vanities, vagaries, and endless wars were making of the entire Empire. But Valdemar . . .” He shook his head. “Valdemar is not ‘beautiful,’ in the Imperial sense. It isn’t paved with Imperial ‘largesse,’ or trying to gain more attention from the Emperor. But the peace of the place, the compassionate way it’s run, the care you take for your people, your land, and your beasts before you even begin to think of yourself, make it a place of peace and quiet beauty. And when I took Father’s position and was invited to ‘keep an eye on you,’ I knew I had to do my best to support you, or all of that would be wiped away in the blink of an eye.”
Kordas felt astonished. He glanced at Star in complete disbelief. Star nodded.
“The best way I could think of to do that was to paint you as a complete bumpkin, a bumbler, someone who couldn’t see past the end of his nose. It wouldn’t have done to show you as competent—or as compassionate.” He sighed. “So all my reports showed a Valdemar that was little more than one large farm, built on land that was too poor to support anything but grazing, with a few things, like the barges and the horses, that were useful but not vital to the Empire. And a Duke that was little more than a competent farmer with brilliance in just one thing: breeding beautiful horses, and breeding the Chargers that the Knights of the Empire need in order to play the role of Imperial shock troops.” Now he grinned wryly. “It did help that you put that face forward yourself, so the initial independent spies the Emperor placed in the Duchy to verify my reports told him exactly the same thing.”
Kordas scarcely believed his own ears. Oh Gods. We played each other. “You mean—all this time we’ve—?” he asked incredulously.
Merrin nodded earnestly. “You knew I was a spy, of course, like my father was. I knew you were too intelligent not to know. As was your father and my father before you, and his and mine before him. My own goal was yours—to keep your lands from being stripped of resources and people. And please believe me, I never wanted to find myself being presented with the Duchy as if it was a prize for good penmanship.”
Kordas fumed at that, and his mood instantly turned darker. “I want to punch you in the throat right now. So much.”
Merrin held up both hands in a surrendering gesture. “Please don’t. We both know Valdemar is valuable, but we managed to get the Emperor to think it is not. I think the Emperor’s so used to power struggles that he thought when I spoke approvingly about Valdemar—well, he assumed I wanted it. I didn’t ask. He just assigned me as the new Duke of Valdemar and—that isn’t something to say ‘no’ to. The Emperor said it was his plan at the Blind Feast for you to be done away with, as a reminder to everyone else of the ‘high standards’ he demanded. I begged him, Kordas. I begged him. To let you live—the Emperor wanted you to be in the Fights, and if you survived it, you’d get a Barony. I came a hairsbreadth away from the Emperor making me fight you, then. He went through so many cruel ideas, man, I must have looked as pale as beach sand. But I convinced the Emperor that you were not made for Court, but that you were a horse-breeding genius, and for that you should stay on as a lesser noble, because of your loyal service.”
Kordas burst out laughing. It was strained laughter, the kind that whistles through clenched teeth, and he shuddered. “Yes—of course—my loyal service!” These months, of thinking as fast as he could while staying in character—well, there was nothing funnier in Kordas’s mind at that moment than hearing he should be spared for his loyalty to the Empire. He knew he sounded off-kilter for laughing so uncontrollably, but he could not stop himself. After a hard swallow, he finally replied to Merrin, “So all that time you were in Valdemar was your—what? your vacation?—and you kept it going by making me think you were the worst spy ever?”
Merrin chuckled a little himself, and replied, “Worst spy ever. It worked, didn’t it?”
Kordas slapped his hands to his face. “I thought you were in Valdemar as a punishment sometimes. You were just so—so bad at being a spy.”
Merrin shrugged, hands apart. “It was the cover I invented, so I could stay longer.”
“Which makes you the best spy ever.” Kordas looked to Star, who just nodded. “And it’s all true. We set you up so many times, and you had us set up the whole time. Oh, gods great and small, I worked so hard to make you view us as harmless, and every time I read your dispatches, I was convinced we were fooling you.”
Merrin frowned a bit. “You could read them somehow? No, wait, that makes sense, when I think about it, but I never caught it at the time. All right. So not the best spy ever. What in all the Hells were you keeping hidden from me?”
“Long story. Long story.” His fatigue was pulling back into a tight-cramped bunching of his back muscles, but otherwise, he felt a rush of blood as his heart rate increased. Some decisions were coming together about the situation. So when my people are all gone, Merrin will be Duke of an empty Duchy, and the Emperor will murder him for allowing it to happen. He’d get thrown into the Fights, killed on the spot, or much worse. I only encountered a few of the torments the Emperor had. I never saw the interrogation chambers, the dungeons, and Gods only know what else the Emperor delights in. Damn it! If I’d known Merrin wasn’t an enemy, we could have used the help of a spy so many times, for the Plan. What can be done to keep backlash off of Merrin and Valdemar?