Page 26 of Connor and the Dragons

Connor frowned. “Sex parties?”

“Oh yes, they are detailed on page 147 of that diary. I’ve read them six times,” I said. “For research purposes. Don’t want to miss a single detail.”

Connor massaged his forehead like I was a trial sent to test him. Or perhaps the forehead massage was what Connor did when he was trying to hold himself back from being overcome by lust.

Oh yes, that explanation was way better, because he had massaged his forehead at least six times today.

Kessrin was no help. He merely watched Connor’s hands for a long moment, went faintly pink, and looked back down at his list.

“There is also material,” he said, in his most administrative voice, “on the Order’s broader predilections. Sky and Moerrven documented a number of practices. Initiations involving restraint. Public discipline as ceremony. Sponsors who present their candidates,” he turned a page, perfectly steady, “collared.”

“Collared,” Connor repeated, and this time his eyes darted to me.

“Yes, please,” I said, in case he was worried about my consent.

“Collared,” Kessrin confirmed, pink to the ears now, reading determinedly onward, and I lay there in my cage in the wreckage of a perfectly ordinary briefing and got hornier, which I had not believed the situation allowed.

Sky and Moerrven arrived at dusk with dinner and salvation, in that order. The dinner was vegetable hand pies from the shop Moerrven liked, still warm through the paper, and the salvation was a single sheet of names.

“Your list,” Sky said, presenting it to Connor with both hands. “Every family anyone links to the Order, in every text and newspaper we read. Turns out a wealthy guy with a submissive is quite likely to be a wizard. A middle-class person with a submissive is just kinky and into cosplay.”

“You’re a hero,” Connor said, already reading.

“Moerrven did most of the reading. He complained the entire time,” Sky said, settling onto the bench. “So I developed a system of rewards.”

“Could you tell me a little about those rewards?” I asked, leaning in.

Connor snorted. “I don’t think I need that level of detail into my little brother’s sex life, thanks, Oallian.”

I turned to Moerrven instead. “Do you have your latest book with you? I own all of the others. Several of them are only a little singed.”

“It is not finished,” Moerrven said.

“I could read what you have.”

“You could not.”

Sky and Moerrven had also worked out who the Order recruited. It took two kinds of people, the naturally gifted from anywhere in the country, farm boys and dock girls with talent for magic, and the old families, where great magic was inherited along with the name. The first kind helped our cover. Nobody blinked at a young wizard from Easterly. He just had to jump through more hoops to be seen.

“The ciphers are competently made,” Moerrven said, in the tone of a man conceding a point to an enemy author. “I dislike them.”

I ate my third hand pie, shifted in my chair, and tried discreetly to adjust the leather bands around my cock, wondering if there was something available that could serve the same purpose while remaining more comfortable. Connor had gone quiet over the list. He had a pencil out, and he was marking it.

“Three of these are quite long,” he said, mostly to himself. “Ten or eleven letters, enough to make a pattern.” The pencil touched down three times. “Silvermarsh. Netherfold. Harrowgate. If any family name is going to surface in those ledgers, it’s the old keeping families, and if I can find one of these even once, the whole substitution opens.”

“How does that work?” Kessrin asked, leaning in, bright-eyed, and there it was again, the lean, the color. “Finding one word. How can one word open a language?”

Connor warmed up and showed off his ciphers the way I would show a man my hoard. The general in his world who shifted every letter three steps and ruled an empire on it. The soldiers who wound a leather strip around a stick and wrote along it, so the message only made sense on a stick of the same width. The ancient scribes who swapped their alphabet end for end. A cipher of stacked alphabets, built by a bored diplomat, that stood unbroken for three hundred years. “My research back home follows the strategies of historical people who didn’t want to be read.”

“And they were all broken eventually,” Kessrin said. “By people like you.”

“By people like me.” Connor smiled at him, and Kessrin looked down at his tea. “Sometimes too late to matter. And sometimes, the ciphers weren’t as good as they thought. There was a queen once, imprisoned by her rival. She ran her whole rescue by coded letter and trusted the cipher completely. Her rival’s man had been reading every word for months, and they let the letters run until she wrote something worth dying for. Then they executed her.”

The table went quiet. Kessrin had gone very still, the stillness he did instead of frost when there were witnesses, and I watched him take that story somewhere private, and I knew where, because there was exactly one queen in his life.

“Cheerful,” Sky said. “Any of them use mirrors? Since these guys are so obsessed?”

“One, kind of.” Connor waved a pie in a dismissive circle. “There was a genius who filled entire notebooks in mirror writing. Every line backwards. Challenging to read unless you held them up to a glass. It wasn’t even a cipher really, though, because it was quite easy to recognize and unlock.”