Agent of the Crown (5 page)

She sent the “clear all” signal, four
distinct long taps with the key, and waited for the return signal
that meant she was clear to send her message. While she waited, she
took a scrap of paper, folded it to the size of a copper, and
wedged it between the duplicate key and its tape. She didn’t want
any record of this conversation.

She’d worked out the coded message late last
night, using a code known only to herself, Posy, and her uncle.
Telaine was aware she was being paranoid, but the way Harroden had
looked at her—that he suspected her at all, the frivolous
socialite—left her inclined to paranoia.

HAVE DOCUMENTS. STEEPRIDGE CONSPIRING WITH
HARRODEN. DETAILS UNKNOWN. MAY HAVE BEEN COMPROMISED. REQUEST
INSTRUCTIONS.

She leaned back in her seat and flailed to
catch her balance when she remembered it was a stool with no back.
The telecoder began tapping out the return message.

MISSION COMPROMISED OR PERSON
COMPROMISED?

She thought for a moment, then tapped out a
quick response: UNSURE. GOING ON LONG TRIP AS PRECAUTION. This
development meant her uncle couldn’t act immediately on Harroden’s
involvement with the Veriboldan smugglers, despite now having
documentary evidence. He wanted the Baron’s head even more than he
wanted Harroden’s.

Telaine leaned forward and put her elbows on
the table. Where should she go? A resort on the Eskandel coast,
that sounded like a relaxing way to spend a few weeks. Pity she had
to go as the Princess, but bathing in the warm ocean currents could
make up for wearing her public persona for a few more weeks.

There went the telecoder again. Telaine took
up the tape and decoded the message as it arrived. NEGATE.
REASSIGNED TO STEEPRIDGE. INVESTIGATE BARON AND REPORT. FIND HOLD
HE HAS ON CHADWICK AND CONFIRM ITEMS BEING SMUGGLED. DO NOT SAY
THIS IS NOT THE JOB I WAS TRAINED FOR. YOU ARE ONLY OPTION AT THIS
TIME AND WILL GET YOU OUT OF SIGHT. SEND DOCUMENTS BY DEAD
DROP.

Telaine gripped the tape in nerveless hands.
A field assignment. Never mind her uncle’s instructions, this
genuinely was not anything she was trained for. How was
she
supposed to learn anything about the Baron? She obviously couldn’t
go as the Princess. Why under heaven couldn’t they send someone
else? What would Julia think? She read the message over again, but
its contents hadn’t changed.

With a shaking hand, she tapped out PLEASE
CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE NOT OUT OF YOUR ROYAL MIND. This had to be a
mistake.

Almost immediately the reply came. Uncle was
clearly expecting her reaction. CONFIRMED THAT YOU ARE
DISRESPECTFUL GIRL. GO TO LONGBOURNE AND FIND MISTRESS WEAVER. SHE
WILL PROVIDE ROOM AND INTRODUCTION TO TOWN. YOU WILL BE HER NIECE.
FIND A WAY TO ACCESS BARONS HOME. SEND REPORTS THROUGH CODED
MESSAGE ELLISMERE TELECODER.

Ellismere was a city in Barony Silverfield,
in the foothills of the Rockwild Ridge and Mount Ehuren. Wherever
Longbourne was, it didn’t even have a telecoder. Lovely. She was
being sent to the back of beyond, to find a way into the home of a
dangerous man, to learn what kind of crime he was committing with
Count Harroden and how he was able to manipulate someone ranked
higher politically than he. And she was supposed to do all this
with no support other than a local woman who didn’t even know her.
It was one thing being the Princess. It was quite another to
pretend to be…what? A peasant? A laborer? She had no idea what life
was like on the frontier.

MUST TELL JULIA SOMETHING, she tapped out.
Maybe this would change Uncle’s mind; Julia would never believe
Telaine had enough unbreakable social obligations to keep her away
when Julia needed her so badly.

It took a while for the response to come, but
it didn’t make Telaine feel better: FAKE ILLNESS TWO DAYS DIAGNOSIS
LUNG FEVER GO SOUTH TO RECUPERATE YES PEOPLE GET LUNG FEVER IN
SUMMER AND HISTORY MAKES IT BELIEVABLE. STOP LOOKING FOR EXCUSES
AND GET TO WORK.

She stared at the tape for a full minute,
then tore the tape off and removed the folded paper from the
duplicate key, spun the Device’s wheels a few times to clear the
private code, and tucked the tape into her reticule. History
indeed. Lung fever had killed her mother and was extremely
communicable; Julia wouldn’t challenge her and risk exposing
herself and her unborn child to the disease. The logic didn’t make
Telaine feel any less sick at lying to her cousin.

She got into her patiently waiting coach and
handed the tape to Posy, who read it without comment as the coach
rattled off down the street. “What do you think?” she asked when
Posy finally lowered it to her lap.

“I don’t like it. I can’t go with you.”

“Why not?”

“Longbourne’s a small town, not much more
than a village. It’ll look funny if you come with a maid.”

“Couldn’t we be traveling companions?”
Telaine pleaded. Posy had been her partner and companion for eight
years. Telaine had never gone on an assignment without her.

Posy shook her head. “Think straight. To make
this work, you got to look like you’re going one way when you’re
really going somewhere else. I’ve got to be your double.”

Telaine looked Posy up and down, skeptically.
“You’ve got four inches on me and I weigh at least ten pounds more
than you do.”

“Not really a double. It’ll be hard, but we
can figure it out. I’ll go south to Eskandel the way you planned
and you’ll sneak north to Barony Steepridge.”

“But I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“Stop whining,” Posy said, and Telaine,
startled, shut her mouth. “If you don’t know enough after eight
years to make this work, then I sure failed. You can work a crowd,
you can make people talk, you can move quiet and pick locks—least I
hope so, don’t know when you practiced last—”

“I did all right last night!”

“There you go, then. You’re smart and you
figure stuff out fast. All you need is a cover and a way to get the
Baron’s attention, and you’ve got those already.”

“What do you mean?”

Posy smiled wickedly. “You’re too young to
remember Harstow at court. He’s obsessed with Devices. He was never
happy that he couldn’t build ’em. If a Deviser shows up on his
doorstep, well, you might have to beat him off with a stick.”

“And my identity?” It came to Telaine in a
heartbeat. “Everyone knows who Princess Telaine North Hunter is,”
she breathed. “But almost no one has ever heard of Lainie
Bricker.”

Telaine stepped
off the coach and took in a deep breath of warm, fragrant air.
Cranky Mister Dalton had insisted on traveling with the windows up,
no matter how hot and smelly that made the interior of the coach.
Now Telaine reveled in the scents of hot bread and flowers from the
bakery and florist across from the coaching yard.

Ellismere was a pretty place, not what she’d
expected of the frontier. For one thing, it was nearly the size of
Ravensholm, though its buildings were planed lumber instead of
stone and the roofs steeper and shingled with slate. Most of the
buildings were half-framed and painted in lovely muted colors, not
drab white. She looked down the street at the town hall, which
looked like a tiny fortress except for the pansies growing in beds
all along its walls. It was unexpectedly civilized. Maybe
Longbourne wouldn’t be as rustic as she feared.

She set down her bag outside the coaching
ticket office. “Excuse me,” she said to the woman behind the
counter, “I’m going up to Longbourne. Can you tell me where to find
the coach?”

“No coach,” the woman said, smiling
pleasantly in a way that blunted the sting of her curt words.
“There’s a wagon leaves from the hitching station every other day
around noon. You’re in luck, this is one of those days. But you’d
better not dawdle.”

“Where is it?”

The woman leaned out of the window and
pointed up the street. “Go that way, then turn left at the sign of
the blue owl and straight on to the end of the road. It’s on the
right.”

“Thanks. How about the telecoder office?”

“That’s on the route. You’ll see the
sign.”

Telaine nodded and shouldered her bag,
heading off the way the woman had indicated. People smiled and
nodded at her as she walked. She smiled back, feeling the
expression come naturally. She hadn’t felt much like smiling the
whole trip. She’d thought she was prepared to be a nobody, but the
first night they’d stopped at an inn where no one offered her the
best room in the house and she’d actually been angry about it.
She’d had to remind herself, alone in her tiny room with the
none-too-clean bed, that Lainie Bricker would be grateful to have a
room to herself, but it didn’t keep her from shedding a few
self-pitying tears she was embarrassed about the next morning.

Now she breathed in the clean, fresh air and
smiled more widely. She no longer hesitated when someone called her
by her new name, she’d become accustomed to the coarse fare most
places along the coaching route served, her boots didn’t chafe as
much as she’d feared, and braiding her hair every morning had
become second nature. This assignment wasn’t going to be so
terrible.

It turned out the hitching station was an inn
and stable actually called the Hitching Station. It stood three
stories tall, freshly painted in pale green with white trim that
reminded Telaine of the east wing dining room. Delicious aromas of
roast beef wafted from the open door, but Telaine bypassed it and
went around to the stable yard, scuffing up dust as she went. With
luck, the wagon would still be there; she was already a day later
than Uncle had promised the mysterious Mistress Weaver, and another
day’s delay…well, it wouldn’t make much difference, but Telaine
wanted to make a good impression. Punctuality would help.

The stable yard fit neatly into an L formed
by the back of the inn and the stables perpendicular to it. It
seemed unusually quiet to Telaine, but she was used to the bustle
of the palace stables, people and carriages coming and going at all
hours. An old wagon, splintered and worn, that sagged dangerously
at the rear stood near the center of the yard. Beyond the wagon, a
couple of enormous horses tethered to a waist-high rail fence nosed
the ground, looking for something to eat. The lean woman brushing
one of the animals paid no attention to Telaine as she
approached.

“Excuse me,” Telaine said. “I was told this
is where I can get the wagon to Longbourne.”

The woman turned her head away from Telaine
and the horses and spat. “This is it,” she said, nodding at the
broken-down contraption.

“Oh. Is it…leaving soon?” It looked as if
nothing could induce it to move.

The woman shrugged. “Be leaving soon’s Abel
gets his ass off that bar stool. Takes him a while to recover from
the trip down mountain.” She spat again and resumed grooming the
horse.

“Oh,” Telaine repeated. “Is that…will he take
long?”

“No idea,” the woman said.

Telaine looked into the wagon. It was
half-full of boxes and bags and wrapped parcels. A satchel bearing
the emblem of the Royal Mail lay on the wagon’s seat where anyone
could walk off with it. As she was trying to decide where to put
her own bag, a couple of men came around the corner. One, a tall,
middle-aged man with a blond beard and thin, elastic arms that
seemed only loosely connected to his body, had his hands on the
second man’s shoulders, steering him around unseen obstacles.

The second man was at least forty years older
than his guide and as lean as if he’d been dried in the sun for a
week. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved for two days, and what was
left of his white hair stuck out in all directions.

“Edith, get the horses hitched, Abel’s ready
to go,” the middle-aged man said. He glanced at Telaine and said,
“Can I help you with something, miss?”

“I’m going up to Longbourne,” Telaine said.
“Where do I pay my fare?”

“No charge,” the man said. “Longbourne pays
Abel here a flat fee no matter what he hauls. You got family up
mountain?”

“Going to stay with my aunt, Mistress Weaver.
I’m a Deviser.” She was in the habit now of adding that little
piece of information every time she introduced herself. It didn’t
hurt to spread the word, even among people who weren’t likely to
tell the Baron, and it gave her a warm feeling to identify herself
that way.

“Mistress Weaver, huh? Good luck with that.
She’s a tough lady. But you didn’t hear it from me. She’d never let
me forget I said it.” He winked and extended his hand. “Josiah
Stakely, miss.”

“Lainie Bricker.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Bricker. Abel, Miss
Bricker’s going up with you. You want to make room on the
seat?”

Abel, who’d climbed onto the wagon, squinted
down at her. “You want to go up?” he said, sounding as if that were
the strangest thing he’d ever heard of.

“I’m Lainie Bricker,” she said. “I’m a
Deviser. Going up to stay with Mistress Weaver. She’s my aunt.”

Abel stared at her in incomprehension. She
was about to repeat herself when he said, “Come on up then,” and
shoved the mail bag under the seat. Telaine hauled herself onto the
wagon and settled her bag on her knees. “Never heard of Agatha
Weaver havin’ no niece,” Abel muttered, but he made a clucking
noise at the horses and they turned out of the stable yard, making
a wide circle. Telaine waved at Stakely and Edith, then had to grab
the edge of the seat to keep from being bounced off as they drove
away from Ellismere.

The road soon went from paving to hard-packed
dirt the horses and wagons turned into puffs of dust. There was
little to see here except long grasses, the pale line of the road,
and the approaching mountains, and Telaine heard no noises beyond
the wheels creaking and the horses’ hooves striking the hard
ground. It was eerie, like being inside an invisible dome that
blocked every sensation except the warm rays of the sun that were
making Telaine sweat. Abel drove in a silence that matched their
surroundings. Telaine examined him covertly and wondered if he were
as drunk as he’d looked. Did he even remember she was there?