The major’s eyes widened, and he stepped all the way back to the door. Telaine judged that was far enough, and swiftly set the interlocking wheels to the correct settings and sent the “clear all” signal. Then, with a shaky hand, she tapped out a code she’d never used before: agent in distress, immediate response required.
It took less than thirty seconds for her to receive a response, but it felt like forever. IDENTIFY AGENT AND CODE.
Damn it. Of course they’d want to verify her identity, but wasn’t her own name good enough for them? AGENT (she had to think hard to remember her number) 15623 CODE WINTER FLOWER. Telaine, talaina, the winter flower that grew along the banks of the Snow River in Ruskald. She’d thought using it was so clever, when she was fifteen.
RESPONSE PHRASE WINTER FLOWER
That was harder. It was…what? Right. SUMMERTREE BLOOMS.
Nearly a minute passed. The room was silent except for the sound of her pulse throbbing in her ears, faster and louder than it probably should be. Suppose she’d gotten it wrong? Was there a space between summer and tree? No, her fifteen-year-old self thought it would be, again, clever.
NATURE OF EMERGENCY AGENT HUNTER?
She’d been holding her breath again. RUSKALDER INVASION AT THORSTEN PASS IN PROGRESS REPEAT INVASION IN PROGRESS. FORT IS INSUFFICIENTLY DEFENDED. REQUEST SEND NEW ORDERS FORT CANDEN MAJOR BECKETT. GARRISON TO PROCEED THORSTEN PASS AID DEFENDERS.
She tried to imagine the face of whoever was on duty right then. Her hand shook again as soon as she released the thumbplate. She turned to Major Beckett. “Soon, now,” she said. He still looked afraid. Pity the competent Major Anselm hadn’t been here instead. No, better that she was at Thorsten Keep. Better for everyone there, probably.
The key began chattering again.
REQUEST RECEIVER CODE FORT CANDEN
She cursed inwardly. CANNOT PROVIDE CODE. KNOW YOU CAN LOOK IT UP SOMEWHERE.
The key went silent. Telaine put her elbows on the counter, linked her fingers together and leaned her forehead on her joined fists. She was afraid to look at her watch again. They might have been in battle for four or five hours by now. Maybe they were lucky and the Ruskalder hadn’t shown up until after dark. Would they attack in the dark? Wasn’t that a bad idea, military-wise?
What if the military refused to give the agent in the palace the code? What if that agent had to argue with them the way she’d wrestled with Major Beckett? Maybe she should tell the man who she was. Would he respond more favorably to an order from the King’s niece? No, she might still be able to keep Telaine North Hunter’s name from being attached to this fiasco, as if she could go back to being the Princess after this.
Her eyes were dry and aching, her legs hurt from riding so many hours after…good heaven, it must have been nine months since she’d ridden anything except the back of Morgan’s horse.
The key began chattering again. She lifted her head and saw the telecoder wasn’t moving. Panic struck her exhausted mind. She hadn’t fixed it completely; the Device was receiving messages but not recording them, it was rattling free inside its case, Ben would die and so would everyone else because of her mistakes.
No, that’s ridiculous, she told herself, scrubbed the tiredness out of her eyes, and thought to look at the other telecoder. It was tapping away like a merry little woodpecker, to Telaine’s eyes as excited about its message as she was anxious.
She stared at it, longing to read the tape but afraid of what the major might think if she did. He was wasted in his current position; he should be guarding the royal family, as paranoid as he was. It wasn’t a complimentary thought.
The major took the tape in his hands and read off the message, moving his lips as he did so. “It appears we’re going up the mountain, agent,” he said. The telecoder fell silent, and he tore off the tape and left the room. After an uncomprehending moment, Telaine followed him.
“Major Beckett, would you mind—” she said, and he glanced over his shoulder at her but didn’t stop walking. “For my own peace of mind, could you tell me what happens next?”
They were once again in the strategy room. “I—excuse me,” Beckett said, and waved a couple of men with captain’s stripes to him. He handed one of them the telecode tape. “We’re moving out in one hour. Pass the word. And one of you send telecodes to Forts Blackrock and Dunstan, get them moving along after us. Agent, what’s the supply situation at Thorsten?”
Telaine blinked. “Ah—oh, it’s got enough weapons to outfit an army, black powder rifles, six-shot rifle Devices, swords, probably other weapons as well. Lots of food and blankets. Some armor.”
“Tell the men we’re marching light. We’ll take advantage of the fort’s supplies. You’d better be right about that,” Beckett said, rounding on her.
She nodded. “I…inspected the supplies myself.”
“Did you? I suppose they have you agents do all sorts of things,” Beckett said.
He made as if to leave the strategy room. Telaine stepped in front of him. “Please, major,” she said, “I have friends defending the fort. My cousin is there. What will happen now?”
Beckett looked down at her. “You heard me say we’d march out in an hour,” he said. “It will take us perhaps sixteen hours to reach the foot of the mountain and another five or six to navigate the pass. We can’t travel at full speed or we won’t be any good to anyone once we get there. It’s a risk, trading weaponry for speed, but if we can’t get there before they’re overrun…” Beckett cracked his knuckles again. “At any rate, we’ll be there in less than a day.
A day. It sounded like forever. “Major Anselm thought they could hold out for a while,” Telaine said. Though she hadn’t said what “a while” was.
The major’s face brightened. “Connie Anselm? She’s one of the best military commanders in Tremontane. Your friends are lucky to have her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she made general before I do.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Let us handle this. You look like you’ve run yourself ragged.”
She nodded. She was exhausted now. Unfortunately, she had one more thing to do before she could rest. Telaine went back to the telecoder room—she should not have left it set to the palace code—and saw a new message had come through for her.
FURTHER ASSISTANCE NEEDED AGENT HUNTER?
She tapped out, wearily, MISSION COMPLETE. REQUEST NEW INSTRUCTIONS.
The reply took several minutes, but when it came, it was only two words:
COME HOME.
Joy filled her before she realized they meant Aurilien.
Finally, she wept.
SPRING
Chapter Thirty
She slept, fitfully, in some soldier’s abandoned bunk after the garrison had moved out. They’d left a handful of soldiers behind, none of whom knew what to do with the strange woman who’d blown in like a tornado and left everything scattered behind her. So they left her alone, which was fine by Telaine.
In the morning, she forced herself to eat something she scrounged out of the mess hall and brushed her hair and her clothes. The horses had been well cared for, and she saddled up and led her spare mounts back down the road to Ellismere. She felt as if she were riding backwards, her long shadow shrinking and disappearing beneath her feet. The horses didn’t complain when she switched mounts, although they were traveling so slowly she might as well not have bothered.
She reached Ellismere in the early afternoon. Rather than returning immediately to the Hitching Station, she sent a telecode to her bank in Aurilien requesting a banker’s draft for fifteen hundred guilders, which she cashed and took payment in notes and some coin. Then she went back to the Hitching Station and forced Josiah Stakely to take five hundred guilders and Morgan’s horse as recompense for helping her without question.
She was not in a mood to argue, and Stakely could tell, because his only resistance was pressing a large mug of beer on her and patting her shoulder in sympathy. She avoided the bar mirror, unwilling to see what it was about her
he thought deserving of sympathy.
After the drink, she wandered the streets of Ellismere until she found a shop selling women’s clothes. This time she couldn’t avoid seeing her reflection: she was dirty and unkempt and not at all the kind of woman this store would serve.
She pushed open the door and, before any of the shop assistants could say anything, slammed down a handful of notes on the counter and said, “I plan to spend a lot of money in this store, and I suggest one of you helps me do it.”
No one made a single comment on her appearance.
She bought three spring dresses, a bonnet, a bolero jacket, a nightgown, underwear, three pairs of gloves, several pairs of sheer stockings, and two pairs of high-heeled boots. She did not buy any trousers. The so-helpful shop assistants wrapped up her purchases so she could carry them, after which she went to the most expensive hotel in Ellismere.
Telaine headed off the manager’s bustling protest about her appearance by demanding a private room with bath in her plummiest royal accent and with a superior sneer. The man, recognizing the eccentricities of the very wealthy, bowed her into a corner suite with no comment. She tipped him ten guilders to be sure.
She bathed and washed her hair without thinking about how wonderful indoor plumbing was. She dressed without admiring her reflection in the full-length, un-cracked mirror. She looked at her dirty shirt and trousers, then kicked them hard into a corner of the room. It was too hard to put her hair up by herself, so she braided it and went to the dining room for supper, where she ate alone.
After supper she went out and bought a suitcase, then returned to her room and packed her new clothes into it. She changed into her nightgown after the sun set and climbed into the beautiful bed with two mattresses, several fluffy pillows, and a down comforter; the early spring nights were chilly. She did not remember dreaming.
In the morning, Telaine went to the coaching station where she could begin the first leg of her journey to Aurilien. The coach yard, noisy and bustling, made her nerves jangle. The idea of traveling with others, people who would want to chat and tell stories and ask about her life, nauseated her. After making some inquiries, she found a coach making a direct run to Aurilien and bought all its fares for the entire journey. She settled into the corner of the coach and watched Ellismere fade into the distance.
The newspapers began reporting on the great victory at Thorsten Pass two days into her journey. Telaine bought a paper and glanced over some of the stories long enough to know that the Canden garrison had arrived in time to push the Ruskalder back and there had been heavy losses. The paper didn’t print the names of the dead. She was grateful for that. She threw the paper away and didn’t buy any others.
On Springtide, two days later, the coach plodded down Broad Street and turned sedately onto Queen’s Way Road, affably moving past other traffic and giving way to cross-traffic. It drove through the gates of the palace, the horses ambling along the wide curving driveway, until it reached the palace steps and the grand front entryway. The coachman hopped down and opened the door to give his eccentric passenger a hand down.
Telaine accepted her suitcase from the coachman’s hand, tipped him the last of her money, and climbed the long stairs to the grand front door. No one paid any attention to her as she went through the halls and up the stairs, some gentrywoman from the country come to take care of business in the palace or to participate in that evening’s Spring Ball. Not that she had a gown—good heaven, they wouldn’t expect her to attend, would they? The idea of dancing and laughing and flirting sickened her.
The guards at the door to the east wing actually stopped her. Am I that changed, then, that people can see it? She removed her bonnet and said, “Ensign Worth, don’t you remember me?”
His bland guardsman’s face went from confusion to recognition with the briefest stop at horror. “Your Highness!” he said. “I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t worry about it, Ensign. May I enter?”
The young man bowed nervously and opened the door for her.
Once inside, she didn’t know what to do next. It was as if a Device had been making her arms and legs move, propelling her all this way and was now sapped of its energy, its motive force spent. She set her suitcase down and walked into the drawing room.
Julia sat with her back to the door. She was making cooing sounds and bouncing a baby on her knee, making the child giggle. Telaine stopped and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. Of course. Julia would have had her baby a few weeks before Wintersmeet. Telaine didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. She’d missed so much. She walked forward, unable to think of anything to say. Julia heard her footsteps and turned around, her face so cheerful it made Telaine’s heart ache. Her cheerful look faded to astonishment. She lifted the baby into her arms and stood, coming around the end of the sofa. “Telaine?” she said softly. And then, with feeling, “Telaine!”
Telaine smiled and held out her arms. “I’m so sorry it took me this long to come home,” she said, tears beginning to fall. “I wish I’d never left.”
***
Elizabeth d’Arden had redecorated her townhouse since Telaine had been there last, and now it was full to the brim with backless Eskandelic couches in white and green and a hundred tiny tables at varying heights above the floor. Telaine sipped her tea and smiled at something one of the women, whose name she’d forgotten, said. Time was she’d have remembered every one of the women Elizabeth had introduced to her. Time was she’d have cared.
“You’re the talk of Aurilien, your Highness,” Stella Murchison said, laying a confiding hand on Telaine’s arm. “I can’t believe you spent the whole winter in a town practically on the edge of nowhere! Wasn’t it too, too awful?”
Telaine giggled. It sounded forced, but then, she was out of practice. “It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “I do think it was good for my soul, living like a commoner. But did you know most of them still use outhouses? And I had to wash my hair in a sink.”
Stella gasped in theatrical horror. “I could never do that,” she declared.
“But that’s not what I want to hear about,” Elizabeth d’Arden said. “Tell us about bringing the garrison to Thorsten Pass.”
“Oh, you don’t want to hear that story again,” Telaine said. I don’t want to tell that story again, ever, she thought. She shouldn’t have come to Elizabeth’s tea party, but she still had an image to maintain.
There had been any number of rumors about where she’d been all those months, and she’d chosen to confirm the one that came nearest the truth, that she’d been pretending to be a commoner in a distant frontier town. She knew most people, when presented with an exciting yet plausible story, tend not to dig for a different truth, and she hoped the truth about her being an agent of the Crown wouldn’t come out. The people who’d been present for her denunciation of the Baron wouldn’t be leaving Longbourne, and the soldiers at Fort Canden didn’t know her as anything but an anonymous agent.
But it was a foolish hope. It was only a matter of weeks, if not days, before the tale would spread.
“Well, all right,” she said in reply to the general clamor that yes, they did want to hear the story again. “Obviously I’m no fighter, and the major needed someone to fetch the garrison, so I volunteered. I think it was tremendously daring of me, don’t you? I rode for hours, all the while knowing our brave men and women were fighting to keep our country safe—oh, but that means I did, too! And I’m so happy we won.”
She sipped her tea, then exclaimed, “Oh, Dorothea, I love your dress! I insist you tell me who your couturier is—I swear I won’t have one made exactly like it!”
“Well, I think you were generous,” Elizabeth said. “It’s not as if those villagers are our kind of people. I imagine they just stood around while the real soldiers fought.”
Telaine indulged a brief vision of launching herself at the woman, shrieking and clawing her eyes out. “I don’t know anything more than that the defense was successful,”
she said. “Would you pass me one of those sandwiches? They’re simply divine.”
She didn’t care for the sandwiches, which were dry; they were just a good way to keep her mouth full so she would have an excuse not to speak. She’d always known the Princess’s acquaintances were shallow, but she’d never realized they were thoughtless and cruel as well.
She wished with all her heart Uncle would return from the front so she could resign her commission and…what? She couldn’t simply stop being the Princess; it would destroy nine years of concealing her true identity so she could spy for the Crown. But being trapped in this guise for the rest of her life…
She smiled brightly at something Stella said and ate another sandwich. Her uncle would have to have a solution. The alternative was too awful to contemplate.
When the party was finally over, Telaine went back to the palace, passed through her ghastly sitting room with no more than a small shudder, and wearily began to undress before she remembered she should have called her maid to help her. She put on a simpler, more comfortable gown, then stood for a moment staring at her vanity table.
Finally she reached out and opened the drawer, pulled out the false top and looked at her Deviser’s gear. It seemed to belong to someone else. She needed to get rid of it. She couldn’t bear to get rid of it. She dropped the tray back into the drawer and slammed it shut. She didn’t have to look at it. Perhaps in a week, or a month, she’d be ready to give everything away. Someone else would appreciate it.
***
The Waxwold Theater was unnaturally stuffy, hot and smelling of ozone from the light Devices spotlighting the stage. It made Telaine’s skin itch, as if she could rub against her velvet-upholstered chair and shed it like a snake. That might make her cooler.
She scooted the chair back from the edge of the royal box. It wasn’t as if it were that high above the floor of the theater, and she wasn’t afraid of heights in any case, but she felt everyone was watching her. Maybe it was just that Clarence Darbeneau’s latest play was flat and dull, and she wasn’t watching it. Or maybe she’d gotten used to relative anonymity over the last nine months. She hated the idea of being stared at.
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