“Well, clearly I am no longer the favorite teacher.” He fetches a currycomb from a rack, then rubs it into Mercy’s fur, just below her mane. “How fares my brother?”
Prince Rhen. Grey asks me this every time I return, and the weight in his voice is always the same. Sometimes I wonder if it’s about Rhen himself, because Grey and Rhen have a long, complicated, dark history that nearly broke them both—and nearly tore apart each country in the process. Grey seems to have moved past the curse that tormented them, but Rhen still wears the weight of his past like a cloak he can’t shrug off.
But sometimes I wonder if this question is aboutme, as if the king worries that sending me to Ironrose Castle is asking more of me than he should.
Prince Rhen once tortured us both for a secret we kept.
Thinking about that moment always makes me feel weak, especially in front of Grey, so I lean into the currycomb and answer. “Prince Rhen is busy,” I say. “When I first arrived, he’d received word that a small group from Valkins Valley had been shipping grain through the harbor at Silvermoon, but messages were found buried inside the sacks.” It was a brilliant hiding place, because none of the messages would have been discovered if a sack hadn’t been caught by a rusty nail and torn open. “At first the messages seemed ridiculous—nothing worth hiding.”
Grey glances up. “What do you mean?”
“Like …Mama fed the goats today. Papa didn’t help her.”
Grey frowns.
“Exactly,” I say. “I don’t think anyone would have paid any attention, but one of the dockworkers was in the marketplace talking about these mysterious letters in the grain sacks, and the Grand Marshal’s guards overheard and demanded to see them. They hadn’t kept all of them, but they had a new shipment waiting to go south on a ship, so they tore them all open—and found dozens of ridiculous messages.”
I crouch to rub the mud from Mercy’s fetlocks. “Marshal Blackcomb turned the messages over to Rhen, and you know how he loves a good puzzle. Well, one of the letters mentioned how ‘Papa’ couldn’t see straight, which made Rhen wonder if it was a reference tohim, what with his missing eye and all, so he went back through the messages and began to determine a code. ‘Mama’ was Harper, and ‘feeding the goats’ seemed to indicate a trip she’d taken to Hutchins Forge, because of the livestock market, and Rhen hadn’t accompanied her—”
“So they were tracking Rhen and Harper’s movements.”
“Not just theirs,” I say. “Yours and Lia Mara’s, too. It took Rhen a while to figure it out, because you’reFatherandMother, so for a while he thought it was interchangeable, but then they mentioned someone namedNyssa—”
“Sinna.” His eyes flash to mine, and there’s no questioning the sudden flare of fury and fear in his tone.
“Yes,” I say. “We think so.”
“Do you have these letters?”
“Yes. Some.” I’ve already begun unbuckling the breastplate. “But there have been no threats to the princess. No threats to any of you, really. The vast majority of the letters are simply reports going back and forth between Syhl Shallow and Emberfall, tracking where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”
I jerk free of the armor and unroll the leather that keeps their messages safe. “There’s one line that appears several times, togather your best silver, which we think could be an instruction to pool funds for another attack. But we’re not sure. I was going to return at once, but Rhen felt it would be better to check shipments going through other towns, to see if we could find any true threats. But obviously, that’s a lot of ground to cover.”
Grey scans the first note in the pile, but looks back at me. “And did he find anything?”
“No. Nothing relating to the messages. Any true threats against the Crown seemed to be lone dissenters who were quickly captured and dealt with. But we did discover that there are small groups of Truthbringers that seem to be growing in number throughout most of the larger cities in Emberfall. He suspects that for now, these messages may be an attempt to set up some kind of … collaboration. Harper called it a ‘whisper network.’ They’re seeing what messages get through, and what messages are stopped.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and when he speaks, there’s a tone of resignation in his voice. “So they can plan something bigger.”
He’s thinking of the Uprising. I remember the rush of magic that swept through the palace, the way so many bodies dropped where they stood.
I also remember the way Sinna screamed when a dozen armed men burst into the nursery and killed her nanny in an attempt to capture the “magical princess.”
My voice is equally resigned. “Possibly.”
He flips to the next message in the pile, then frowns. Then the third. He sighs and folds them back up in the leather. “I shouldn’t have troubled you with this now, Tycho.”
“It’s no trouble. I knew you’d be eager to hear. I would have been earlier, but Mercy threw a shoe just after we passed the border.” I pause. “In that stack, you’ll find that Rhen wrote you a letter detailing everything he thinks you should do.”
“Of course he did.” Grey pauses. “We’ll have to search shipments here, too. I don’t like the idea that messages could be passed right under our noses. Anything else?”
“No.” I untie Mercy to lead her to a stall. “Maybe.”
“Tell me.”
I turn the mare loose in a stall and latch the gate. She immediately thrusts her face into a pile of hay. “I stopped in Briarlock to get a fresh shoe for Mercy. While I was there, I saw Lord Alek.”
Grey frowns. “Did he say what he was doing there?”
