Agent of the Crown (44 page)

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.

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.”