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ChapterTen
Neil
“Shouldn’t we be heading back to the cottages to help Sebald and the others with, er, their problem?” I asked as Magnus, Peter, and I marched through the unfamiliar streets of Hedeon.
“Sebald is probably beside himself right now,” Peter said, as if speaking the thought aloud. I took it as a good sign, at least, that he was feeling more charitably inclined toward our friend.
“Do you honestly think that the three of us mucking around and getting in the way at the cottages would make the situation young Sebald has on his hands easier to manage?” Magnus asked, striding on at a ridiculous pace and searching the buildings as he went.
“No,” I admitted with a sigh, slightly breathless from keeping up with him. “But aren’t people going to wonder why we didn’t head straight to the cottages after leaving the palace?”
Magnus turned his head to look at me with a baffled look. “Who other than Sai, Jace, and Gennadi know where we are or where we should be right now?” he asked. “And do you think any of them would raise the question when they discover we aren’t where they thought?”
Again, the answer was no, but I knew at that point there was no point in answering aloud.
“So where are we going, then?” I asked instead, putting more effort into keeping up with Magnus.
“Hadrian’s house,” Magnus said in a quiet, conspiratorial voice.
“Is that what you asked that servant in the palace?” Peter asked. “Where Hadrian lives?”
“That is precisely what I asked her, my love,” Magnus said, reaching for Peter’s hand and squeezing it. “And if we find it in good time, we will be at leisure to search the place from top to bottom before anyone gets it into their heads to do the same.”
I grinned in spite of the fact that what Magnus was suggesting was dubiously moral. Everything that had happened in the last few hours was dubiously moral, and honestly, that description fit a great deal of Magnus’s personality, too.
It took a while to figure out which of the small houses in the neighborhood near the palace was Hadrian’s. I wasn’t really surprised that Sai had given Hadrian a house near the palace. Sai knew Hadrian from years before and considered him a friend. It made me wonder how often Sai and Hadrian had visited as friends…and how much information Sai had inadvertently shared with the spy. I guessed that was the whole point of our mission, though, to figure that out, if we could.
Once we did find Hadrian’s house—which we were only able to do by asking a passing maid, unfortunately—we had to let ourselves in through a cracked window, since both the front and back doors were locked.
“Consider it an advantage,” Magnus said once I’d managed, as the strongest of the three of us, to shove the window open enough to crawl through. “We can search for what we need, abscond with it as necessary, then depart through the window again, and no one will be any wiser.”
“As long as we’re careful not to upset too many things,” Peter said in a hushed voice, as if the walls had ears, as the three of us stepped away from the window to begin our search.
In spite of being a representative—and spy—from the Old Realm and a friend of Sai’s, Hadrian’s cottage was small and plain. I supposed that was because he hadn’t lived there long and hadn’t had a chance to accumulate much in the way of clutter. There were a few books on his shelves in the main room downstairs, a few decorative trinkets to liven up the space, and a vase of fresh flowers on the table in the main room. Aside from the main room, on the ground floor there was also a kitchen and a dining room, but that was it.
Upstairs, the house had two bedrooms and several closets, but no more than that. The house didn’t even have a washroom. Instead, there was a pump in the kitchen and a chamber pot behind a screen in the room I assumed Hadrian had been sleeping in. The other bedroom was neat but dusty, suggesting no one had used it in a while.
“The house is too clean,” Peter said once we’d finished our initial tour and returned to the main room, where we could already see documents on the table and what looked like a messenger’s satchel.
“There’s nothing wrong with keeping a clean house,” I said, moving to the bookshelf as Magnus and Peter went to the table to look at the papers.
“There is if it means Hadrian employs a servant,” Magnus said, almost as a side thought.
A chill shot down my spine. I hadn’t thought about that. It was a good point. If Hadrian employed someone to clean and maybe to cook for him, we had a limited amount of time for our search. We couldn’t know how long it would be until the maid came. And if Sai wanted to make it appear as if Hadrian had dropped everything to run back to the Old Realm, someone would need to come up with a plausible explanation so that maid didn’t get suspicious.
We were all silent for a few minutes after that. I looked over the titles of the books on the shelf, then, on a whim, I started pulling them down and flipping through the pages to see if there were any hidden papers there. I could hear Peter and Magnus shuffling through the papers on the table as well.
“I can’t tell if these are important or not,” Peter said with a sigh after about five minutes. “Clearly, they are important, since they’re notes from council meetings and they contain a lot of information, but is it the sort of information King Julius would be interested in? And if so, has any of it made its way to the Old Realm?”
I glanced over my shoulder at them as Magnus answered, “All information is important information. And I think our safest assumption would be that Hadrian passed every bit of information, no matter how small, to my brother.”
“So he can do what with it?” Peter asked on as I put one book back on the shelf and took down another. “So he can see that the cities are still struggling? That Sai is up to his ears in problems?”
“Wouldn’t you want to know that about your frontier if you were a king?” Magnus asked. I could hear a hint of teasing in his voice, since we all more or less assumed Peter would serve a term as king someday.
Peter paused for a moment before saying, “I suppose so. At the very least, it would reassure me to know that the people I want to reconquer were an organizational mess.”
“Is it that bad?” I asked, putting the book I’d just checked back on the shelf and looking at Peter and Magnus again.
