This, he realized as he paged through it, was gold. It named the location and destination of every ship and every battalion of soldiers, as well as status information such as the numbers of sick and wounded, stocks of provisions and ammunition, recent disciplinary problems, and the experience levels of the troops and their commanders. Janto put the other papers back in the desk.
He hadn’t seen everything in the desk, but now that wasn’t necessary. This was all he needed. He glanced at the bedroom door. How long could he risk staying here before Lucien woke? Maybe an hour or two. Or could he take the report with him?
No, it would be missed. He’d have to copy it.
The report confirmed that the Kjallans were sending a fleet to attack Sarpol. Twelve warships were involved, not just the three he’d already known about. The
Another six ships were bound for the port city of Rhaylet, which was odd.
Rhaylet was located on Dori, but Sardos controlled it. An attack on Rhaylet was an attack on Sardos and would certainly pull forth a defensive fleet. But a Sardossian fleet could not sail through the Kjallan-held Neruna Strait. It would have to go the long way around. Such a lengthy sail would leave it unable to render assistance in the defense of Sardos itself.
In terms of numbers, the feint seemed to give Kjall no material advantage. They could fight the Sardossian ships at Sarpol or they could fight them at Rhaylet; what did it matter? But in practical terms it mattered a great deal. Sarpol had ground-based defenses that gave them an advantage and rendered light ships useless. Anything Kjall could draw off was a win for them.
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:
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,
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.
