Chapter 26
To Rys’s surprise, Sarae didn’t protest. At least, not to him. They entered the palace and found an empty meeting room.
“What ridiculous stories are you telling your new boss?” Sarae said once they entered, glaring daggers at Mina.
“How is this my fault? You’re the one trying too hard to fuck him,” Mina shot back. “Maybe I told him about that time you got punished for spending more time kissing boys than training.”
“‘Kissing boys.’” Sarae giggled. “Are you fifty or fifteen, Mina?”
“Fuck you.”
Sarae opened her mouth, and Rys knew that this argument was about to devolve into two sisters swearing at each other.
“Enough,” he said.
Both foxes shut up and looked at him, their ears and tails lowering.
“Save the family greetings for later,” he continued. “Mina, let’s talk outside for a minute. Sarae, don’t go anywhere.”
His gaze lingered on her for several seconds for effect, then Rys swept out of the room without a second glance.
He heard the sisters mumble to each other as he left.
“Damn, that’s hot. Does he look at you like that in bed?” Sarae asked.
“Stick around and find out,” Mina said.
When Rys’s spymaster slipped out after him, her face was cherry red. She ran a hand through her long white hair.
“Uh, I don’t remember her being that horny,” Mina said. “Or slutty.”
He raised an eyebrow at her, then checked that the door was shut properly. He then cast an aural barrier around them, as he suspected Sarae was eavesdropping.
“I’ll let you off lightly because she’s family, but think carefully about the way she’s acting,” he said. “You are a trained spy, aren’t you?”
Mina froze. Rys saw the gears in her mind whirring, and the moment when she understood what was going on.
“Shit. She’s trying to distract you,” Mina said. “I tried the same thing, but I wanted work. Do you think she wants the same?”
“I don’t know anything about why she’s here, other than she claims to have just arrived at Port Mayfield, knows that I’m king and use infernals, and that you work for me.” He ticked off each of the suspicious things he had noticed, using his fingers.
Mina stared at him. “You think she’s the Garrote spymaster?”
“I found her standing over Vallis with her swords out,” he added. “While she did kill the assailants, that may have just been removing witnesses prematurely. Or maybe she wanted Vallis alive and unsoiled.”
“Unsoiled.” Mina grimaced. “Um, change of topic, but Fara whined a bit about how aggressively abrupt you are right now. I’ve never seen you this… hard. Like steel. Fara’s never seen it, either?”
“I haven’t had much of a reason to be this serious before,” Rys said. “If you weren’t involved, I would have softened already. I need you to understand the stakes involved, and that while I value you, I’m not going to treat you softly when things go wrong.”
“When I fuck up,” Mina corrected. “Okay, yeah. That helps me focus. Um, I’m not fired?”
He laughed. “Mina, I was once a general when the fortress I was protecting was completely vaporized by the Archangel Azrael. Cities have literally sunk under my watch, and I have failed one of the most important sieges in all of history. No, I’m not going to fire you for a single mistake.”
She stared at him with wide eyes. Tears built up in the corner of them, and she looked away for a moment. When she turned back, it was with a small smile.
“That helps a lot more,” she mumbled.
“So long as you learn.” His tone hardened. “Failure can have meaning if you learn from it. It can make us stronger, and grant us even more power. Otherwise, it’s just the path to greater weakness.”
Mina nodded, and they returned to the subject at hand.
“I can’t imagine that Sarae is the one behind all of this,” she said. “But she could be involved.”
“Explain how this happened, then we’ll backtrack.”
Nodding, Mina launched into an explanation.
“I’ve been dealing with League agents for months, while monitoring Mave’s Gorgrian spies. Then I had to add the Garrote network, who I relied on through Nia.” Mina grimaced. “Not long ago, several of my agents were taken out and Nia told me that the network went dark. I sent in our succubus.”
“And then the ambush happened? Why not warn Vallis?” Rys asked.
“I didn’t know about the ambush until Vallis was already moving. We’ve ‘interrogated’ some of the attackers and learned that they were mercenaries lingering since Compagnon went down.” Mina grinned at the mention of interrogation.
With a succubus under her, the process was far smoother. People gave up their secrets all too willingly for her. Although Rys wondered if Mina sometimes still applied a personal touch.
He sometimes found her in the prison cells, after they had captured enemies. While Fara had explained that they were trained to eliminate prisoners to reduce information leaks, Rys had his doubts about Mina’s motivations.
Not that he cared. If his spymaster enjoyed her job, all the better. Everyone needed a part of the job that became their happy place.
“What about the mages they had?” Rys asked. “I saw very few dead and captured when I was there.”
“We only have two live ones,” Mina admitted. “They snuck in by boat. Our border situation isn’t perfect. We still allow vessels from Lapisloch and Avolar, even if we’re restricting food exports. That’s not even mentioning all of the coast we don’t patrol. People can get in, officially and unofficially.”
Rys clicked his tongue. That was as much his own fault as Mina’s.
In order to make Avolar appear to be the aggressor in the coming war, he had opted to boil them like a frog. Restrict their food supply, tax anything they needed, and generally treat them poorly as a bullying neighbor.
But that prevented him from outright cutting them off. That would be a diplomatic bridge too far and leave him without plausible deniability for Tarmouth and the Federation.
As silly as it was, that mattered in international politics. The nobles and diplomats knew what he was doing, but the common people didn’t.
If somebody tried to explain to a farmer that Avolar was invading other countries due to increasing prices, port levies, and rising tensions, the farmer would tell them to fuck off.
But if the explanation was that Avolar was starving because all their neighbors banned them from buying food, then the farmer would probably say that Avolar was right to go to war. They could imagine being banned from their local markets because of some assholes and sympathize.
“In short,” Rys summarized, “the League blacked out your intelligence network, snuck in some mages, recruited mercenaries, and then set up an ambush before you knew what was going on. That seems too fast.”
“I agree. They definitely had agents here already,” Mina grumbled. “I’ve pulled Leth and a Haunt back here to chase down the remaining League agents and mercenaries that got away. But I suspect the mages will vanish like smoke. The problem is that while they got here by boat, they didn’t come from the League. We would have noticed ships coming from the south.”
“This comes back to the mysterious method that the League is using to support Avolar then,” he said.
“Yes, as well as the fact we’re now dealing with two spy networks.”
Rys looked back at the room where Sarae was. Mina winced.
“It doesn’t look good for her, I guess,” Mina said. “We should talk to her, at least. I’d like to talk to her.”
“What’s your history with her? Other than the obvious. I didn’t expect you to be so competitive with her, given what you said earlier,” Rys said.
Licking her lips, Mina avoided answering for several seconds. She twisted in place with a pout.
“I told you how I was special, right? That I was selected for adjutant training early—the only fox with three tails? How I got my third tail earlier than everyone in my family?” When Rys nodded, Mina continued, “Well, Sarae and I were pretty competitive before that. She would get better results than me at first, and I’d train day and night in order to beat her.”
That matched Rys’s expectation of Mina. His spymaster’s idea of leisure was to stalk him, and she frequently fell asleep in the service ducts from exhaustion.
But Sarae?
“Your sister doesn’t seem the type to train hard,” he said cautiously.
“She, uh, isn’t. And wasn’t.” Mina scowled, but it softened immediately.
Suddenly, she changed the topic. “Mom and Auntie Nia raised us on stories of Fara. About how strong and capable she was. It’s funny to look back on them, now that I actually know her properly. Fara must have looked like a blazing sun that did whatever she wanted and had strength they didn’t, given she ignored the clan’s wishes and the scorn she received for her black tails.”
Mina smiled sadly. “But I talk to her now, and she’s so relatable. I felt all this pressure to chase after her, because everyone told me how great she was and she always had such great stories. She felt unreachable, especially…” she trailed off, unable to bring up the reason she joined Rys to begin with.
“I’m assuming you and Sarae both wanted to be like Fara?” Rys asked.
“I don’t know about Sarae,” Mina said. “But she did get compared to Fara a lot. Sarae had the natural talent. What she did instantly, I took days or weeks to do. Getting my third tail before her and being offered the adjutant training, when she was only offered enforcer training was… Is there a term for feeling good for the misfortune for others?”
“Schadenfreude.”
“That. I felt that. We got along really well before then. An inseparable pair of twins, and we’ve barely spent an entire day in the same room together since.” Mina sighed. “But you know what hurts the most?”
Rys waited silently.
Mina didn’t continue. Maybe she felt embarrassed to say it.
But when Rys didn’t fill in the silence, she eventually said her piece.
“I trained so hard to get where I did. Spent thirty years to become an adjutant. Then I got thrown away,” Mina said, no emotion in her voice as she stared at nothing. “Now Sarae’s here, and she has four tails. I’m not special for getting them early. She might even be working for the clan, after they threw me away. Am I that useless?”
“Are you?” Rys asked.
She winced and looked up at him with watery eyes.
“Are you my spymaster, or not?” he asked her with a raised eyebrow.
Mina giggled. “Oh, you meant like that. I am. Of course I am. I’ll never forget that you gave me this opportunity, especially as you have so many other options. It just… it still hurts.”
Rys shrugged. “I still get angry about things that happened when I was young. Idiotic decisions I made. I wonder why people betrayed me, and whether it was my fault or theirs. All I need you to do, Mina, is walk forward with me.”
She nodded.
Then she wrapped her arms around him and looked up at him with her chest pressed against him. “I don’t need sex, but I want to ask for something. Prepayment of my services.”
He nearly laughed, but still managed to nod.
“Whatever happens with Sarae, or anyone else, I want to be the next fox in your bed,” Mina said.
“You really are like Vallis, you know that?”
“She gave me the idea of asking this.”
Rys nodded, smiling. “Fine. But if you leave it that open-ended, you realize I get to choose when I take you.”
Mina’s eyes widened and her breathing hastened. “Then… I don’t want you to warn me when you do. Just fuck me.”
“Now who’s being the horny one?”
She giggled.
But it was time to talk to Sarae. They returned to the room.
Sarae jumped as they entered and grimaced at how she gave away the fact she was trying to eavesdrop.
“Guess your magic is better than mine,” she muttered.
“I have a few questions,” Mina said.
“You do? Not him?”
“I’m his spymaster. So yes, I do.” Mina glared at her sister.
Sarae’s jaw dropped. “Fucking what? You’re…” She gulped. “Mina, you do know what he is, right?”
“Do you?”
Rys found this exchange curious. Mina hadn’t known what he is when they had first met, but Sarae did.
Rolling her eyes, Mina said, “The King of Kavolara, a powerful infernalist, and the man who will order me to dispose of your corpse if you fuck around. Sarae, what are you doing back here? When did you get four tails? And why did you lie about just arriving on the island?”
Taken aback, Sarae’s tails shot up. Her swords were on the table, and her eyes shot to them. But she didn’t make a move, and instead scowled.
“Are you accusing me of being a traitor? Does Auntie Nia know what you’re doing? What happened to becoming an adjutant, Mina?” Sarae shot back.
“Are you that stupid? The clan turned me into a spy instead.”
Sarae froze. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Nobody told me… Fuck.” Sarae buried her head in her hands. “I got my fourth tail a couple of months ago out of the blue and was given a random busywork posting. When I contacted Nia, she told me to come home because you got four tails and were working for some foreign king. I thought this was some sort of intervention.”
A pretty good story. Rys had to admit that Sarae’s words added up, at least with what he’d observed.
But Mina raised an eyebrow. “Auntie Nia used a message canister for that?”
“Do you think she doesn’t care about you?”
Mina rolled her eyes. “If I asked Auntie Nia about this, will she say corroborate your story? She’s not far away.”
“We’re like 100 miles south-west of the village, Mina.”
“More like five miles south.” Mina smirked. “The village relocated.”
Sarae stared at her. “Um. What’s going on?”
“War,” Rys said. “So I’ll be blunt: why did you show up to save Vallis? Given she was with infernals, that seemed like the opposite thing for a mystic fox to do.”
“I wasn’t going to watch a woman be raped,” Sarae protested. “And it wasn’t a coincidence. I found out from the local clan contacts about the ambush. When things went south for her, I stepped in. You just showed up at the worst moment. I thought you were going to wear me like a hat, and not in a good way.”
“There’s a good way?” Mina asked.
“Given how big his cock must be, I’m guessing—” Sarae began to say, before Mina shut her sister up with a force slap.
Mina and Rys conferred briefly.
“Her surprise seems genuine,” he said.
“She still knows things she shouldn’t. I want to talk to Nia about her, but I don’t want her to leave,” Mina said.
“Then it’s easy. Keep her here.”
“I can do that?” Mina’s eyes widened.
“What is she going to do? You’re one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. You answer only to me.” Rys gave her a push toward Sarae.
The two sisters ended up screaming at each other within almost seconds, their tails flailing about wildly.
For his part, Rys got some coffee from an imp and watched from the sidelines as Mina contained her sister. Eventually, Sarae gave in.
Ah, sibling love. Rys decided that the fox variety was far less violent than what infernals practiced.