Agent of the Crown

by Melissa McShane

  Her voice echoed with a cold fury that promised violence to anyone who challenged her; she heard it, and she knew everyone else did too. The soldiers looked at one another. Jackson came to full attention for the first time since Telaine had known him and said, “Yours to command, major.”

  A disturbance at the outside of the crowd turned into Ben, carrying his biggest sledgehammer as if it were a willow stick. “I’ll help with the defense too,” he said, looking at Anselm and ignoring Telaine. “Happen you could use a few more hands.”

  “I’m with you, too,” said Liam. A few voices chimed in, then more and more. Telaine listened to the chorus with growing horror.

  “No,” she said to Ben, forgetting herself, “you aren’t fighters, you’ll just get yourselves killed.”

  He looked at her with such fury she didn’t recognize him. “Happen you don’t get a say in this,” he said coldly. “Get out of here. Go back where you came from. You’re not one of us.”

  Telaine flinched. He turned away, hoisted his hammer over his shoulder, and joined Jack and Liam where they stood with the rest of the townspeople, waiting for the major to direct them. Why am I not crying? she wondered, and her own thoughts seemed so remote it was as if someone else were thinking them.

  She heard Anselm say, behind her, “There’s a garrison east of Ellismere. Fort Canden. We might be able to hold them off long enough for those troops to get here. Sergeant Williams, maybe—”

  “I’ll go,” Telaine said. “You can’t spare any soldiers, and I’m done here.” She walked over to Morgan’s horse and mounted, turning it in a wide circle. “How do I find it?”

  “Straight along the road east from Ellismere, no side roads. It’s easy to find.” Anselm held out her hand and Telaine grasped it. “That was a brave thing you did,” she added. “Sorry it turned out that way.”

  “It was always going to turn out that way,” Telaine said. “I just didn’t want to believe it.” She saw Aunt Weaver in the crowd, looking up at her. Her great-aunt’s face was unreadable. How much trouble did I let her in for? Not that she could do anything about it. She hoped Aunt Weaver’s secret would stay safer than her own. She nodded once at Aunt Weaver in farewell, then turned the horse and trotted away.

  Jeffy brought his horse alongside hers as she began heading out of town. “Lainie, did I ruin everything?” he asked. “I only joined her troop two days ago, I asked to be transferred in—it’s just that she’s a legendary commander, and I wanted…”

  He sounded so much like a little boy that she laughed without bitterness. “I’m the one who ruined everything,” she said, “and you have nothing to be sorry for. Jeffy—stay safe. Fight well.”

  “Not always compatible,” he said lightly, but his voice shook. She patted his hand.

  “I’ll send help,” she said, and kicked the horse into a gallop.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  She had to dismount and lead Morgan’s horse down the mountain road. Though Major Anselm’s earth mover had left a wide, obvious trail, it had also left enough snow on the path to obscure any potential hazards.

  She forced herself to walk slowly so she wouldn’t trip, all the while imagining the defenders of the fort picking their way across the snowy fields, spreading out through the fort, passing out weapons. She pictured Jeffy with his sword he’d never used before, Liam holding one of the new guns, Ben hefting his hammer…she had to stop thinking then, focus on not accidentally walking off the mountainside.

  She descended from winter into early spring, a spring still touched here and there by snowdrifts, but spring nonetheless. Daffodils sprouted at the bases of aspen trees, their slim white trunks exclamation points against the evergreen background. How beautiful the world still is, she thought in wonder, and could not understand how it could also be so cruel.

  No snow remained on the foothills, and as soon as the road was visible, she mounted Morgan’s horse and trotted the rest of the way off the mountain. Then she kicked the horse into a gallop. She glanced at her watch. Just past noon. The Ruskalder could be at the fort in less than six hours. She urged the horse faster.

  She reached the Hitching Station at one o’clock and scrambled off the horse, thrusting its reins into Edith’s surprised hand. The dinnertime crowd filled the tap room, but Telaine got Josiah Stakely’s attention by shoving between him and someone ordering a beer. “I need to speak with you in private. Now.”

  Stakely looked at her, perplexed, and finished drawing the man’s beer. “Back here, Miss Bricker,” he said, and ushered her into the back room. “I hope this is important,” he added, frowning, standing with his arms crossed in a forbidding manner.

  She took a deep breath. She’d already done it once; how many times could she be damned? “Mister Stakely, I’m not a Deviser. I’m an agent of the Crown and I need your help.”

  Stakely furrowed his brow at her. “You’re a what?”

  “I’m an agent of the Crown. A spy. And I need two horses. I don’t have any money to pay you now, but I swear I will pay you anything you like for this imposition when I return. Please, Mister Stakely, this is more urgent than you can imagine.”

  Stakely scratched his head. “I don’t understand—” he began.

  “Mister Stakely, I don’t have time to explain. All I can tell you is that I have to get to Fort Canden as quickly as possible, and I need to move at top speed. So I need to be able to switch between three mounts. Can you help me?”

  He scratched his head again, his brow still furrowed. Then he turned, and Telaine followed him out of the tap room and into the stable yard. “Edith, Miss Bricker needs two good mounts,” he said.

  Edith was already deeply involved in grooming Morgan’s horse. “Seems she’s got one good one already,” she grunted. Spittle flew.

  “Two other horses. You want to help her saddle up?” Stakely asked her. Telaine held out her hand and shook his vigorously.

  “Mister Stakely,” she said, “thank you. I promise you’ll be rewarded for serving your country.”

  She and Stakely helped Edith put bridle and lead lines on two horses, not fancy or high-stepping, but good movers who looked like they had stamina. Exactly what she needed. She mounted Morgan’s horse and led the other two on a string behind her, trotting through the streets of Ellismere until she came to the road leading out of town. Then she gave her mount its head, and her string of horses set off rapidly eastward.

  Telaine became obsessed with her watch. She told herself she would only check it every time she switched horses, but the terrain here was broad, featureless plains, smelling of dust even this early in the year, and there was nothing to focus on, so she would sneak a peek, just once or twice.

  As the afternoon wore on, she and her horses began treading on their shadows, which lengthened as the minutes and hours passed until they were thin gray fingers pointing the way to the garrison. The road was well-kept, paved and maintained the way roads between military stations were expected to be. If the troops had to be called out, no one wanted them delayed because of potholes. Telaine stopped watching for hazards and urged her horses on. One more glance at the watch wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  The setting sun turned their shadows a starkly outlined black, and then it sank behind distant Mount Tendennon, leaving a glow that might have been rosy or golden. Telaine had no time to waste looking at sunsets. She could no longer read her watch face. A Device that lights a clock face, she thought, something soft so it doesn’t blind you at night.

  She put it away and concentrated on the road. The light of the half-moon was not quite enough for speedy travel, and she had to slow for fear of veering off over the verge, fear of a horse breaking a leg, and if that happened Telaine didn’t know what she would do. She trotted along and tried not to imagine distant screams and war cries. I hope they give him a gun, that hammer won’t do any good until the Ruskalder are so close it doesn’t matter.

  She changed mounts again and urged the horses on faster. On her left, the foo
thills of the Rockwilds, charcoal gray ash-heaps in the starry night; on her right, barren prairie that spread out uninterrupted…no. Something else. Something that sparkled, here and there, with light.

  Another half hour, she guessed, and she came to a stop in front of the great wooden doors of the fort. It was little more than a black hulk against the sky. She saw no watchers, no guardsmen at the gate. “Hallo the fort!” she shouted. “Is anyone there?” Had she not seen the lights above the wall, she might have imagined it empty, a shell populated by ghosts.

  “Who’s there?” someone shouted. A window slid open, shedding yellow light on the ground next to her.

  “I am an agent of the Crown and I need to speak to your commanding officer.” It was getting easier. And she wasn’t dead yet, or destroyed, from saying it. Oh, wait. Yes, she was.

  “Can you prove it?”

  She wanted to scream with frustration. Instead, she said, “Not from out here.”

  After a moment, the gate swung open with a hideous groan. She led her mounts inside.

  It was smaller than the Thorsten Pass fort, but looked bigger because it wasn’t all spread out flat. A couple of soldiers came forward to take the reins from her. She slid down, staggered, and said, “Please care for them. They’ve worked hard today.”

  The man who’d spoken to her—she recognized his voice—said, “So. We’re supposed to take your word for it that you’re a spy. You don’t look like a spy.”

  “If I looked like a spy, I wouldn’t be much good, would I?” She didn’t look like a spy. She looked, she was certain, like a madwoman, her hair wild, her clothes sweaty and filthy from road grime. “I must speak to your commanding officer.”

  “Don’t be a jackass, Sampson, if she’s a spy the commander needs to know,” said another soldier, taller and thinner than Sampson. “Wait here, miss.” He went up a flight of stairs leading to the top of the keep. Sampson glowered at her as if he expected her to pull out a sword or a gun and attack him. Telaine smiled sweetly at him, or tried to; the corners of her mouth felt tight, as if she had forgotten how.

  It took a few minutes for the soldier to reappear. “Come with me, miss,” he said, and led the way back to the stairs and into the keep. The crenellated walls and the walkway that ran along them looked uncomfortably like the fort at Thorsten Pass, but the keep was nothing like its counterpart. Where the Thorsten Pass keep had that tall, bleak, depressing central room, the Canden fort was warm and cheery. Its top floor was given over to a strategy room, lit by golden-white Devices and the bright flames burning in a red brick fireplace.

  Several soldiers in tidy green and brown uniforms stood in groups of two or three throughout the room. A few, consulting paperwork, sat at a table that would have been more at home in someone’s dining room. A surprisingly youthful man wearing major’s stripes stood up from the table and came to meet her. He looked as severe as the room looked welcoming.

  “You had better be able to back that claim up,” he said. “There are heavy penalties for impersonating an agent of the Crown.”

  “I know,” she replied. “I also know you have a protocol for verifying an agent’s status.” It had never been an issue for her, but she knew it existed. She hoped it was something she could pass.

  He pursed his lips and stared at her for a moment. He cracked the knuckles of his left hand, one at a time. “This fort doesn’t,” he said. “We should.” He cracked the knuckles of his right hand. Telaine thought her head might explode from tension.

  “What’s your name, major?”

  “Beckett.”

  “Major Beckett, let me explain the problem and you and I can figure out what to do about it. At this moment, a Ruskalder army is attacking the fort at Thorsten Pass. The fort is inadequately defended by a force one-third the strength it should be, as well as a number of untrained civilians. I need you to take your garrison up the pass to Thorsten and repulse the invaders. And I need you to do it now.”

  The major cracked his knuckles again. Telaine wanted to cut his hand off and feed it to him. “I don’t think you realize Tremontane is already on heightened alert due to a Ruskalder army massing on the northwestern border. Leaving my post could mean court-martial or execution. I’d need more than the word of a woman who claims to be an agent.”

  “Major Beckett, the Ruskalder invasion surely overrides whatever orders you currently have.”

  “I have no evidence you aren’t a traitor trying to pull me away from my post. For all I know that supposed invasion is going to come from the east instead.”

  Telaine closed her eyes and bit down on a handful of hasty words before they could escape her lips. “Suppose…suppose I could get you new orders,” she said. “Official orders from a source you trust. You’d have to obey those, right?”

  “I don’t see how you could,” Beckett said. He cracked his knuckles again.

  “You leave that to me.” Telaine rubbed her eyes. “Where’s your telecoder?”

  “It’s broken,” the major said.

  Telaine stared. “I’m sorry, did you say it’s broken?”

  “We’re expecting someone to repair it in two days. The dedicated receiver is still working, but the main Device is down.”

  She sank into a chair. “Just a minute,” she said when the major asked if she was all right. Broken. No tools. No experience. And over one hundred and seventy lives at the fort, not to mention the thousands more living in Barony Steepridge, depending on her to get this major off his ass and up the mountain.

  She looked up at him. “Show me your telecoder room.”

  The two telecoder Devices were in a smallish room on the ground floor of the keep. One, the major explained, could not send messages and was used only to receive official directives, including new orders. The other, a standard Device for sending and receiving, was cold. Every other telecoder she’d used had been slightly warmer than body temperature and gave off a quiet hum. This one was definitely broken.

  Thank heaven they didn’t send Sergeant Williams. She picked the Device up in both hands. It was surprisingly light. “Be careful with that,” Beckett said, putting out a restraining hand. She held the Device out of his reach.

  “Don’t worry, major, I know what I’m doing,” she lied. “Are you afraid I’ll sabotage it?”

  The major shrugged, lowering his hand. “It’s already broken; what more can you do? And, honestly—” he lowered his voice—“I believe you are who you say you are. But I can’t violate protocol on one woman’s say-so, agent or no.”

  I will not kill this man. I will not kill this man. Telaine turned the Device over, examining the case. Four small screws fastened the brass plate to its wooden base. “Do you have some loose change?” she asked the major, who gave her a strange look but fished out a handful of coins. She tried one after the other until she found one that fit the slot and then quickly removed the screws. The base popped away too easily, and she almost dropped it before setting it down carefully on the counter.

  The wooden base was hollow in the middle, and empty; the wires and gears that made up the Device were connected to the brass plate and fed up through a square hole into the arm of the telecoder. There were a lot of moving parts and a lot of copper and brass wires. Telaine gently eased the rest of the Device out of the arm. Like the earth mover, a thick copper wire the size of her pinky coupled the Device to the arm. She disconnected it and the whole thing slid neatly onto the counter in front of her.

  She repressed the urge to despair. She, Telaine North Hunter, had assembled an earth mover without any instructions, and it was far more complex than this thing. And how many months did it take you to do that? She began tracing connections, examining tiny gears, using her fingertips instead of her eyes to understand how this Device worked. Gear fed into gear; wires transmitted power from the motive force, which was a disc half an inch wide that, thank heaven, glowed strongly. She had scented no source anywhere near this place and had no time to search for one.

  It wa
s going to take forever. Or, worse, she would find the problem immediately and it would be something impossible for her to fix. She closed her eyes to shut out distractions, wishing she could shut out her sense of the minutes slipping by. Had battle been joined yet? Was Ben still alive? She paused in her exploration and waited for her fingers to stop shaking. Stay focused. There’s nothing you can do for him now but this.

  There. A brass gear no bigger than her thumbnail had slipped a fraction of an inch out of place. She moved it, tapped on it to seat it, continued checking the Device in case there was more than one problem. Another slipped gear, and another. What had they done to this Device, shaken it? None of the parts seemed bent or misaligned except those tiny gears; none of the wires were broken.

  A thread of hope wound its way into her heart. Surely that had taken mere minutes and not the hours her body told her it had been. She slid her fingers inside the arm and connected the thick wire. Gears moved, the motive force glowed stronger, and she felt the hum through her fingers. She breathed out in relief.

  More quickly now, she reassembled the Device, taking great care to seat it into its wooden base without dislodging any more pieces. The major seemed awed. “Is this something all agents learn to do?” he asked.

  She smiled. “No, but maybe they should.” She reached for the interlocking wheels to set the code for the ultra-secret Device at the palace, then stopped. “Major, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to send some messages. After that, your receiving Device is going to deliver a message. Don’t tell me what its transmission code is. I don’t want you saying I somehow found a way to send it a message from this Device. But I have to ask you to back off now. The Device I’m going to communicate with is for agents only and I honestly don’t know what they’d do to you if you knew the code.”