As Mr. Thu explained to us, he had not been a member of the army per se. He was a mountaineer, hired to work with surveyors so that Yelang might have more accurate maps of the mountains to their east. But it seemed he had made copies of those maps and passed them along to his Khiam Siu brethren, whose leaders had been driven out of Yelang after a tremendous defeat at Diéziò. Someone above him in the imperial hierarchy had discovered this fact, and Mr. Thu barely escaped with his life.
He delivered this tale in the simple, matter-of-fact tone one might use to relate events read from a news-sheet. To many people this might have seemed like evidence of falsity, but for me, it made the entire affair ring true. I knew that tone well, for I have used it myself when I am deeply upset by a thing, and must detach myself from it so as not to surrender my dignity before strangers. When he finished by saying, “So you see, I am an exile,” I felt a pang of sympathy.
“I am very sorry to hear that,” I told him, and was quite sincere.
An awkward silence fell, until Tom took it upon himself to break it. “But why come here?”
“Because of Lady Trent,” Mr. Thu said, with a little bow toward me. “I wish her help. In exchange, I offer what I know.”
“What manner of help?” I asked warily.
He straightened his back, hands placed precisely atop his knees. Now we had come to the heart of it, for which all the rest had been prelude. “Your support. We—the Khiam Siu—have approached your government, seeking an alliance against the Taisên. But many look at us and see only Yelangese, and say we can never be allies. You can speak against them. You can help us gain our alliance.”
I would have a great deal of difficulty speaking if I did not first retrieve my jaw from the floor. The proposed alliance with the Khiam Siu was a matter of hot debate. The magazines and newspapers generally fell into two camps: those who, as Mr. Thu said, saw only Yelangese, and trusted them no further than the door; and those who understood the Khiam Siu to be the enemies of the Taisên, but saw no reason we should not stand back and let the two chew on one another to their hearts’ content. In less public corners the issue was acknowledged as more complex—but relatively few with the power to do anything were inclined to show favour to the Khiam Siu. Mr. Thu was quite right in thinking they needed support.
Where I parted company with his reasoning was the point at which he thought my support would get him anywhere. I might have engaged with politics more often than I intended—for we cannot pretend the education of girls and the forging of international bonds for the well-being of dragons are apolitical acts—but that did not make me anything like a force to be reckoned with on the diplomatic front.
Tom had resumed the role of skeptic, while I attempted to find my tongue. “What assurance do we have that this information of yours is any good? You could feed us a load of rubbish, and we would never know until after Lady Trent staked her reputation on you and your allies.”
“It is not… rubbish,” Mr. Thu said, employing the new word with quiet dignity. “And I have faith that you and Lady Trent would see through it if it were.”
I had my own question for Mr. Thu, which was as much a test as it was a genuine query. Looking him directly in the eye, I asked, “What makes you think I will trust you? My history with your countrymen has not been good.”
He nodded, unsurprised. “You do not like Yelangese. I understand this. But they say you care more about dragons than things such as that. I am hoping this is true.”
And, of course, it was.
THREE
We met with predictable disbelief when we presented our situation to members of the Synedrion.
My brother Paul laughed in my face. I approached him first, for while we were not close, we were at least on cordial terms (my elevation to the peerage having done a good deal to mend my contentious relations with the bulk of my family.) As he still held a seat in the Open House of the Synedrion, I thought I stood a better chance with him than with someone I knew only from public functions. “It’s a trap, Isabella,” he said over dinner at my house. “I thought you clever enough to see that on your own.”
“A trap to what end?” I asked. My impatience, I fear, was not as well concealed as I might have wished. “To lure me off into the Mrtyahaima Mountains so I may be killed? Dear heaven—if someone wants me dead, there are far less convoluted ways to arrange it.”
“And what if they want to capture you instead?”
“Yes,” I said dryly. “It is so much easier to do that by hunting me down in the icy wilderness of the world’s highest peaks than by, say, knocking me over the head on my way to visit a friend. Besides, he is Khiam Siu, not a follower of the Taisên. They want our assistance; foul play would hardly aid them in that goal.” (I forbore to mention that certain members of the Synedrion might applaud them for doing me in.)
Paul put his fork down with an impatient clack. “What other reason could these Yelangese have for approaching you? If they believe this information is so valuable—a point which I am not at all prepared to concede—then why not have their envoy formally present that offer to the Synedrion?”
Suhail laughed, as much to defuse the tension as from amusement. “Because they know our dear Lady Trent well enough to understand what good bait this is.” When I gave him an exasperated look, he said, “My heart, you know it is true.”
“That it is good bait, yes.” I could hardly pretend otherwise, when it had already produced such a marked effect. “But what benefit do they gain from spearing me on their hook?”
“Your vote, for one.”
We were then in that odd period between the passage of the Female Peers Act and the General Representation Act. The former gave me the right to vote in the Closed House of the Synedrion, as befitted my rank as a baroness who held the title in her own right; prior to the passage of that bill, I would have required a male family member to occupy my seat and vote in my stead. (Ordinarily this would have been my husband, but since another law prohibits foreign-born individuals from holding seats in either house of the Synedrion, I would have had to look farther afield.) The latter, of course, extended the right of suffrage to all women—but at the moment, I had the odd privilege of voting on Synedrion bills, but not in the elections which filled the Open House of that body.
Still my vote did not count for much. “If it comes down to so close a division that a single vote makes the difference, they are depending on a very slender reed.”
“It would be one vote more than they had before,” Suhail said. “And I would not undervalue yourself. If you speak in favour of this, it will have an effect.”
I gave him a dry look. “An effect, yes. But a positive one? That remains to be seen.”
My undertaking thus did not begin well, nor did it improve much in the following days. It seemed that everyone had a theory for what this supposed conspiracy might hope to accomplish. “He’ll feed us false intelligence,” Lord Rossmere said when I met with him a few days later. My readers may recall him as the brigadier who sent Tom and myself to Akhia—and as such, a man who knew how well the prospect of dragons would motivate me to action. “He’ll say things about the mountains to lead our own men astray, so that we won’t find a way through to the western side.”