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They both nodded.
“I suspect Petronus will require his hand forced,” he said, looking at them both, his eyes narrow. “I suspect that I will betray my friend.”
“Hail the camp,” a distant voice called out. Vlad Li Tam looked up and nodded as his guards scattered to reinforce their positions.
“Hail, Gypsy Scout. What news do you bring?”
“Lord Rudolfo sends regards and will join your parley on the morrow.”
Vlad Li Tam nodded. “Excellent. Is my daughter with him?”
“She has returned to the Ninefold Forest with the metal man. Your presence here was unexpected. Otherwise, I’m certain she would have delayed her travel.”
Far better for her to stay near the mechoservitor. She could be trusted to watch out for it, to keep it from the wrong hands. It reminded him of another matter. “Tell your general that after the parley we will move quickly against the City States if they do not lay down arms. Our Pope will want the mechoservitors that Sethbert is holding. They are critical for the reestablishment of the library.”
“I will tell him,” the scout said, never staying still yet never entering the camp’s ring of light.
After the scout left, Vlad Li Tam called for a bird and laid his pipe aside to compose a message, coding it in double and triple Whymer loops that only an Androfrancine Pope could read. After he’d finished writing it, he went back over it, layering in yet more code in the slightest brush strokes of his pen, the seemingly hapless smearing of a letter here or there.
He tied it to his strongest, smallest bird and whispered the direction to its tiny head as it fluttered against his hands.
Vlad Li Tam tossed the bird into the sky, watched its wings unfurl as it caught the light breeze and shot east, flying low to the ground.
Chapter 20
Jin Li Tam
Jin Li Tam rose early on her first morning back in the seventh forest manor. She slipped into plain cotton trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, pulling a light cloak over both to keep her dry in the cold autumn drizzle. In her absence, they had moved her into the room adjoining Rudolfo’s, outfitting it with everything she could p? keossibly need. She left her hair down and shoved her foot into the low doeskin boots the steward had provided.
In the hall, she paused at the door. Once more her eyes went to the children’s quarters, and she thought again about the one furnished room. Despite the early hour a servant passed, and Jin Li Tam reached out to touch the girl’s arm.
“What is that room?” she asked, pointing.
The servant shifted uncomfortably. “It’s Lord Isaak’s room, Lady Tam.”
She felt herself frown. “I don’t understand. Why would Isaak need a child’s room?”
The girl blushed and stammered. “Not for the-” She struggled, looking for the right word. “Not for the mechanical,” she finally said. Her eyes wandered the hall, only pausing to meet Jin Li Tam’s eyes for the briefest of moments. “I’m not sure it is proper for me to speak of it. You should ask Steward Kember or perhaps Mistress Ilyna.”
Jin Li Tam nodded. “Very well.”
Looking to that closed door one more time, she turned and moved down the hall, her soft boots whispering across the carpet. She took the stairs two at a time, springing lightly, and nodded to the Gypsy Scouts that waited for her at the main doors. They fell in behind her, and she smiled beneath her hood. She’d grown familiar with the half-squad Rudolfo had assigned to her, and most of her life she’d had guards of one kind or another. Sethbert was the first to not assign an escort to her, and she knew it had more to do with the message he sent to her father-like his insistence that she be considered a consort and nothing more.
They were very different men, Sethbert and Rudolfo. Rudolfo carried a certain ruthlessness about him, but it was the carefully chosen path that blended menace with charm in order to achieve a goal. Sethbert’s had been more the meanness of a large bully accustomed to imposing his will for the pleasure it brought him more than to any purpose.
Rudolfo, as she had observed before, was more like her father. Prepared and cautious, but with an aloof and light touch.
Even the men he’d chosen for her escort showcased this. They followed, often just one or two, but they stayed far enough back to not invade her privacy.
As she passed through the gate, a movement on the hill outside of town caught her eye. A lone figure moved along the top of that cleared surface and she knew it was Isaak, pacing out the space there. The structure would be massive and for a moment, she stood still and took it in. How would this sleeping town respond in the shadow of this undertaking? Certainly, Rudolfo had considered this. She was too new to the Ninefold Forest to know what it would mean when the libraA wh inry opened its doors and became the centerpoint of the Named Lands, so far from the centers of commerce and statecraft.
Of course, that was the first vision of the Androfrancines. And though Windwir was easily the most powerful city in the world, it had never been the largest. The children of P’Andro Whym, with help from their Gray Guard, had kept it to a size that they could manage, turning away the universities that sought to locate near that vast receptacle of knowledge. Instead, they’d allowed small groups of students to visit in shifts throughout the year, mostly the children of nobles. And Androfrancine scholars traveled out to the schools, carrying what knowledge the Order deemed appropriate.
She found herself wondering how this new library would work. The Order’s back had been broken and it would not soon come back. Two thousand years of careful growth had made them insular as it was. But now, with possibly only a thousand Androfrancines left in the world-one percent or less of their former numbers-she did not see the Order coming back into its strength any time soon.
She resumed her walk, glancing over her shoulder to be sure the scouts were following.
The town stirred to life, a few women out to the bakery and a few hunters gathering outside the locked tavern, waiting for the owner to throw open the doors and feed them before they went after their game.
A carpenter worked beneath a canvas canopy, planing a length of wood in long, slow strokes.
Jin Li Tam moved through the streets until she reached the narrow river that ran through the center of town. She followed the river north until the rest of the town fell away to a scattering of houses and huts. The steward’s wife, Ilyna, had told her where to go. There were never any signs but most towns had at least one apothecary.
She’d sent a bird to her oldest sister on the outer shores of the Emerald Coasts, now the wife of a Free City Warpriest, and the finest apothecary House Li Tam had ever produced. She’d studied at the Francine School disguised as a young man and fooled those old monks for three years. Much older than Jin Li Tam, Rae Li Tam had lived a lifetime making potions and powders for their father’s work, and her medicines, magicks and poisons were legendary.
She had replied to Jin’s note immediately, and the coded recipe waited for her when she and Isaak and their half-squad arrived at the seventh manor the night before. Jin had translated the recipe into a common script late that night, working by candlelight and feeling the knots in her stomach as she did so.
Smoke trickled from the small ramshackle hut, and an older, plump woman squatted at the river, her head inclined toward the water. “Aye,” she said without looking up. “Dark times indeed.” Then, as if finishing her conversation, her head rose and her eyes met with Jin Li Tam’s. She blushed. “Lady Tam, an unexpected grace.” She bowed.
Jin returned the bow, inclining her head and offering a smile. “I have need of your services, River Woman.”
The River Woman smiled. “Magicks for the Lord’s new Lady? Or will it be powders of another sort? Whatever my Lady needs, I’m sure we can find it in the elements given.”
