Ehren had been trained to school his reactions, just as she had. He had also been trained to falsify them. She knew the signs to look for, which would mark a reaction as genuine or false. He would, of course, know that she knew it, and could potentially modify his response to take advantage of the fact—but she judged that it would take someone with more experience in life than Sir Ehren currently possessed to deceive both her own trained eyes and ears
and
the watercrafting senses of someone as skilled as Veradis. Particularly if she clubbed him over the head with the news rather than taking a more subtle approach.
Sir Ehren’s reaction was a complete
non
reaction. He simply stared at her for a moment. Then he pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “She’s been . . . bloody
crows
.” The voice that emerged from the young man was a great deal more strident—and frustrated—than she would have expected to accompany his face and bearing. “Abducted. Of
course
she has been. Because obviously there isn’t
enough
going wrong tonight.” He glared at her. He had a rather effective glare, Amara thought, despite the muddy hazel color of his eyes and the fact that he stood nearly half a foot shorter than she did and was thus compelled to glare
up
at her. She had to make a conscious effort not to take a step back. Veradis
did
step back from him. “And I suppose,” he said, “you want me to help.”
Amara faced the young man mildly. “You . . . do seem to be having that sort of evening, Sir Ehren.”
“Crows,” he said wearily. The word betrayed a wealth of exhaustion. He hid it well, but Amara could see the signs of strain on his young face. If he’d been any older, she suspected, the past weeks would have aged him ten years. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. The change in the young man was nearly magical. His expression became mild again, his posture diffident, nearly servile. “I’m not sure how you could trust anything I did to help you, Countess.”
“She couldn’t,” Veradis said quietly, and took a step closer to the young man, extending her hand. “But I could.”
Ehren eyed Veradis. A skilled watercrafter’s ability to sense the truth in another, when it was freely shared, was the bane of all manner of deceptive enterprise—and if trusted too casually, was a wellspring of fresh deceptions in its own right. As someone who had spent years becoming skilled in that particular expertise, he probably regarded it with almost as much distrust and wariness as Amara did.
“How could this possibly harm the Realm, Cursor?” Veradis asked, smiling slightly.
Ehren warily took her hand. “Very well.”
“One question,” Veradis said quietly. “Whom do you serve?”
“The Realm and people of Alera, and the House of Gaius,” Ehren replied promptly. “In that order.”
Veradis listened with her head tilted slightly to one side. As the young man spoke, she shivered slightly, withdrew her hand, and nodded to Amara.
“I note,” Amara said drily, “that your choice of loyalties, Cursor, is not quite the Academy standard.”
Ehren’s mild eyes flickered with something hard, and he began to say something but seemed to think better of it. Then he said, “One should bear in mind that at the moment, there are two scions of the House of Gaius in the Realm. I’m working with the one that’s actually here.”
Amara nodded. “Isana was taken from—”
“I know where she was staying,” Ehren said. “And I know the security precautions protecting her. I designed them.”
Amara arched an eyebrow. If that was the case, then it seemed likely that Ehren was serving as Aquitaine’s de facto minister of intelligence. That he was, in effect, the spymaster of what remained of the entire Realm.
He watched her reaction and grimaced. “Gaius sent me to Aquitaine with his last letters. In them, he commanded me to serve him to the best of my conscience, or to inform him that I could not do so and depart, and to do him no harm. And he recommended me to Aquitaine as the most trustworthy Cursor he could pass on, at the moment.”
Amara felt a small pang in her chest at that.
But then, Gaius
hadn’t
been able to trust her. She’d walked out on her oath. With good reason, perhaps, but the fact remained that she had turned away from his service.
“The same went for Sextus’s physician, by the way,” Ehren said. “Not as though Aquitaine needs one, but you never know. He’s around here somewhere . . .” The young man shook his head. “I’m sorry, I’m wandering. Too many things going on.” He scrunched up his eyes, and said, “Right. The First Lady. The attack had to be aerial. Any other approach would have garnered too much of a reaction from the furies protecting the inn.”
“How could they have done it at all?” Veradis asked.
“We don’t have unlimited furypower at our disposal,” Ehren said, his voice carrying a slight edge. “The enemy has furycraft, too. We thus have a finite number of secure furies. Many of them had been diverted to protect the majority of the political and military resources of the Realm, which were at the Senate meeting.”
“What are the odds they could have brought the First Lady down anywhere inside the city or encampment without being seen?” Amara asked.
“Bad,” Ehren replied frankly. “She’s been everywhere since the capital. Helped a lot of people. She’s better known on sight among the populace than Sextus ever was.” He sighed and faced Amara squarely. “Aquitaine wasn’t behind it. He couldn’t have done it without me finding out.”
Amara grimaced. “You’re sure?”
“Very.”
“Then it was the enemy,” Amara said.
“It seems likely,” Ehren said. “We know that the vord Queen still controls a cadre of skilled Knights Aeris and Citizens.”
“If the vord have her . . . if they flew out, they could be miles from here by now,” Veradis breathed.
“Aquitaine is occupied,” Amara said. “And the temptation for him to remain occupied is going to be great.”
Ehren tilted his head to one side, a gesture of allowance, while spreading the fingers of one hand. He looked torn.
“Help us,” Amara said.
“There is a lot more at stake here than one woman’s life,” Ehren replied quietly.
“Cursor,” Amara said, “you learned from my example that it was wrong to blindly follow a First Lord. That you could find yourself used. So it is time to ask yourself whether you serve the Realm first—or the people who
are
the Realm. Gaius Isana was Steadholder Isana first. And freeman Isana before that.” She smiled tightly, and delivered the next sentence flat, without the coating of gentleness that would have made it slide home like a well-honed knife. “And she was your friend’s mother before that.”
Ehren gave her a sour look but leavened it with a nod of thanks, that she hadn’t driven that last home in the properly manipulative Academy fashion.
“Aquitaine has all that remains of the Realm to stand with him tonight,” Veradis said. “Who does the First Lady have?”
Ehren tapped a toe several times on the ground and nodded once, sharply. “Come with me.”
They followed him as he started through the encampment, moving at a quick walk. “Where are we going?” Amara asked.
“Every scrap of battlecraft we have is being focused right now,” Ehren said. “There’s a force of better than five hundred thousand vord closing on us. They’ll reach the defenses within the hour.”
“How did they get here so swiftly?”
“We’re not sure,” Ehren said. “But logic suggests that they repaired the severed causeways.”
“What?”
Veradis demanded. “Could they possibly have
done
that in the time they’ve had? It would take our own engineers months, maybe years.”
“The work isn’t complicated,” Ehren said. “Just heavy and repetitive. If they had enough gifted earthcrafters focused on the task it could be done relatively quickly. The causeways weren’t built by Citizen-level skills. For healing over the cuts, a powerful Citizen with the proper knowledge could theoretically repair several miles a day.”
Amara let out a blistering curse. “That’s what that little slive meant.” At Ehren’s glance, she clarified. “Kalarus Brencis Minoris. The vord Queen’s slave-master. Before I killed him, he said he’d been focusing on recruiting more earthcrafters, as ordered.”
Ehren hissed between his teeth. “I remember the report now. We should have put it together.”
“Hindsight is always better,” Amara said, walking beside him.
“But isn’t that a good thing?” Veradis asked. “If the roads are restored, perhaps Octavian’s forces can get here more quickly.”
“It’s unlikely they’ve repaired all the causeways,” Amara replied. “Most probably they’ve rebuilt a single artery for their own use, to move an attack force here rapidly. They’re coming up from the south, mainly, near the capital. Octavian is far west and a bit north of us.”
“And he’s only got two Legions.” Ehren sighed. “Assuming he got back from Canea with everyone and all those freed slaves stuck to their banners. Maybe fifteen thousand men, total.”
“Sir Ehren,” Amara repeated. “Where are we
going
?”
“Gaius Attis,” Ehren said, pronouncing the name without the hesitation of unfamiliarity, “retained a certain number of skilled individuals for his personal use. I have the authority to dispatch them as needed.”
“Singulares?”
Veradis asked.
“Assassins,” Amara said, without emphasis.
“Ah. A little of both,” Ehren replied. “Attis felt a need to be sure he had a hand ready to move quickly, if necessary.”
“To strike at Octavian if it seemed possible,” Amara said.
“I rather think they were primarily intended for his ex-wife,” Ehren replied. “Primarily.”
Amara gave him a sharp glance. “And you are in charge of them? You know when they are to be used? And you have the authority to send them to help us?”
Ehren bowed to her from the waist, without slowing down.
Amara watched him steadily. Then she said, “You are either a very good friend, Sir Ehren—or a very,
very
good spy.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling. “Or a little of both.”
They walked to the rear corner of the camp, where the tents that were usually reserved for critical noncombat personnel were pitched, according to the standard format for a Legion camp. They usually housed smiths, farriers, valets, cooks, mule skinners, and the like. Ehren walked straight to an oversized tent that displaced four of the regulation-sized structures, opened the flap, and walked in.
A dozen swords leapt from their scabbards in slithering, steely whispers, and Amara straightened from ducking into the tent to find a blade not six inches from her throat. She looked down its length, to the oft-scarred hand that held it in a steady grip, and let her gaze track up the arm of the swordsman to his face. He was enormous, dark of hair, his beard clipped in a short, precise cut. His eyes were steely and cold. It didn’t seem that he held the sword so much as that the weapon seemed to grow from his extended hand. Amara knew him.
“Aldrick,”
hissed a woman’s voice. A small, richly curvaceous woman wearing a plain linen gown with a tight-fitting leather bodice stepped out from behind the swordsman. Her hair was dark and curly, her eyes glittering, darting left and right at odd intervals. The smile on her face did not match the eyes at all. Her hands opened and closed in excitement, and she licked her lips as she slid closer to Amara and pushed the end of the blade very gently down. “Look, lord. It’s the nice wind girl who left us to die naked in the Kalaran wilderness. And I never thanked her for it.”
Aldrick ex Gladius, one of the deadliest swordsmen in Alera, hooked a finger down into the back of the woman’s bodice and dragged her close to him, leaving his sword extended. She leaned against his pull. He didn’t seem to notice. He slid a hand around her waist, when she was close enough, and pressed her shoulders back against his mailed torso. “Odiana,” he rumbled. “Peace.”
The fey-looking woman twitched several more times, her smile widening, and subsided. “Yes, lord.”
“Little man,” Aldrick rumbled. “What’s she doing here?”
Ehren smiled up at Aldrick, standing diffidently, as though he weren’t bright enough to notice all the naked steel in the room and too innocent of the ways of violence to understand how much danger he was in. “Ah, yes. She’s here to, ah, there’s a special mission for you all, and you’re to do it.”
Amara glanced around the tent. She recognized some of the men and women in it, from long before, during her graduation exercise from the Academy. Back before her mentor had betrayed her. Back before the man she’d pledged her life to support had done the same. They were the Windwolves—mercenaries, the long-term hirelings of the Aquitaines. They were suspected in any number of dubious enterprises, and though she could not prove it, Amara was certain that they had killed any number of Alerans during their employers’ various schemes.
They were dangerous men and women one and all, strongly gifted at furycraft, known as an aerial contingent, Knights for hire.
“Hello, Aldrick,” Amara said calmly, facing the man. “This is the short version: As of now, you are working with me.”
His eyebrows climbed. His eyes went to Ehren.
The little man nodded, smiling and blinking myopically. “Yes, that’s correct. She’ll tell you what you need to know. Very important, and I’ve other messages to deliver, good hunting.”
Ehren nodded and bumbled out of the tent, muttering apologies.
Grimacing, Aldrick watched him go and eyed Amara. A moment later, he put his sword away. Only then did the others in the room lower and put away their weapons.
“All right,” he said, staring at Amara with distaste. “What’s the job?”
Odiana stared at her with what Amara could only describe as malicious glee. Her smile was unsettling.
“The usual,” Amara said, smiling as though her innards hadn’t spent the last moments shimmying and twisting in fear. “It’s a rescue.”