It was not a matter of luck that the letter arrived in Abderus’s hand while Helen was at his side. She, master that she was of the Macarian bureaucracy, knew that the transmission of important, secret information such as this was highly standardized. The couriers would travel often at night, the path lit only by dull mps, so as to minimize the risk of being caught or wayid, meaning letters bearing such sensitive information as military reports or the words of spies would almost inevitably arrive te in the morning.

  This time, after breakfast but before the day had grown warm, a time when most men were at their strongest states of focus, was set aside for the work of bureaucracy. Abderus would sit down and an entire parade of bureaucrats and functionaries would appear before him to rey news. He paid little attention. The mind of the man who had won his position through war was simply not attuned to such matters, such that even on the days when he was at his sharpest, he could comprehend only the broadest motions of w and custom. Helen was almost always at his side, silent and still, learning everything. She was the only woman in the room, aside from the occasional moments when a female sve would pass through offering refreshments.

  It was not an uncommon event during these morning get-togethers that an uninvited guest would find his way into the Exarch’s chamber. Everybody knew where he was, and an Exarchate was a chaotic enough thing that those who wanted to make themselves known often could not arrive at a reasonable hour, such as the evening before. Usually the men who burst into the room were elderly statesmen or square-jawed generals; but on that particur morning, the one who dashed in was a youth, twenty years of age or so, dripping with sweat.

  All eyes pivoted to look upon the new arrival, and Helen was slightly ashamed when she realized she had twitched with shock. Abderus raised an eyebrow; many scowled or muttered something about the impropriety of youth. The young man, meanwhile, seemed about to colpse. His face was bright red, and every time he opened his mouth to speak, he instead sucked down breath, trying to feed his exhausted system.

  “What is it, man! Speak, already! You are in the presence of the ruler of Philgeonia!”

  The man instead cwed at a leather pouch secured to his belt, after a moment retrieving a scroll. With a cough, he managed to wheeze out, “Letter.”

  “Who for?” asked Abderus, the strangeness of the situation causing him to break formality.

  “You.”

  As the young man staggered forward, suddenly realizing that it would be uncouth to expect the Exarch to collect his own mail, one of the attending noblemen cracked a joke.

  “If only the army were made of men as devoted to their professions as was the post!” he muttered, to a round of half-suppressed ughter. Eventually, as one of the shows of humbleness with which he had so much skill, Abderus rose from his seat and took a step forward, retrieving the scroll from the messenger’s hand. The man nodded at him, then retreated to the back of the room, waiting to be dismissed.

  Abderus read the letter, and Helen stared at the words from over his shoulder. She, of course, knew precisely what was written. Indeed, she knew that letter more exactly than any other object she had ever touched; she knew the thoughts that had gone into every pen-stroke on its surface, she knew of all the false starts that had ended up in the firepce when she concluded that the lettering was too simir to her own, and she knew exactly what the letter was intended to bring about.

  Abderus read through the entire letter. It wasn’t much, but a few quick sentences, written in the clipped vocabury of a military scout. But when he finished it—Helen could tell by the way his eyes went unfocused for a moment—he read it again. Then again. Halfway through his fourth attempt to read the words before him, Abderus gave up; he retreated to his chair and colpsed, eyes shut with grief and anguish.

  “Damn him,” Abderus said. “Damn that whole whorish city.”

  “My lord? What does it say?”

  Abderus cast the papyrus aside, as though it was the scroll that had done him injury. “Peleus gathers his troops, and he has excluded the Philgeonian legions. He pns to… I don’t know what he pns, but it is obvious that he marches on Eunon.”

  The room exploded into noise and cmor, men shouting their disbelief, their rage, their validation. Abderus, Helen, and the messenger were alone in their silence. The young man was shocked, even horrified, growing more aware of the weight of the responsibility on his shoulders with each passing moment. Then, suddenly, Abderus seized control.

  With an inarticute roar and a sm of his powerful fist, Abderus silenced the entire chamber. “Cannot a man even be allowed to think in the final hours before he is thrust into war? Speak one at a time. Like men, not animals.”

  A moment passed, then two men spoke up at once. There was another gulf of silence before one of them relented and allowed the other to have the floor. Helen recognized him vaguely as a Philgeoniai, but one of the ones more loyal to Chrysopolis.

  “Why would he do this? What does the Emperor stand to gain from pitting Macarian against Macarian?”

  Another man stood. “He is jealous of our success, of the patriotism which remains unbroken even after so much suffering. He intends to shatter Philgeonia once and for all, and repce us with Macariai and Kyreniai settlers.”

  “Quit that idealistic talk, Am,” said another man. “He has been more than satisfied with retions between Philgeonia and the capital for years; no doubt this is an expression of his paranoia. He believes, after the revetion of the letter, that rebellion is inevitable; and in this belief, he makes it true, for now we must war against him or else be destroyed.”

  “We gain nothing by pondering the man’s motives! Perhaps he has gone mad and decided to invade Philgeonia because it pleases him! What we must do now is advise Abderus in the best pn of action and prepare for our defense!”

  The debate went back and forth, not quite as uproarious as it had been but nonetheless energetic. There was one figure who did not speak: Abderus himself. He remained in his chair and slowly colpsed. Never, in all the months she had known the man, had Helen ever seen him so miserable. A thousand different fvors of grief and horror flickered across his face, eyes welling with tears, his broad figure suddenly stripped of its strength. War was going to destroy his heart.

  Collecting himself ever so slightly, Abderus gestured, not to the bureaucrats and noblemen around him, but to the young messenger. The man took a moment to understand the gesture, but quickly crossed the room to his Exarch’s side. Helen watched from just over Abderus’s shoulder.

  “Are you certain that this letter is genuine?”

  The young man nodded. “As certain as I can be. I found it at the usual pce where I pick up the rey, and it is marked with the official seal of your scouting corps. Here, you see?”

  This was all according to Helen’s pn, of course. As the Exarch’s wife, she had a great deal of access to information on things such as the rey posts of the scouting corps, as well as a schedule of their movements. From there, it had been retively easy to convince Abderus that she was feeling ill and in need of fresh forest air. Given that her husband was too busy with his own business to accompany her, Helen’s protection and care was left up to a handful of servants and a single loyal bodyguard.

  She’d convinced the bodyguard to, in essence, switch pces. She would disguise as a sve girl and he as a traveling aristocrat, for the stated purpose of throwing off potential assassins. That the bodyguard almost definitely assumed this to be an esoteric sexual predilection on Helen’s part was of no trouble to her. What mattered was that he agreed, and that nobody would know the Exarch’s wife was in the area of the rey post.

  They had spent two and a half days eating through the reserves of a roadside inn on the outskirts of a small town while Helen searched for where the letters were hidden. To their credit, there were very few people who could have gotten away with searching for as long as she did; and even still she had the advantage of knowing roughly what to look for. It was a very tamper-resistant system. But eventually it had given up its secrets, in the form of a scrap of papyrus tucked into a crack in the mile marking a ways down the road. For as important as it was, the act itself was almost upsettingly simple. She simply yanked out the old letter, shoved her own into the crevice in its pce, and walked back to the inn to dispose of the evidence.

  So it only made sense that the young man, who knew little beyond that needed for his own role in the process, would have every reason to believe the letter was genuine. If she had not known it was faked, Helen would have believed his certainty the right thing to do. Somehow, being confronted with the victim of one’s deception never felt quite as good as committing it in the first pce.

  “May I see it?” said Helen. She was unsure why she had given into the urge.

  “Of course, my love,” said Abderus. He extended his arm, and she took the letter.

  What was her goal in doing this? What aim did Helen hope to achieve? Merely deying the inevitable? Proving that her memories of having committed this fraud were, in fact, correct? She did not read the words of the letter, but allowed her eyes to go unfocused as she remembered the process of writing it. Her nails ran across the papyrus and ink, following the patterns of line and curve.

  Helen was seized by a terrible urge to undo all she had done. She knew how she could do it, how she could save her own conscience at the expense of her soul; it would be so easy. The pain would go, the torment would go, and perhaps Abderus would smile at her like he had before this whole terrible business had begun.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It is a fake.”

  “What?” Abderus asked. “How could you possibly know?”

  “The scouting corps uses iron-gall ink for their letters, yes? But this isn’t iron-gall. This is sepia.”

  Most of the room did not hear Helen’s words. But Abderus did, as well as the young messenger and a few of the closest members of the ongoing debate. All who did turned to Helen in confusion.

  “May I look at it?” said the young man.

  Helen gave him the letter. He examined it, lifting it up close to his face and squinting intensely. “You’re right! It’s… it’s a very slightly different shade of bck to the usual letters, I think. It’s a fake!”

  “What is the meaning of this?” Abderus said. “Someone is trying to trick me into war against the Emperor?”

  “There are many in Eunon who would wish for such a thing,” Helen said.

  Someone snatched the fake letter out of Helen’s hands, and after that it was off to the races. Everyone had an opinion, and they all wished to give it as quickly and as loudly as possible. Helen couldn’t stand to be in the same room. She thought, perhaps, that she could hear the consensus shifting towards the letter being a fake; but by then, the door was already rattling closed.

  Helen raced for her chamber, then stopped and reconsidered. This was a private emotion, and Abderus was too likely to find her there. She fled instead to a balcony overlooking Eunon and threw shut the curtain behind her to hide her from sight. Then she colpsed into sobs.

  Shirrin would have never reacted like this. Even when she was the Pale Prince, she had always understood her own thoughts; now that she was burning with purpose, her mind and intent were always razor-sharp. In no world would Shirrin end up turning back on herself like Helen had. Was Helen so unworthy for this role? Had being made into a woman somehow robbed her of her convictions, rendered her sve to her passions, as the philosophers so often said of women? Helen wept for ck of a purpose, cwing at her chest in a desperate attempt to tear out the gnawing sense of inadequacy that had so suddenly put down roots there.

  Eventually, Helen stood once again. Her hair was a tangled ruin, her clothes all disheveled, her cheeks stained with bck. There were no more tears to be shed, and she was desperately hungry. She retreated to her chamber just long enough to become presentable—thank the gods and all their servants that Abderus was nowhere to be found—and then slunk to the dining hall. The midday meal was still in session.

  That the Exarch’s wife was in a sour mood was visible in her every gesture, so almost everyone had the good sense to leave her alone. Except, as it happened, for one man.

  “Um. My dy. I know you are not in any state to be working on matters of bureaucracy, but this is rather urgent…”

  Helen turned around, squinting at the skinny, bald figure before her. “Hagar?”

  “Yes, my dy.” He was clutching a set of record parchments to his chest as though they were his children.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, erm. There are a lot of orders flying around the pace tely, more than usual. Some people are telling me to begin shifting kitchen allocations over to the military storehouses, as though we’re about to go to war. Is that… is that correct?”

  Helen blinked, swallowing on a dry throat. “Hagar, that is not a question for me. My husband is the one who knows whether or not we are at war.”

  Hagar gasped, bowing reflexively. “My apologies, my dy! I had become so used to coming to you for aid that the matter of authority, it must have… it must have slipped my mind.”

  Without another word, Hagar hurried off, presumably to find the Exarch. Helen continued her meal, this time with something much more substantial to chew on. Hagar was not exactly a low-ranking member of the bureaucracy, and she knew that he was far from the only one who saw her as the ultimate authority far more than they ever thought about her husband.

  Perhaps she could put that kind of power to use.

  SaffronDragon