Janto shook his head in frustration. If only he could get word to the Sardossians! Then maybe they’d have a fighting chance at Sarpol. If the Sardossians could give Kjall a smashing defeat there, it would help Janto’s cause on Mosar.
He read the document thoroughly and copied it onto his own paper, writing down even the small things, like the numbers of sick and wounded. Battles could turn on such details.
When he finished, he returned everything carefully to its place and went back to the bedroom. Lucien was still snoozing. Janto crawled back into the trapdoor. He pulled the rug over the wooden square and gently lowered both of them back into place.
About a mile outside the village of Hodboken, Rhianne’s horse stumbled and went lame, nodding her head with each uneven stride. Rhianne pulled up and swung down from the saddle. The mare had thrown a shoe. Sort of. It was hanging on to her hoof by a couple of nails, clanking as the horse moved.
Rhianne clucked in sympathy—that had to be frightening and uncomfortable. She circled to the offending foot, the right fore, and picked it up. Lifting the hoof didn’t tell her much that she didn’t already know. The shoe had come loose and was hanging by two nails. It didn’t seem possible to hammer the shoe back in without tools. Instead she pried it off, using the shoe as leverage against its own nails. Surely the mare would be happier with an absent shoe than with one that was half on, half off.
Tossing the useless shoe into the grass alongside the road, she led the mare forward experimentally, hoping the animal would be sound enough to ride. But the mare still walked unevenly, nodding her head.
“Well, old girl,” Rhianne told the mare, “at least you didn’t do this five miles back.”
She led the mare up the road to the nearest farm. Some farms ran a cozy side business dealing in horses for travelers, and this one had a sizable-looking stable. She turned into the yard.
The farmer, when he came out to meet her, spotted the problem immediately. “Lost a shoe?”
“Back there on the road,” said Rhianne. “I haven’t been riding her since she threw it, and I don’t think she’s lame.”
“There’s a farrier in Hodboken could fix her up.”
“Actually, I’d like to sell her and buy a new horse,” said Rhianne.
He shook his head. “I’ve got animals for sale, but I can’t evaluate the mare until she’s reshod.”
Rhianne reached out with her magic and embedded a suggestion in the farmer’s mind: I trust you. I want to help you. She hated having to use her magic to win people’s trust, but she had no time to earn it the proper way. “She’ll be sound when she’s shod. And she’s a quality animal—nice paces, well mannered. So safe your children could ride her,” she added, spotting a couple of youngsters peeping through the cottage window. “You could keep her for yourself or turn around and sell her for a quick profit after you get the shoe repaired.”
The farmer chewed his lip. He checked the mare’s teeth and felt each of her legs. After his examination, he grunted approval. “Perhaps we could work out a deal. You want to look at what I’ve got for sale?”
Half an hour later, Rhianne was cantering east, this time on a black gelding. While the travel was exhausting and she was sore all over from so much riding, she was, somewhat to her surprise, enjoying herself. She missed Janto, of course, and Morgan and Marcella and even Lucien, whom she supposed she’d eventually forgive for setting those guards at the hypocaust exit, but so far she didn’t feel too lonely. She was meeting people every day, and they were so different from the people she’d known at the palace, so varied and wonderful. She was seeing tradespeople, innkeepers, farmers, housewives, and children.
She was more than two hundred miles from the Imperial Palace, and she saw now what Lucien had told her, that Kjall was not a wealthy nation. She understood how she’d been fooled. All her life, she’d been confined to the palace, where she’d been surrounded by the nobility in their fine clothes, with all their fine things. Even the nearby port city of Riat had been wealthy.
The rest of the country was different. While she encountered pockets of the well-to-do, mostly she traveled past shabby houses, lopsided barns, and grubby inns. Scraggly yards housed the family assets: more often than not, swaybacked horses and skinny pullets. And yet she loved the people she met. Even when she didn’t use her mind magic, they greeted her kindly, gave her directions if she asked, sometimes offered her food or shelter. A few men leered at her, and still others thought of cheating or stealing from her, leading her to plant the suggestion in their heads, I don’t want to have contact with this woman. But they were the exception, not the rule.
She found herself wondering what Janto would think if he were making this journey with her. As far as she knew, he’d seen only Kjall’s royalty and nobility and their servants. Might he think better of her people if he spent time with the rest of the population, as she was doing now?
She was going through her hoard of cash faster than anticipated because she could not stop herself from pressing tetrals into the hands of children as she traveled. Twenty years she’d been alive, nearly all of them spent in a single building. How much of the world she’d been missing!
Lucien was crossing the bedroom floor with his crutch under his arm when he stopped short. Was that a white thread on the floor beneath his desk? He leaned down, touched a fingertip to his tongue, and touched the thread to lift it from the parquet square. It was nearly invisible. He had almost walked right by it.
He opened his desk drawer and pulled out the military’s readiness report, careful not to tip it sideways. He opened it to page seven and chewed his lip. His suspicion was correct. The thread he’d inserted between the pages as an anti-tampering device was missing.
Who had been looking through his things?
He sat in his desk chair and went through the drawers, paging through each of his letters and documents. Nothing had been visibly moved, and nothing was missing. He wasn’t dealing with a thief, but with a snoop or a spy. That was disturbing enough. How could a spy get into his rooms? They were warded day and night.
He frowned at the rug that covered his trapdoor into the hypocaust. Why had he not sealed that secret passageway years ago? He couldn’t make effective use of it, not with his missing leg. But his father frightened him just enough that he liked the idea of having a way out in case of disaster. He could not easily crawl through those subterranean tunnels, but if sufficiently desperate . . .
What a fool he was. Someone had sneaked into his room, almost certainly through that trapdoor, and rifled his things. That person had looked through a document containing important and very secret military information. With Florian’s idiotic attack on Sardos imminent, the stakes were unusually high.
There was a spy at large in the Imperial Palace, probably a Sardossian shroud mage. Now Lucien understood the bizarre incident in Florian’s office. Augustan had tripped an enemy ward, yet his interrogation had come up clean. Important papers had gone missing that day. The event should have been followed up on, but then Rhianne had gone missing and all available resources had been allocated toward her recovery. An invisible spy must have entered the room at the same time as Augustan, triggering the ward so that the blame fell on the legatus. Then the spy had grabbed the papers. Clever bastard.
Lucien rose from his chair and shouldered his crutch. He limped into the sitting room. “Hiberus,” he called to his door guard. “Send me a warder right away. And get me on Florian’s schedule. I need to speak to him.”