Spy's Honor hat-2

by Amy Raby

  “Does it not drive you crazy, sitting in a cave all through the storm season?”

  Janto raised his eyebrows. “Does it not drive you crazy, sitting in the Imperial Palace all year long?”

  Rhianne bit her lip. She sneaked out on a regular basis. But he didn’t know that.

  “In answer to your question,” said Janto, “no. Our usonts make up entire cities. There is much work to be done indoors, whether it’s more building, or artwork, or scholarship, or magical training.”

  “Tell me something else,” said Rhianne. “What’s something Mosari people do when it’s not the storm season? Something fun.”

  Janto shrugged. “Lots of things. We hunt lorim eggs.”

  “What’s a lorim?”

  “A seabird. They nest by the millions along our cliffs in spring and early summer, just before the storm season. You can hardly hear for their squalling, and when they fly, their wings darken the sky. Mosari youngsters—boys and young men, mostly, but some of the girls get in on the fun—like to climb up the cliff face and harvest the eggs. We’ve a law that you must leave two eggs in each nest, so by late season, the easy eggs have been harvested, and you’ve got to climb way up to find an eligible nest.”

  “You’ve done this personally?”

  “Oh yes,” said Janto. “You’re a coward if you don’t. The cliff claims a few lives each year, but it wouldn’t be exciting if it weren’t a bit dangerous. It’s not easy clinging to the rocks with your fingertips while the birds’ wings beat in your face.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Rhianne’s lunch, a crystal tray piled with cold venison, soft cheese, biscuits, oranges, and sliced apples.

  “You want some of this?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t say no to it.”

  She set the tray down between them, and they shared.

  “Have you ever been to Sardos?” asked Rhianne.

  “No.”

  “Their language is a lot easier than yours. The pronouns aren’t so ridiculous.”

  Janto’s eyebrows rose. “You speak Sardossian?”

  “Yes. Bellam khi oberym.” Good morning, my alligator.

  He laughed and answered, “Qua oberym, bellam khi iquay.” I understand, my alligator. Good afternoon to you.

  “How many languages do you know?”

  “Five.”

  Her jaw fell. “Five?”

  “Mosari, Kjallan, Inyan, Sardossian, and Riorcan. Except my Riorcan is awful. Maybe we should say four and a half.”

  “And you’re a palace scribe? Seems to me your talent is wasted.”

  “Languages are more of a personal interest for me, but I’ve done translation work and foreign correspondence.”

  Translation work and foreign correspondence? She didn’t doubt he’d done plenty of that, but as a palace scribe? That seemed less and less likely. She’d been suspecting for a while, and now she was convinced: this man was Mosari nobility.

  * * *

  Lucien was at his Caturanga board when Rhianne found him, playing a game with some minor official she knew vaguely by sight but not by name. Lucien gave her a cursory glance. “Give us a few minutes. The game’s almost over.”

  She nodded and retreated to a couch to thumb through his books.

  Behind her, she heard the sounds of the game finishing and the two men discussing it, their voices raised in passion—it appeared Lucien had won. Then the official left, and Lucien limped over on his crutch and wooden leg. “No one around here can give me a challenge anymore. You should play more.”

  “Caturanga?” Rhianne rolled her eyes. “That’s a man’s game. I couldn’t be less interested.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lucien. “There’s a woman tearing up the tournament circuit in eastern Kjall as we speak. What are you here for? Is it time for the tetrals?”

  “Not yet. I came to ask you about something else.”

  “Make it quick. I’ve got a meeting in half an hour.”

  “I sort of got in an argument with someone about the war in Mosar, and I think I came off looking like a fool.”

  “With Augustan?” Lucien shook his head. “He’s the commander of the invasion. If you argue with him about that war, you are a fool.”

  Rhianne considered correcting him, but she decided against it. Lucien might not approve of her discussing the war with a Mosari slave. “I realized I don’t know that much about Mosar. Or even much about Kjall, politically and economically. I think the histories I’ve read were . . . shall we say, self-serving. Florian doesn’t involve me in meetings the way he does you, and—well, you know a great deal. You’ve got your own ideas. You’re opposed to the war, for example.”

  “You don’t want to hear my ideas. They’re unpopular. Treasonous.”

  “But they’re right. Aren’t they?”

  He shrugged. “Yes.”

  “I want to hear them.”

  “All right, but it’s on you.” He pointed an accusing finger at her. “Don’t complain to me if you repeat this stuff to Florian and he goes up like a pyrotechnics display. In fact, you’d better not repeat anything to him at all.”

  “Of course I won’t,” said Rhianne. “So why is the war in Mosar a bad idea?”

  “Because we can’t afford it.”

  “You’ve already lost me. We have an enormous army, and we’re a wealthy nation.”

  “Right on the first count, wrong on the second,” said Lucien. “We’re a poor nation, and the size of our army is part of the reason for it. Our economy is based on plunder, tribute, and slave labor. We invade a neighboring nation, plunder their wealth, take slaves, and extract tribute from them henceforth. But the tribute payments don’t grow—in fact, they diminish over the years because the captured provinces do not flourish under the harsh conditions we impose on them. We solve the problem of our dwindling treasury by invading someone else, but after we conquered Riorca, there wasn’t anyone else left. We have the entire continent.”

  “So we invaded the island of Mosar,” said Rhianne.

  “Yes, and now you see how uncreative Florian’s thinking is. Invading Mosar is a stopgap solution, and we’ve reached the point where our constant wars are making our problems worse, not better,” said Lucien. “We have to face the real problem, which is that our empire is too far-flung and too backward—”

  “Backward?”

  “You’ve never been to Sardos or Inya. If you had, you’d know they’re ahead of us. The Inyans can build bridges the likes of which we can only dream of, and the Sardossians—well, Sardos is a bit of a mess, but I assure you they don’t leave so many of their natural resources unexploited.”

  “What do you mean we don’t exploit our resources?”

  “Just one example,” said Lucien. “There are mines in Riorca, rich mines where we could be extracting iron and copper and gold, but they’ve been shut down for decades because of the unrest in that part of the country. If we could stabilize the north, calm the unrest—but no, Florian sends our troops overseas to conquer Mosar.” He shook his head. “And speaking of Mosar, they’re ahead of us too. They’ve got musket technology far superior to ours. Their weapons are breech loaded, not muzzle loaded.”

  “But if we take Mosar, it will be good for us. Won’t it? We can copy their muskets.”

  “It won’t be good for us,” said Lucien. “In the short term, yes, there’ll be plunder, and we can copy the musket design. But Riorca has been a nightmare to manage. We conquered it decades ago, and there are still pockets of rebellion. And they’ve got the Obsidian Circle assassinating our people. You think it will be any easier with Mosar? It will be worse. The farther away the conquered nation, the harder it is to manage from Riat. You’ll be in the middle of that mess, you and Augustan. We would do better to pull out now, establish some favorable trade agreements with Mosar, and focus on stabilizing the north.”

  “This is a lot more complicated than I imagined.” Would she and Augustan really be stuck in the middle of an u
nstable, violent mess when they tried to govern Mosar? She’d thought the worst of her problems would be a husband she didn’t get along with. She hadn’t considered that she might also be dodging assassins and rebels.

  “I’ve barely scratched the surface.” Lucien gave her a weak smile. “And I’ve got to go to my meeting. Would you like to come along? If you sit in on these meetings, you’ll pick up a lot. And if you’ll be trying to help govern a conquered Mosar, you’ll need it.”

  “I suppose I should.” Janto had coaxed her to look beyond the simplistic explanations she’d heard from her tutors, the ones that glorified Kjall and skirted around all the tough questions that had nagged at her even as a child. On a gut level, she’d always known those explanations did not make sense. She was ready to discover a more complex reality.

  9

  “He’s not in the prison,” said Janto.

  He sat with Iolo and Sirali in a forest clearing beneath the meager light of the orange Soldier moon, pooling his information with theirs and finding it depressingly scanty.

  “Maybe there’s another prison,” said Sirali.

  “Could be,” said Janto. “But he’s not in the one beneath the palace.”

  “Right, and the war’s going well from a Kjallan perspective,” said Sirali. “Augustan’s men were crowing about the progress they’d made.”

  Everyone was silent. That was not good news.

  “I think Ral-Vaddis is dead,” said Janto.

  “You can’t give up yet,” said Iolo.

  “We give our spies a poison pill. They’re to use it if they’re captured, so they don’t give up their informants when they’re tortured. I think he must have used it. Otherwise he’d have given up Sirali.”

  Sirali hugged her knees to her chest.

  “And this mystery bit of information he said he had, what he thought might win the war,” said Janto. “I can’t imagine what that could have been. I don’t think it exists.”

  “It does exist,” said Iolo. “If Ral-Vaddis is dead, you have to find that intelligence.”

  “I don’t know how,” said Janto. “Ral-Vaddis was a trained spy. I’m a prince and a diplomat. I know many things, but not how to do what he did. I’m trying, but Ral-Vaddis did his best, and I think it got him killed.”

  “You have shroud magic, same as Ral-Vaddis had,” pointed out Iolo. “In Mosar’s hour of need, we all do our best, even if it isn’t what we were trained to do.”

  Away in the woods, a woman screamed.

  Janto turned in the direction of the sound. He called telepathically to Sashi, who came running and scrambled onto his shoulder. “What was that?”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” said Iolo.

  “Why?” said Janto. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Micah,” said Sirali. “The slave overseer.”

  “What do you mean? Who’s screaming?”

  The woman’s voice cried out in the Mosari language, “Stop! Let go!”

  Janto leapt to his feet. That was one of his people being threatened. What harm could there be in at least seeing what was going on? Here was a situation where maybe he could do some good—not like this endless stream of failures in searching for Ral-Vaddis and phantoms of war intelligence that didn’t exist, or if they did, that he would never find. “I’m going.” He flung a shroud over himself and ran in the direction of the voice.

  Ahead, a distant light shone through the trees. He followed it, panting from exertion. The trees ended abruptly at a clearing where he found a building identical to the men’s slave house with warm, yellow light shining through the windows. In front of the building, two figures struggled. The larger figure was a man—Micah, the slave overseer?—and the smaller figure was a woman, trying to escape his grip. Any sapskull could see what was afoot.

  Micah was a huge Mosari man, well-muscled and intimidating. Janto wished he could fight him invisibly, since he had no weapon and the man outweighed him. But that wasn’t an option. He didn’t intend murder, only intervention, and if Micah reported an invisible attacker to his Kjallan masters, invisibility wards would go up all around the vicinity.

  Sashi, on his shoulder, bared wicked teeth. He may be big, su-kali. But he will be slow.

  Let’s hope so, su-kali.

  Together we will kill him, said the ferret.

  No killing, insisted Janto. We will hurt him a little.

  He released his shroud, leaving Sashi invisible, and stepped into the moonlight. “Let her go.”

  “Vagabond’s breath,” Micah swore, gripping the woman’s arm as she tried to pry his fingers off it. “Who are you?”

  Janto didn’t answer.

  Micah peered at him. “You’re not one of mine, are you? But you can’t be anyone else’s. Get out of here.”

  “Let her go,” repeated Janto. He was committed, but he realized now how big a risk he was taking. This was the overseer, who knew all the slaves by sight.

  Micah leered at him. “The only reason I can think of that you haven’t left yet is that you want to watch.”

  The woman he held prisoner stomped on his foot, hard. Micah yowled. She twisted out of his grip and took off running into the woods.

  “Horse fucker!” roared Micah. He flung himself at Janto and flung him to the ground.

  In his youth, Janto had been trained in unarmed combat, against his adolescent will. He’d been uncoordinated, gawky, his younger brother pinning him two bouts out of three. Now, for the first time in his life, he was glad of that training, because despite what Sashi had believed, Micah was not slow.

  Janto aimed a knee at Micah’s groin. Micah shifted to block it, and Janto, taking advantage of his distraction, twisted out of his grip and punched him hard in the face. Then he felt a crushing pain as Micah’s fist connected with his jaw.

  Kill! came Sashi’s battle cry, and through the telepathic link, Janto knew the ferret had sunk his teeth into Micah’s leg.

  Micah yelled and grabbed at the animal, and Janto scrambled into the darkness beneath a tree. Sashi must have withdrawn too, because Micah was on his feet, cursing and looking around. Janto circled into the moonlight and charged him from behind. He managed to bowl over Micah and get in several good blows before Micah’s fist found him again, and pain exploded in the side of his head. He rolled into the shadows and called on his shroud. Hopefully he’d given the woman enough time to get away.

  Sashi? he called.

  The ferret scrambled up his shoulder from out of the darkness. Good fight, but we should have killed him.

  While Micah lunged around, searching for him in the darkness, Janto hurried through the trees, back to Iolo and Sirali. When he spotted them, he extended his shroud to include them. “He does this regularly? Rapes the slave women?”

  They stared at him, horrified, and he realized he presented a less-than-pretty picture: dirty and mussed, he probably had some blood on him and bruises forming.

  “You attacked him,” Iolo accused.

  Sirali looked awed.

  “Just long enough for her to get away,” said Janto. “He’s half again my size, and I don’t carry a weapon.”

  “Did he see you?” said Iolo.

  “It’s better he should see me than not,” said Janto. “If the Kjallans become aware there’s a shroud mage in their midst, they’ll start placing invisibility wards.”

  “You should not have done it, Your Highness,” said Iolo. “I said before, I don’t question your courage, but—”

  “My judgment,” said Janto. “I know.”

  “Right, and . . . of course it was the right thing,” stammered Sirali. “Micah does this to lots of women.”

  Iolo turned on her. “But he’s got to find Ral-Vaddis! He’s got to find intelligence to help the war effort! He’s made an enemy of Micah, he’s aroused the man’s suspicions, and he might get caught. We don’t have any other shroud mages. Only him!”

  “I came here to help my people in any way I could,” said Janto. “That woman
is one of my people.”

  “You have to put the most important things first,” said Iolo. “It’s awful what Micah does to those women, but if we lose you, and Mosar loses the war, how many more of them are going to be raped or killed by Kjallan soldiers?”

  Sirali folded her arms. “I think if a prince would let his people get hurt right in front of him, he deserves to lose his kingdom.”

  “What about everyone else in that kingdom?” snarled Iolo. “What do they deserve?”

  “Right, and if it were men being hurt instead of women—,” began Sirali.

  “Quiet, both of you,” said Janto. “What’s done is done.” He only hoped it didn’t turn out as disastrously as Silverside. “Sirali, you say he does this frequently?”

  She nodded. “He picks out a slave. Does what he likes with her.”

  Janto bit his lip. “What can we do to stop him from doing it?”

  “Kill him,” she said cheerfully.

  Yes, kill. Sashi bared his teeth.

  “Oh, no,” said Iolo. “You couldn’t possibly. There’d be an investigation.”

  “Iolo’s right,” said Janto. “But start thinking. I helped one woman tonight, but that won’t help the one Micah chooses next time. Come up with an answer.”

  10

  When Rhianne arrived at the bench under the Poinciana for her language lesson the next morning, Janto wasn’t there. Annoyed, since it was beyond ridiculous for a slave not to show up for an appointment with an imperial princess, she sat down to wait for him. Ten minutes dragged by, and he did not come.

  “Do you suppose he might be sick?” she asked her bodyguard.

  “We could ask the head gardener,” replied Tamienne.

  “What about that man?” Rhianne angled her head toward an anxious-looking slave who kept glancing over at her as he pulled weeds. “Maybe he knows something.” She raised her voice. “You there.”