“You’re in a unique position, Rhywun Ellis.” The man sat back in his chair. “As First Warden you know Wellech’s every weakness or potential weakness. Moreover, you’re in regular contact with the Wardens of the other parishes, and I’m betting you know those weaknesses as well. On top of that, you’re doing the job of Pennaeth, which in your case means you not only know everyone, but their politics, their weaknesses, their motivations.”
“You seem to be rather fixated on weaknesses.”
“In my line of work, I’ve little choice.”
“And what is your line of work?” Though Ellis was beginning to think he knew.
The man tipped his head, as though conceding a point, though he didn’t answer the question. “It’s worse than you think.” He paused, waiting for a reaction; when Ellis didn’t give him one, the man quirked an eyebrow as if to say All right, we’ll do it your way. “This isn’t the first time people have turned on their own. It’s not even the worst. Not yet, at any rate.” His mouth crimped, a flash of anger so quickly smoothed back into the detachment that had been so persuasive just a second ago, Ellis marked the slip he wasn’t entirely sure was a slip. “It’s easy to scare folk,” the man went on. “All you have to do is give them a bogey. It doesn’t even really need to be credible—they’ll take care of convincing themselves, once you start blaming all their ills on it. Start it out small, whispers and rumors and not-quite-accusations. Add in resentment they didn’t know they felt, and sprinkle in a good dose of fear. It doesn’t have to be reasonable fear. That’s the beauty of it, really—you never have to prove any of it, you only have to keep repeating it. Once it takes hold, all you need do is sit back and wait for people to start turning this bogey you’ve built into something not quite a person. It’s very quick after that. Neighbors turning on neighbors, children on parents, cariad on cariad.”
“That’s…” Ellis shook his head. “Listen, I’m not sure what kind of game you’re trying to get me to play here, Mastermind. But if you’re confessing to being some evil villain right out of a penny dreadful, you’ll have to give me a moment to dig up something to restrain you with because I’d have to arrest you, and I don’t know where I left my—”
“I’m the vil—?” The man huffed a curse, appearing truly offended, then truly annoyed. “Boy, open your eyes. I’ve been watching you—I know you’re smarter than that. You know what this is.”
Ellis thought he did. He stared at the man, narrow-eyed, and gnawed the inside of his cheek.
“All right.” He glanced down at the note still in his hand—Listen to him—and all at once wondered what Milo had to do with all this, and why Ellis hadn’t heard from him in too long. He held up the note. “Why did Milo give you this? Why didn’t he just tell me about”—he waved the note around—“whatever this is supposed to be?”
The man seemed to chew that over for a moment or two, then didn’t answer it.
“You were right about the planes.” He lifted his eyebrows when Ellis frowned. “There’s a base in the Surgebreaks. The broad strokes of it will be in all the papers in two or three days, but I’ll tell you this much now for free.” He tapped a thick finger on the table. “Two months ago, in secret and directly contrary to World Court convention, Vistosa signed a treaty with Taraverde granting them unencumbered use of the islands. In exchange, Taraverde will leave Vistosa out of all aggression, and acknowledge and respect Vistosa’s neutral status.”
“That’s hardly neutral!” Ellis’s spine had snapped rigid. “Those islands are nearly right on top of—-”
“Yes. I’m aware. And I’d very much like to tell you more about it and what it has to do with why I’m here.” The man reached into his coat pocket again, and drew out… a contract. “But I’ll need you to sign this first.”
“Oh, yeah, of course.” Ellis snorted, finally set his keys down on the bench, and reached for the contract. “I’ll just have my solicitor go over it and get back to you soonish, yeah? Thanks for stopping by, I hope you won’t mind finding your own way—”
“Ah-ah.” The man pulled the contract back. His brow was furrowed but his mouth was tugged up at one corner. “I’m not sure I like your tone.”
“I’m not sure I like you in my kitchen.”
“Fair.” The man waved the contract. “This is something called the National Secrets Act. You’re familiar with it.”
It wasn’t a question, and yes, Ellis was familiar with it, because Eira in Whitpool had told him she’d had to sign one shortly after the mess with Cennydd. Except how would this man know that?
It rather confirmed the spy! spy! spy! flashing in bright, furlong-high letters behind Ellis’s eyes. And ramped up the what does this have to do with Milo? that hadn’t stopped pattering at him since he’d seen the handwriting. Ellis clutched the still unopened envelope tighter in his abruptly clammy hand. Jaw set, he tore at a corner—
“You open that now, I leave.”
It shouldn’t have been a threat. And yet it stopped Ellis before he’d got the envelope open.
Which seemed to please the man, because he relaxed back into his seat again, and held the contract out, tilting his expression into something halfway conciliatory when Ellis glared.
“Not a demand on my part,” the man said. “A condition on his.” He waved the contract. “Please.”
Ellis stared at the neatly folded papers in the man’s hand, then down at the crumpled, torn envelope in his. Foreboding welled, heavy and thick, and he wasn’t sure which otherwise innocuous-looking bit of paper it was focused on.
Angry now, impatient, and swamped by intrigue and dread both, Ellis snatched the contract out of the man’s hand and held back a curse.
“Let me find a pen.”
THE PLANE had been reconnaissance, though there was no way to tell exactly what it had been sent to scout. Gaps in the coastal patrols, most likely. The point was, it hadn’t meant to be seen, likely blown off course by a sudden sea squall, and hadn’t had enough fuel to get back. It was pure luck it went down where it did and with a Royal Navy cruiser as witness.
Preidyn’s main island was just across the gulf from Taraverde. Ellis had assumed it an obvious target, but—
“The Isles are too scattered,” the man said, patient.
Mastermind, Ellis reminded himself, but he couldn’t even think it without wanting to snort.
“And too independent, for the most part,” the man went on. “They don’t want Llundaintref because it’s strategic—they want it because that’s where Her Royal Majesty is. They don’t want to take it, they want to raze it. Even if they did take Preidyn’s government seat, all the other islands would likely just nod along with whatever the invaders say, and then do as they please anyway just to be difficult, because we do love our Queen and we don’t like it when anyone crosses her. No.” He shook his head with a sour curl of his lip. “The smartest way to take all of the Preidynīg Isles at once is to take—”
“Tirryderch,” Ellis said, a bit breathless and a bit sick. “You take Tirryderch, you take Kymbrygh. Because if you control the food, you control the people.”
The man tilted his head with a lift of eyebrows, approving.
It didn’t settle the rush of acid sloshing in Ellis’s gut. “Then, with what Vistosa just pulled, why aren’t you there telling all this to Tirryderch’s Pennaeth?”
“What Tirryderch knows or doesn’t is not what we’re here to discuss.”
Ellis gritted his teeth. “Then would you mind getting to what we are here to discuss? Because I still have no idea what any of this has to do with me. Or Milo, for that matter.”
That wasn’t entirely true. He had a suspicion. The Wardens were meant for keeping local and regional law and order, but everyone knew they were also meant to become another arm of the Home Guard, should there be a real threat to Preidyn’s borders. It was only that, as far as Ellis knew. A just in case backup. Because nothing like it had happened since the wild days of raids and pirates, before all t
he clans scattered across the various islands became the United Preidynīg Isles. And that had been centuries ago.
The man folded his hands atop the table and leaned in. “We’re here to discuss Wellech, Rhywun Ellis. We’re here to discuss the information leaking out of it. Important information.”
“Leaking.” Ellis sat bolt-upright. “What kind of information? And to whom?”
“Its mining output, for a start. Its crop yields. Its defenses.” The man lifted a hand when Ellis frowned. “As well as the names and whereabouts of just about every citizen of Kymbrygh who’s got even minor magical abilities.” It wasn’t until the man paused, sympathetic, and said, “Including those who’ve recently immigrated,” that Ellis knew.
Knew.
Still, he breathed “No.” Painfully small, embarrassingly shaky, because it was… it was too much. Too horrible.
“Wellech has not been helpful or useful in structuring a home defense for quite some time now.” The man pursed his mouth, the scar puckering with the narrowing of his eyes. “Council reports that go into the Pennaeth’s office and never come back out—never make it to Kymbrygh’s parliament, let alone Llundaintref—and instead show up in the hands of people who don’t have Preidyn’s best interests at heart. Ore production, harvest productivity, river traff—”
“I fill out those reports myself!”
“Yes. I know. I’ve checked. But who’s meant to sign them and send them on?” When Ellis merely stared, knowing but unwilling to actually believe, the man sighed. “I don’t know what the goal is, if that means anything. It could be as simple as bigotry, or just plain incompetence. Sometimes it is, and in this case there’s certainly evidence of both. And I haven’t yet had proof enough to warrant an arrest. Which, I feel compelled to point out, could well lead to summary execution without the nicety of a trial. But if—”
“Execution?” Ellis reared back. “This isn’t bloody Tarav—”
“We have cause to believe sensitive information is being sold or given to a hostile entity, which could end in injury to our citizens, our government, our nation, and our Queen. That’s treason, Rhywun Ellis.”
The word—treason—hit with a sharp thump to Ellis’s solar plexus. He could hardly breathe. And he didn’t know if it was the shock of hearing it, or the absolute certainty that his own tad was the one guilty of it.
The man gentled his voice. “We need Kymbrygh united. We need a network of people we can trust that stretches from Wellech to Tirryderch to Whitpool, and every minor parish, village, and hamlet between. We need everyone watching our shores and each other’s backs.” He lifted his eyebrows. “We need a Pennaeth in Wellech who isn’t working against us, for whatever reason.”
Ellis shut his eyes, trying to calm the rabbiting of his heart, slow his breathing. The thought of what Folant was doing—had been doing… it had been bad enough when Ellis thought it was merely arrogance and bitterness and misguided blame. It had made him angry at his tad, furious, and even made him feel a little sorry for someone who’d based his prejudices, his life, on things so shockingly wrong yet so thoroughly embedded there was no talking him out of them.
But this.
Even if there were some way of understanding it, there was no excusing it. Whether Folant knew what he was doing, what he was endangering, or not, there was no coming back from this.
Ellis hadn’t had much hope of having a tad for most of his life; he’d never fooled himself that owning Folant as his sire would be anything but a series of compromises and overlooking things unpardonable from anyone else. Last year, last week, right up until that discussion at the Grange, he’d been willing to try, to keep trying, because Ellis rarely gave up on something he wanted, and he nearly always got what he was after in the end.
There was no looking away from this. There was no compromise possible. Not for Ellis.
He sucked in a long, deep breath, let his hands curl into fists, and opened his eyes.
“I don’t have the votes to take Pennaeth.”
The man smirked. “You do now.”
Ellis didn’t want to know how, but he was willing to accept the truth of it. He nodded.
“What d’you need from me?”
WHAT “MASTERMIND” apparently needed was for Ellis to abandon any idea he might have had of enlisting. For him to present his case for Pennaeth to the council, and not even hint at a foregone conclusion.
There would be clandestine meetings and secret codes and covert communications, everything anyone who’d read even a single spy novel would expect. But there would also be things Ellis never would’ve guessed.
“You want to leave Folant just running about, doing as he pleases? You just said—”
“Everything he’s done or said for the past year has been predicted, monitored, and carefully controlled. Every boyo he’s spoken with, every rumor he’s bred, every letter he’s sent, we know about it. There’s a value to knowing what information is making it into whose hands. There’s even more value in deciding exactly what information will get through, and what the source thinks they know.”
Ellis stared, rather stuck on the middle bit. “You’ve been monitoring the post? What, like opening personal letters and things?” He thought of the letters Milo sometimes sent and scowled, the thought of anyone besides Ellis himself reading them extraordinarily offensive.
The man squinted. “What exactly d’you think spies do?”
And that was… fair. Ellis supposed. No less intrusive, but fair. Ish.
“Yes, all right, but I’m still not clear on what you’re asking for here. You want me to read Folant’s letters? Eavesdrop on his card games?” Ellis shook his head. “Once I petition the council, and if I get the votes like you say I will, he’s not going to let me anywhere near him.”
In fact, it was likely he’d file his own petition to disinherit Ellis and remove “dy Rees” from his name. Not that Ellis didn’t intend to do that last bit himself, but he hadn’t even yet got used to the idea of the complete break that was in his near future, and this man wanted him to… what? Try to somehow get closer?
Impossible.
The man was peering at Ellis keenly, as though he could tell what Ellis was thinking. Though, Ellis supposed, the man was a spy. Maybe he could.
“The problem,” the man said, slow and thoughtful, “is that your views are too well known. You’ve been trying to out-shout your tad with them for too long for anyone to believe you might’ve changed your mind. And mark me, if the worst happens, it’s going to make you a target.”
“The worst.” Ellis narrowed his eyes. “Are you seriously expecting an invasion?”
“First lesson.” The man held up his finger. “Always expect everything, and try to plan accordingly.” He lowered his hand and knocked his knuckles against the table. “Right now I need you for contacts, for information, for opening Wellech to the system already in place through the rest of Kymbrygh. All you have to do is give me the information. Because if the worst does happen, it’ll be best if you don’t know what I do with it.”
Ellis blinked. “So you’re saying if we get invaded and I get arrested, at least you’ll have what you need.”
“Listen, son.” The man leaned in, expression grave, tone even. “You are just now on the edge of coming to understand that a quarter of the people you’ve known all your life would like to see another quarter gone or dead, and yet another quarter would be so paralyzed or apathetic they’d do nothing but watch. That leaves only a last quarter to do something about it.” He sat back, eyebrows raised. “It’s time to choose a place to stand and decide which quarter you belong to.”
It was too close to what Milo had said back in Nia’s study, his whole body vibrating with it, and his eyes already seeing things that would hopefully never come to pass. And yet Milo hadn’t seemed to have much hope at all, too sure there wasn’t any, because he’d seen at least the stirrings of it up close—in a hostile woman in Brookings; a bitter boy in Whitpool; neighbors who’d c
asually and genteelly excluded him as though he were a leper but a nice one, so they didn’t quite have it in them to be cruel about it. And those were only the ones Ellis knew about. Who knew what Milo had seen and just never talked about?
Ellis sat back. “Milo sent you to me.” The man didn’t answer, but Ellis didn’t need him to. He tapped the unopened envelope against the table. “You know what this says. You read it.”
“The condition was I wouldn’t be in the room when you opened it.”
Because Milo would’ve thought of Ellis wanting privacy, but he wouldn’t have thought of anyone having the audacity to read something he’d specified was private. Milo was not his mam, he wasn’t a natural dissembler, so the betrayal of discretion wouldn’t have even occurred to him.
Which really made Ellis worry about what this man—this Mastermind, save them all—had dragged Milo into, when everything Milo thought or felt was always telegraphed all over his face. Milo was no spy.
But whatever it was Milo had agreed to, he’d wanted Ellis with him, which had rather decided Ellis before the man had even started his pitch. Because Milo thought it was worthy, was willing to risk himself for it, and he believed in Ellis enough to send this man to him.
And that… well.
It was one of the reasons why having Milo in his life was imperative for Ellis. Even back when they were boys, Milo had always seen the very best in Ellis, had believed everything good about him, had believed in him. It made Ellis want to be the person Milo saw when he looked at him. It always had.
Ellis huffed and tapped the envelope on the table again, impatient this time.
“All right. You have your source.” He lifted an eyebrow. “But ‘Prince’ is out of the question.”
IT WASN’T. Out of the question, that was. Ellis was stuck with it whether he liked it or not.
He really, really didn’t.
Dearest Elly—
Please don’t be angry with me. I don’t think I could bear it. I won’t blame you if you are, of course—how could I?—but…
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