The Crown Affair

I am Kiera, summoned to this world of magik by a ditzy goddess. I am no longer a cosplay Ninja. I have become the real thing. Deidre took me in and taught me how to survive in this world. I am Dierdre’s spy, mastermind, assassin. I am the subtle knife of the White Empress. I have been infiltrating the Prittoni Realm ever since Selene was taken by the Kharnasian Traders Slaver group who attempted kidnapping of Hestia, Dee’s closest dragonkin guard.

Queen Ophelia had wanted to capture Dee, out of curiosity and greed Ophelia was fascinated, no, fanatically obsessed, with Dee. She knew she could never hope to capture Dee. So she schemed to kidnap one of Dee’s friends. Dee cared. She cared too much, according to the mindset of people like Ophelia. That was Dee’s weakness. But Ophelia was wrong. That was Dee’s strength. That was Dee’s greatest asset, and the downfall of all the fools who went up against her.

We had been investigating the Queen. I had been investigating the Queen. How many times now have I slipped in past these two corrupt border guards in one disguise, or another? Now, I am going to conclude this case. There were only a handful of nobles left to tie up. I crossed into the Prittoni Realm on a night without a moon, on the mission long delayed. We will have justice for Hestia, and for Selene. I am disguised as an old worn-out woman, using the glamoury skills I perfected thanks to lessons from Deirdre, that were expanded at Academy. I have gone beyond all that now, due all the crazy adventures we’ve had over the years.

The Queen was an adept spy. Who’d have figured a Queen with the job title of thief? Ophelia’s spy network was extraordinary. That was my in. I infiltrated her network. The Queen had been played, by someone. They saw her greed and used it for their own purpose. I would never forgive that person. Dee was tied to Ophelia now, and her kingdom. In the end Ophelia got what she wanted, by other means. I don’t know how to feel about that. Can I forgive Ophelia? I don’t know.

It was all too easy. This crossing was a waste of my skills. Every other traveler on the Meridian Road was hauling something: wine, wool, a nervous passenger, a shipment of songbirds. The border guards were bored and hungry, and they had not seen any people worth searching in months. I carried a satchel of dried up fruits, a letter of introduction from a fictional dye merchant in Crispenwell, and the slouch of a woman who had walked too far for too little money.

“Business?” the guard asked, already looking past me.

“Wife of a dyer. Husband’s taken ill. I’m to sell what’s left of the stock before the creditors do.”

He waved me through. Nobody had ever stopped a tired old woman at a border suspecting she was secretly the most powerful assassin in all of Eå. I was undetectable in my disguises. The Goddess had blessed me with many powers. But I had done the hard work to hone my craft, thanks to Dee, Celes, the Academy, and our adventures. No spy, or assassin, could surpass my skills now. I had made my peace with that long ago. In my old world I had been invisible and ordinary, and the habit of being overlooked had followed me across the gap between worlds, and it was effortless.

I walked until the border lanterns were gone, stepped off the road, sat on a stone, and let my glamoury go. It barely cost any mana to maintain it now. But the glamoury can be too real, and affect one physically. I needed my full strength now. People assumed glamouries were just an illusion on the surface. Some were, but the glamouries cast by stronger spies went deeper, much deeper. Deep enough to fool even a Dragon of Royal Blood.

The port city of Thesally, on the Easter Coast inside a Rocky Bay, smelled of tar and old fish. I took a room above a chandler's shop as Marena de Dyer, paid a month in advance, and spent my first day doing nothing, which was the hardest part of the work. I sat in the common room of a wine shop called the Sleeping Heron, ordered watered wine, and listened.

I carried a list in my head, and every line of it fed my quiet rage.

1. Hestia, nearly taken in the crowded City Market by a bumbling attack.

2. Selene, taken while hunting for the Slavers, and nearly killed, but it would have been worse had they not caught up to the Slavers.

3. Kharnasian Traders, dead now, none of them had the name of the man who paid them.

What they had left was a pattern. Experienced slavers choose more certain means, and knew what they were up against and planned for it. The first attempt had been staged at the Market, drawn up like a child’s game by someone who had never held a knife in the dark. Someone had insisted, and the professionals had obeyed, and it had failed. A controlling man, a proud one, who had never learned that in the underworld the people doing the work always know better than the people paying for them.

By the second night I had heard what I was searching for, one name three times from three mouths, each time with the same flavor. Not fear. Weary contempt,

Gideon Mac Fortunato. The Viscount. Sends back every ledger twice.

It took four days to learn his habits. He rose at dawn, breakfasted alone only after his taster survived for thirty minutes, and spent mornings in his counting-room correcting other people’s arithmetic. He attended Queen Ophelia’s court twice a week and nodded at everything. And on the first Thursday of each month he visited a tannery warehouse that, according to every record, belonged to a salt merchant who did not exist.

I was on the roof an hour before he arrived, having blinked through a skylight no one had touched in a decade. Below me, a thin clerk with black hair and ink-stained fingers worked at a ledger while two guards tossed dice by the door. Gideon arrived in a plain cloak that fooled no one. He was an insular, upright man in his fifties with a face like a closed fist.

“Is the shipment ready?”

“Lord Viscount, the captain won’t sail on the schedule you've proposed.”

“Then the captain will be replaced.”

“He’s the only one who knows the channel, my lord.”

Gideon was silent. Then, very evenly: "I have told you how this is to be done. The route. The timing. The number of men. I wrote it down. Why is it so difficult to simply follow instructions?"

I, laying flat on the beams, almost pitied the clerk. Mostly I felt something cold settle in my chest. This was the man. I had heard the same tone described by a drunk slaver’s widow complaining about “that mad noble who thought he knew our trade better than we did.”

When the meeting ended, Gideon left the ledger on the table. I waited for the dice to rattle, then silently cast from the beam, and it blinked into my hand. I was back on the roof before the clerk's yawn ended.

I read it by a shielded candle, and my stomach sank by the third page. Salt. Rope. Harbor bribes. A tidy bureaucrat's record of a tidy bureaucrat’s smuggling. There was nothing about Selene, nothing about the Slavers, nothing about a marketplace. A man who micromanaged slavers into disaster did not keep an honest book of his crimes in a warehouse guarded by two dice-players. It was bait, or at least a decoy. The real ledger lived somewhere better protected.

I sat very still and contemplated. Had Gideon known I was coming? No. The decoy was habit, the kind of reflex a careful man develops without knowing why. My own lessons had taught me what that looked like. What mattered was that nearly every entry carried a marginal number, a small pencil mark beside each line. Cross-reference numbers.

“Folio and page,” I realized. “They point to another book.”

A man who kept a decoy ledger kept a real one close. Not in the warehouse. Not in a bank. Somewhere he could reach in the middle of the night when his nerves failed him. I spent two days learning that Gideon's counting-room had a second room behind it, and that nobody but the Viscount had ever been seen to enter.

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The counting-room sat on the ground floor of the manor, behind a corridor that changed guard every two hours and a door with a lock I admired from the moment I saw it. A Dwarven dex-tumbler, six pins, a false keyway that would trip an alarm, and a spell, if wrongly turned.

I could not afford to rush this. I lay in the dark of the servants’ passage for forty minutes, listening to the guard’s pattern, and the door’s mechanism, and my own heartbeat. Then it was time to work.

The false keyway first. I slid a sliver of silk-wrapped wire into it to muffle the bell’s striker with a spell on it, then bypassed it with a bent pick. The first three pins set cleanly. The fourth had a security spool, which made the tumbler fight me. I paced my breath and let the pick feel for the false set, back and forth, the way a sailor reads a current. The door opened with a click so quiet I thought it might be my imagination.

Inside, a plain wooden desk and a single iron-banded chest. No guards. No lamp. That was the second warning, because the room was too bare.

I did not step in. She knelt in the doorway and looked at the floor. The flagstones were uniformly gray, but the third and fifth in the row were a half-shade darker, slightly worn at the edges where mortar had been disturbed. Pressure plates. I’d have missed them if I had been in a hurry.

“Levitation. Air walk,” I cast.

The chest had a ward woven through its lid, a thin silver thread of old magik, the sort a hedge-mage would sell for a month's rent. I did not break it. I unhooked the hinge pins instead, lifted the entire lid off its frame like a cover from a pot, and set it on the side without disturbing the thread.

Inside lay a ledger bound in plain black leather.

Gideon had written it in his own small, furious hand. And here, at last, was the Gray Hand: payments, dates, amounts. A line for ‘the dragonkin, Hestia, delivery before Summer Break.’ A second for ‘the girl, Selene, caught spying. Delivery immediate.’ Beneath each, in the margin, a note of instruction, long and exacting, the kind that had doomed the first attempt.

It was everything I could hope for, and was nothing I needed. It named Gideon. It named his sins. But every instruction ended the same way: ‘as arranged,’ or ‘per the understanding,’ or ‘as the principal directs.’

‘The principal.’ No name. Not even an initial. Gideon had been careful about that one thing. He had written down every detail of his own guilt and left the real author a blank.

I replaced the lid, and rehung the hinge pins. I took the book, because a missing ledger would give a quiet death away, and left a plain copy in its place, written overnight in a hand close enough to fool a tired man. Then I went to my lodging, and did what I had to do next.

I had learned enough alchemy in the Academy for two years. The recipe wasn’t complicated. Foxglove tincture, refined and stripped of its bitterness. A pinch of powdered datura. A drop of something distilled from a dragon's-breath flower that Deirdre’s dragonkin gardeners had given me as a “gift for my tea.” The result was a clear liquid that would stop a healthy heart and look, to any healer’s eye, like a heart simply failing.

I brewed it over three nights in my rented room, windows shuttered, with my own hands. I did not let myself think about it too hard. But I checked each measurement twice, because a poison that failed was cruelty, and a poison that left traces was incompetence, and I had no patience for either.

When I was done, I corked the vial and set it on the windowsill to watch the dawn come up.

“It will be quick,” I told myself. “It will be clean. It will look like nothing.”

It was more mercy than he had shown Hestia.

I took him on the seventh night, in his own study, and the wards on the manor were competent, but I simply walked through them as though they were a polite suggestion.

Gideon was correcting a column of figures. He did not look up until the candle flame bent toward the wrong side of the room.

“I will scream,” he said calmly.

“You can try,” I was already sitting across from him.

“The guard outside is asleep. So is the one at the stairs. I do not think you'll like what happens if I have to make you quiet.”

He studied me with the narrow look of a man tallying a bad debt. “You are the Empress’ blade.”

“I’m a woman who wants a name. Give it to me and this ends gently.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I set the real ledger on the desk between them, and for one half-second his composure slipped. Then it closed over again like water.

“Hestia,” Kiera said. “Selene. The Kharnasian Traders. You wrote it all down. But you never wrote ‘who’. The principal. Who is he?”

“I will tell you nothing.”

“I thought you might say that.”

“You can threaten me. You can cut me. I have nothing to say.” His voice was thin and very steady. “I have buried better secrets than this under worse men than you.”

I believed him. That was what I was hoping to avoid. He wasn’t bluffing. Gideon Mac Fortunato was a proud, rigid, infuriating man, and under torture he would very likely die with the name in his mouth. I have seen men like that. I had no interest in making him a martyr.

“Then I won’t ask,” I said quietly.

The sky darkened as I reached for the power. Lightning and thunder rolled in. I pulled up the darkness, and reached into his mind. It was more like walking into a dark house and following the one lit window. People’s secrets always glowed a little. The more they feared them, the brighter they burned. Terror took him, as he realized.

“No! Please, don’t!” His mind screamed because his voice no longer could.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.

Gideon went rigid. His hand tightened around the pen until it snapped. His eyes flew wide. I walked through the corridors of his mind and threw open his locked secrets. There was a great deal of arithmetic, rows of figures like soldiers in ranks. There! There it is!

A memory, before the fumbled abduction. A study lit by a single candle. A man across the desk with a quiet face and gentle hands, who spoke softly and never raised his voice. A man who had said, ‘Her Majesty must never know, Viscount. Let us spare her the burden.’ And Gideon, flattered, flushed, eager to be trusted with something so delicate, had agreed to everything. Count Belldonnar of the Dargon Realm. Unfortunately, he was untouchable.

I saw more, and it was chilling. Gideon had been used from the first conversation. Every instruction had come from the Count and been presented as Gideon's own idea. The palace staging, the insistence on the festival. The man had *wanted* the first attempt to fail. He had wanted an investigation that led to Queen Ophelia's door. Gideon had been the lock on that door, and Belldonnar had held the key the whole time. I released the darkness and Gideon slumped in his chair, panting, tears on his face.

“What did you do to me?”

“I took what I needed.”

I stood and drew the vial from my coat. “I’m sorry. You were used, Viscount. It does not excuse what you did to two girls. But I thought you should know.”

He stared at the vial, and then at me. He did not beg. After a moment, with the dull dignity of a man who has finally been shown the real total of a long, ugly account, he asked, “Will I suffer long?”

“This will be quick. But who knows what lies beyond, in the Infernal Abyss” I said. The Infernal Abyss was this world’s equivalent to Hell.

“Then give it here.”

He drank it himself. He did not drink it like a man seeking mercy. He drank it like a man settling a debt.

It took only a few seconds, Gideon settled back, hand pressed to his chest, expression almost puzzled, as though he had found an error in a column of figures. Then his eyes went still. He looked like just another man who worked himself to death.

I arranged him with care. I fixed the lamp, laid a half-finished letter to his steward on the blotter, and set a cup of cold tea at his elbow. I rumpled the cushion the way a weary man’s cushion would be rumpled, and put the cracked pen back in his dead fingers.

By morning, Viscount Gideon Mac Fortunato would be found dead at his desk. The healers would call it a failing heart. The realm would mourn a hard-working, difficult man who had finally worked himself to death, and nobody would ask questions, because nobody ever did about a man like that.

I left the real ledger beside his hand, open to nothing in particular, and took only what I’d come for. I left his estate undetected. I returned to my suite, and vomited. The dark necromancy powers were truly horrific, just as Dee had said. I did not sleep that night. I sat on a rooftop at the edge of Thesally Port and watched the sky roll over the harbor, thinking about a name.

I had been prepared to find a villain. I had not been prepared for one so patient, so careful, so willing to let a Queen carry the weight of his crime while he stayed clean. It would have been easier if it had been Ophelia. Ophelia was proud and petty and loud. Ophelia could be confronted.

Belldonnar was a different kind of problem. He sat behind a hundred men and a dozen mages, with the court's love and the Queen’s trust. If I killed him now, it would look like the Empress murdering a loyal noble, and every house in the four realms and the Rhonel Empire would rise. And I had no proof. Nothing I’d taken from Gideon’s mind would convince a court. It was a name, nothing more, and a name was not enough.

But Ophelia still did not know. A Queen who thought she was clean was a Queen who could be turned into an ally, a woman with every reason to hate the man who had made her his shield. All it would take was the right proof, in the right hands, at the right time.

That would take time, care, and patience, and perhaps a plan that Deirdre’s strange, brilliant mind would conceive more than I could.

I stood and brushed the dust from my coat. Below me the harbor was waking: gulls, hawkers, the first creak of rope and timber. Somewhere in the city, a servant would soon knock on a study door and get no answer.

I pulled my hood forward and let the morning shadows grow around me.

“I’m coming for you Belldonnar. Not yet,” I said softly, to a man who could not hear me. “But I know what you did.”

Then I went home to tell my Empress that the true hunt was only just begun.