Spy's Honor

by Amy Raby

  The conversation ceased at her approach. Taia and the two younger ladies dipped into curtsies, murmuring, “Your Imperial Highness.”

  “Taia,” she answered. Best to get the moment of humiliation over with as quickly as possible. She turned to Augustan. “Legatus, would you do me the honor of dancing with me?”

  A corner of his mouth quirked. “Feeling better, are you?” He offered her his hand.

  “No. But I’ll dance anyway.” Deep in her gut, she knew that handing him even this small victory was a mistake. It would only encourage him. But what choice did she have? She had another day of this to endure, and when the war in Mosar was over, a lifetime. Gritting her teeth, she slipped her hand into his.

  8

  Rhianne cradled the cat in her arms as she walked, trying to make it comfortable, but it squirmed, and one of its needlelike claws poked through her syrtos. She winced and removed it.

  “Your Imperial Highness,” said Tamienne from behind her. “Perhaps we should leave the animal in your rooms?”

  “No, I want Janto to see it.” She couldn’t wait to see him again. She’d survived two horrid days of Augustan, including the world’s most tedious betrothal ceremony, which had lasted a mind-numbing three hours. She’d finally seen him back to his ship, waving prettily as he set sail and praying that the war lasted another fifty years. If he lost the war entirely, might the marriage be called off? Gods, she was thinking the most horrid thoughts lately. Janto and Morgan and Lucien, with their treasonous ideas, must be wearing off on her.

  She sat on her usual bench beneath the Poinciana.

  Janto arrived soon after and spotted the cat in her arms. His eyes went wide.

  “Please tell me you’re not afraid of cats.” Rhianne patted the space next to her.

  “House cats, no,” said Janto. “But, three gods, that is a brindlecat.”

  She laughed. “How can it be a brindlecat? They’re ten times this size. And do you see any brindling?” She held up the cat to display its plain brown coloration. It had no stripes at all.

  Janto sat beside her. “Brindlecats are born without stripes, and what you have is a kitten. Watch the ears over the next few days—that’s where they’ll appear first. Do you see the claws?” He picked up one of the cat’s paws. “They don’t retract. This is not a house cat. Where did you get this animal?”

  “Augustan gave it to me.” She studied the cat—kitten—with chagrin. Maybe it really was a brindlecat. Augustan had said it came from Mosar, and brindlecats were native to that island. He’d probably had no idea what it really was.

  Janto recoiled. “Is he trying to kill you?”

  “Well, honestly, it doesn’t look dangerous. Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?”

  Janto inspected the cat. “It’s a girl. Princess, you have to cage this animal. She may not be dangerous now, but if you feed her properly—and it would be cruel not to—she’s going to grow quickly. Within a month, she will be deadly.”

  “I can’t imagine.” However, Rhianne could see a little of what he was talking about. The kitten’s claws and teeth were larger than she’d seen before, and the animal wasn’t exactly sweet-natured. “Don’t you think I could make a friend out of her? If I handle her every day?”

  Janto looked horrified. “Absolutely not. Brindlecats are wild animals. If you’re the one who feeds her, she’ll probably refrain from clawing you to pieces. But she’ll make a mess of your floors, she’ll shred your furniture, and she’ll play so rough she leaves gashes in your arms. This is not a pet.”

  “Three gods,” said Rhianne. “I don’t think Augustan had any idea.”

  “I should hope he didn’t.”

  Rhianne stroked her brindlecat kitten. Janto was probably right that the animal would grow dangerous quickly, but she would enjoy her while she could.

  “Didn’t you bring a book today?” asked Janto.

  “No,” said Rhianne. “I thought we could just talk. I want to learn more about Mosar—your customs, your way of life. Is it true your people live in caves?”

  Janto’s eyes narrowed. Perhaps he thought she was insulting him. “It depends what you mean by caves. In the Mosari language, we have two words meaning cave. The first is lerot, a beast cave, naturally occurring, usually rough and inhospitable. The second is usont, a man-made cave carved into the mountain by one of our stoneshapers. We live in usonts.”

  “And what’s an usont like?”

  “Like any indoor space, except carved of stone. Our stoneshapers’ magic can make the walls, ceilings, and floors flat and the corners right-angled, like your Kjallan houses built of wood. But stoneshapers can also make graceful curves, undulations, strange textures, rooms that are perfectly round. Parts of the Mosari palace would astonish you.”

  “It sounds interesting. But why do you live in caves rather than houses?”

  “Because of the storm season. During the late summer and fall, Mosar is battered by storms so severe that they would rip apart the sorts of houses you build here on Kjall. During the storm season, we send our ships to safer waters and retreat into our usonts for safety. The rest of the year is our growing and building season, and we erect some temporary structures then. But there’s not much wood on Mosar. What we have, we wouldn’t waste on houses. We use it for ships.”

  “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 unstable, 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.