H - 91: What You Don't Know (Patreon)

A battle was an ugly thing, as was its aftermath. This one had been brief and deliberately as bloodless as possible; Gunhild had obviously wanted to preserve as much of this gang’s strength as possible, and taken out only the leadership and the few who had stubbornly fought to the last. These were few indeed—bandits as a rule were pragmatic and opportunistic, and not every boss in Dragonvale had cultivated the kind of personal loyalty Gunhild had. Still, a battle was a battle. Blood, death, and stench.

Now, standing in the aftermath, Cora had to wonder how well she’d have fared looking at a proper battlefield, where people were slaughtered by the hundreds before the losses were considered significant. This…wasn’t so terrible. She had seen worse.

She conjured her copy of the map of Dragonvale she’d supplied the bandits, fully annotated by Boisverd’s spy agency with data gleaned from every cooperative counterpart agency, adventuring guild, and mages’ guild in the Evervales, as well as information from Rhivaak’s espionage ministry—which had not been voluntarily supplied.

“We’re doing well,” she said, eyes scanning the map as she listened to the heavy, deliberate footfalls approaching. “Good work today. Very efficient.”

“Couldn’t have done it without you, Lady Cora,” Gunhild replied, her low alto voice subtly tinged with amusement. The steps stopped.

Cora raised her eyes, turning around. Gunhild had halted several paces away—just close enough that conversing wouldn’t be difficult, but not within arm’s reach.

Well enough—neither had any reason to attack the other, as far as Cora knew, but it wasn’t as if the trust between them ran deep.

Kessi was with her, as usual sticking close to Gunhild’s shadow even though everyone else was doing something constructive—the rest of the bandit forces were sorting through the camp, interviewing new members, applying medical care to those who needed it and dragging those who never would again into the darkness of the woods. It had been like that during the raid, too; Kessi had insisted on fighting, but she stayed carefully close to Gunhild and behind their lines, her few opportunities to use the Rhiva pistol and scimitar she’d commandeered from the smuggled Imperial armaments Clarent had re-routed here showing that she had clearly never done so before.

Cora was starting to wonder about this girl. Either her helplessness was part of a layered deception suggesting she was a fare more adept agent than Rhivaak could usually field, or she was a much worse agent than even Rhivaak would field. Or Claude’s identification of her as an Imperial spy was a mistake based on coincidence and she actually just was some girl who’d been caught by bandits crossing through Dragonvale and cozied up to their leader to survive.

Ideally, all this would be done with before it mattered. Cora had kept an eye open for opportunities to take the girl out, but Claude had been right; she was too close to Gunhild, and either by skill or luck kept herself in positions from which it had been too difficult to stage a convincing accident, even during a battle.

“We’re almost done with this campaign,” Cora said aloud, consulting the map again. “Three more camps—at least, three big enough to bother with. Once you have control of Dragonvale you can deal with miscellaneous loners and tiny poaching camps as you see fit. If we keep up this pace, you can be finished and ready to move within days.”

“Ah, yes, ready to move,” Gunhild replied, calm, smiling. A prickle ran up Cora’s spine and she looked up from the map again. There was suddenly an atmosphere here that she recognized—she was Valefolk nobility, these things were like mother’s milk to her.

Upon raising her eyes, she noted Oswald and Rafaela ambling over to join Gunhild and Kessi from either side, moving far too casually and looking far too pleased.

Great. The bandits were about to make this unnecessarily complicated. As if she didn’t have enough headaches, moving all her pieces into position.

“And then,” Gunhild continued with that calm smile and far too knowing expression, “once we have combined our ranks and purged them of the eyes of the other Vale states, you’ll hand over Queen Henrietta’s treaty ceding Dragonvale to me and recognizing my sovereignty, and Boisverd will have its…plausibly deniable base from which to carry out its operations. Into Rhivaak, the Nourdells, and the Vales alike.”

“Yes?” Cora replied, not deigning to suppress the annoyance creeping into her tone. She did not have time for whatever this was.

“What a strange thing for her Majesty to want to do, though,” Gunhild mused, bracing her musket across her shoulder. “Are the advantages of having a client state to carry out such dirty work really worth the effort of this arrangement? This is the Evervales, after all. It’s not as if Boisverd’s peers would be surprised by a bit of spying, or take it personally.”

“Are you picking this late date to try to press for better terms?” Cora demanded. “Because I haven’t—”

“Oh, no, the terms are generous enough, given what you’ve told me,” Gunhild replied easily. “But at this late date, Lady Cora, I think we should discuss what you haven’t told me. Specifically, what you don’t know that I know.”

The movements were unhurried, subtle, and natural enough that were Cora not habitually on edge she might not even have noticed. Nobody sprang, or pivoted, or did anything to call attention to themselves. One at a time, though, in no hurry, while Gunhild had been speaking, the miscellaneous scattering of her followers picking through the camp had straightened up and turned, those not occupied handling prisoners or wounded. Now she saw clearly that all the random bandits who had shifted to face her specifically were carrying crossbows, muskets, or pistols, and were oh-so-coincidentally arranged in a wide arc around her, with Gunhild’s party at its apex, and had no one positioned to suffer crossfire.

“First,” Gunhild stated, “Atraximos the Dread is gone.”

“That’s some unreasonable optimism,” Cora said evenly. “He’s been quiet for longer than this—”

“No, he hasn’t,” Gunhild retorted with no lapse in her calm. “The crowned heads of the Evervales may not have noticed yet, as he tends to roam at random, but we see his comings and goings first. You have generally failed to consider how crucial it is for we scuttling rats beneath the wings of dragons to keep a wary eye on our skies… And you’ve also failed to consider that a bunch of mere bandits might read. Some of us even went to very good schools.”

Oswald grinned, idly fondling the pommel of his runeblade rapier, and Rafaela had the damned temerity to wink at her.

“I wonder,” the bandit boss mused, “is he dead? Or merely…indisposed? Would you happen to know, Lady Cora?”

Cora had magic ready to cast, but did not invoke it yet. Those two spellblades might sense it, and were clearly itching for an excuse to pounce. She formed a detection and reaction ward that would conjure a brick wall in a circle around herself if anything approached it too quickly—her standard defense against projectiles. Brick would hold off musket balls and crossbow bolts for the seconds it would take her to escape. She wasn’t in physical danger here. Unless Gunhild was about to pull something else out of her arse…

“Second,” Gunhild continued after a pause when Cora didn’t trouble to answer her, “not long ago, Vanimax, the son of Izayaroa, kidnapped Princess Perseverance de Clairmont of Boisverd.”

Cora narrowed her eyes.

“We’re late to get the news out here,” Gunhild said with a faint grin, “but a piece of gossip as juicy as that wends its way even as far as Dragonvale before long. We’re not some sort of cloistered order of monks out here, you know—bandits do raid the outlying kingdoms, it’s sort of our whole thing. We learn what’s up eventually. And more importantly, Lady Cora, we damned well noticed the fact that Vanimax went screeching through here one fine evening carrying a person, a thing not one of those beasts has ever done before.”

She paused, so blatantly for dramatic effect that Cora nearly hurled a conjured pumpkin at her out of sheer annoyance.

“Likewise, we took note when Pheneraxa left and later came back with a person riding on her, like some sort of mule. And especially when she did so a few days later carrying two people. What an insult to draconic pride! Her father would never stand for it…if he were in any position to complain. You didn’t know I knew that, either, did you, my Lady?”

Gunhild’s smile widened, subtly and deliberately.

“Or…could it be that that was something you didn’t know you did not know?”

She had not known, specifically. It wasn’t shocking; she’d known the godling was up to something with those dragons. What was shocking was that these scruffy dregs knew the names of the drakes and recognized them by sight.

“Fascinating,” Cora said in her most deadpan tone. “Can you cut to the—”

“Now, now, you wouldn’t begrudge a girl her moment of drama, would you?” Gunhild interrupted, her grin fading into a smirk. “Turn up that noblesse oblige and allow me my fun, good Lady. We have so little entertainment out here.”

It was annoying that Gunhild was good enough at this game to actually have some fun with it; Cora might even suspect she’d had some manner of training in speechcraft or theatre. No one would ever call Gunhild a great beauty, but her appearance was cultivated to impress, from the wolf cut which had to be difficult to maintain out here in the sticks to the armored vest which sacrificed defense to show off her wide shoulders and brawny arms. That she knew how to deliver a speech on top of all that really shouldn’t be a surprise.

“I suppose I can’t blame you for not knowing that I know all that,” Gunhild mused, as the smile began to slip from her features. “I also know, I should think, most of the things that everyone knows, and can make the same logical inferences as anyone else. For example, that Boisverd receives a lot of monetary and material aid from all the Vale states, as well as a measure of assurance it won’t be invaded or overthrown, because it holds the fief of Dragonvale—the front lines in the eternal war, so to speak. Now, obviously, if Queen Henrietta’s grand plan is to use me and a newly independent Dragonvale as catspaws, the rest of the world has to know Dragonvale is independent…which would cut Boisverd off from all that support, and send it instead to me. I can’t see the Queen relinquishing that, not while her fingers are still alive enough to grasp it.”

The smile was fully gone now.

“Unless,” Gunhild said quietly, “something is about to happen which means that support is going to be cut off, anyway. Such as, for example, the revelation that the Dread is no more. I must say, Lady Cora, I’m a mite offended by this one. Anybody could have figured that out. You really set all this up, blithely assuming I couldn’t?”

Bollocks. She needed these reprobates; Cora had made the plans she could to smooth her path, but she wasn’t about to march into the lair of the dragons without some distraction keeping the various forces there off her back. The means were arranged to get rid of both the godling and the Phantom Legion, and the shadow was working on a ploy to draw the consorts away. It had insisted that the drakes were ironically more difficult to distract, simply because they had fewer interests in the world and no sense of responsibility. If Cora was to go in there and get Perseverence out, she needed these idiots for the drakes to chew on. True to form, they’d picked the worst possible moment to get clever.

“Well, I suppose I have to grant you that one,” she said aloud. “My sincere apologies, Gunhild. I have a bad habit of underestimating those who haven’t studied the craft. It’s a known problem.”

One of the onlooking bandits raised his crossbow to point at her.

Cora activated the ward she’d been forming. No visible effect occurred, but Rafaela and Oswald both narrowed their eyes; the former leaned over to whisper in Gunhild’s ear.

Gunhild nodded once without looking at Rafaela, and after a moment and under scathing stares from several of his compatriots, the bandit with the crossbow abashedly lowered it.

Cora did not let her ward drop.

“So what you actually want is your Princess back,” Gunhild mused. “Fine by me, as far as it goes; I’ve neither interest in nor grudge against the lass. I assume the plan was to toss a united horde of bandits at them as a distraction?”

“That wouldn’t be much of a distraction,” Cora retorted. “It would take ten seconds of fire breath to annihilate the lot of you.”

She’d been planning to issue them some potions and charms to contend with that—just enough to make them last long enough to command the dragons’ attention for a few precious minutes.

“Right,” Gunhild drawled. “It’s what comes after that has my curiosity. If you steal back the Princess, obviously they’ll quickly figure out who did, and come right back to Boisverd—an outcome I’m sure you’d prefer to avoid. So it seems, Lady Cora, there are also things I know I don’t know. Care to be a good neighbor and dish some gossip on our…mutual friends?”

Okay, this was…manageable. If they were actively soliciting information, she could still lead them. On the other hand—

“She’ll just lie to us again,” Rafaela said in a particularly sour tone, glaring down her nose at Cora. “I told you, Gunhild, this is pointless.” Oswald nodded silent agreement.

“Not if she’s properly incentivised,” Gunhild said with the faintest smile.

Cora bared her teeth at them. “You surely didn’t think I would come here in person if you were any threat to me.”

“There are more consequences on the table than the immediately personal,” Gunhild replied. “Now, Oswald and Rafaela here may be my best finger-wigglers—” A description which made both of them grimace. “—but it probably won’t surprise you to learn there is no shortage of hedge witches, washout former adventurers, and disgraced expelled apprentices among a bandit gang of this size. It won’t be terribly difficult to put together some spell working elaborate enough and interesting enough to draw the valley’s resident grandmaster archmage down here to see what’s going on. And I’m sure Emeralaphine will be very interested in hearing what you and the Queen are cooking up.”

Cora actually rolled her eyes. “If you’re genuinely just tired of the hardships of life, there are cleaner ways to leave them behind than by drawing that beast down on your head.”

Gunhild smiled again, and this time the expression was so smugly knowing that Cora was suddenly tempted to conjure something rather more volatile than a pumpkin.

“Pheneraxa likes to talk shop with mages,” Gunhild said. “She’s a bit brusque and to the point—borderline rude, in fact, but the funny thing is the mages she’s talked with don’t seem to much mind. Funny enough, a lot of that sort are accustomed to dealing with academic types, the kind who’re fixated on facts and somewhat confused by the concept of social skills. Vadaralshi, though, she’s outright friendly to anyone willing to stop for a chat. She particularly likes adventurers, though—likes to listen to their stories. And while they keep their own secrets better than most, her habit of flying over the ridge there to visit with the Hiiri has been well-noted. Vanimax, now, he takes after his papa a bit. Not in the sense of indiscriminately attacking people, in fact he has so assiduously refrained from it that him snatching the Princess was quite a departure. Nah, he doesn’t seem to have much use for people or conversation, is all. Well enough; something tells me I’d rather chat with his sisters, anyway. Even the unmannerly mage one.”

“What in the countless hells are you talking about?” Cora demanded.

“Of course, all this is old data,” Gunhild continued. “About sixty or so years ago, there was a big to-do. A whole fracas, you might say. Happened all over the Vales, all up and down this mountain range. The Dead himself kept pouncing on his own children, beating and clawing them half to death right out in the open. And then went after everything in the vague vicinity of anyone they’d talked to with a particularly fiery passion. After that, the drakes have kept strictly to themselves, never let anybody approach them. You see, Lady Cora,” she added with a knowing smirk, “it’s not just that we watch the skies. People all over the Evervales have been watching and taking notes for nigh six hundred years—and even we fractious Valefolk come together to support one another when the subject is the dragons. There are centuries of accounts and notes on their habits floating around. You must have read a fair few, yourself. Does it truly shock you so that some of them floated all the way to Dragonvale itself?”

She tilted her head to the left, the direction in which Kessi and Oswald stood beside her.

“I even have the benefit of a rather skilled curator—the sort who knows how to care for books, and what volumes are worth acquiring. We’ve managed to put together a respectable little library, out here in our humble hole. What can I say? It relieves the tedium.”

“Respectable,” Oswald sniffed. “Please. Our collection aspires, barely, to adequacy.”

“Oswald,” Gunhild said mildly, “you’re stepping on my moment.”

He turned toward her and bowed deeply, sweeping off his hat. “A thousand pardons, Gunhild. You know how I get carried away on the subject of books.”

“It should go without saying that we know the habits of the consorts, as well,” Gunhild continued, once more looking at Cora. “To my knowledge, nobody’s ever confirmed it from her own scaly lips, but everyone knows the compromise Izayaroa made—it’s obvious from the combined facts of her presence here, and Atraximos’s forbearance toward Rhivaak just over there on the other side of the Reaches. It’s less clear what the other two are doing, putting up with him, but one can theorize. What’s more important is that there are two of them who are, in fact, interested in people. And Tiavathyris definitely knows the value of…” She gestured with her free hand around at the onlooking bandits. “…irregulars. It was only the Dread himself who was too good to deal with we mere two-legged vermin. There’s a deal to be made, now that he’s gone. So the question for you, Lady Cora, is whether such a deal includes Boisverd…or comes at its expense?”

“The big hole in your plan,” Cora said tightly, “is that Emeralaphine is the one who would respond to your big idea of setting off an interesting spell in their backyard. Any of the dragons would destroy anyone who approached their lair directly, and she will do the same to any nuisances wasting her time. You have no means of making contact that don’t result in instant fiery death.”

Gunhild’s mysterious little smile widened enough to show teeth. “Ah, but Lady Cora—that’s another thing you don’t know you don’t know. Now, I can’t say for sure who was snooping around Dragonvale, but I know they were trying to use magic to do it. I know this because it was the White Wind herself who came out to investigate. Believe you me, my lady, we took notice when a colossal white dragon landed on the cliffs up there, spoke with some people who’d been lurking about, and then teleported them away. I gather their answers failed to please her.”

She had the effrontery to wink. Cora wondered whether she’d picked up that habit from Rafaela, or vice versa.

“It’s a gamble indeed that mine will succeed, but given what I’ve gleaned from you already? I like our odds.”

What? Who? How? Why?

Cora struggled to control her expression, well aware that the vibrating tension which wracked her whole body was giving her away. This was it, then; whether or not Gunhild had an actual advantage, it was clear that she thought she did, which meant that if Cora didn’t find a way to get this crew back under her control, the bandits would either throw in with the dragons—or far more likely forewarn them of her own incipient attack in the process of getting themselves all killed. And then…everything would be lost. None of her careful plans would be worth a damn if the beasts knew she was coming.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” Gunhild said smugly. “I’m big enough to admit when there are things I know I don’t know. Especially in the presence of someone who, I suspect, does know them. Something’s up with those beasts. Ferrying passengers about? Stealing princesses? That smells like an agenda, one beyond celebrating the lack of having Atraximos around—and I can’t help suspecting the reason behind that agenda is the same as the one behind his absence. I’ve shared some valuable information with you, Lady Cora; turnabout is fair play. So what say we all lay our cards on the table, and see if we can find a way for us all to profit together?”

She shifted, finally lowering the musket from across her shoulder. Not to aim it at Cora, at least not yet, but bracing it in her arms in a position that could be raised to fire in an instant.

“Or am I better off taking my chances with the dragons, and setting them loose on your kingdom?”

Cora thought as quickly as she could, feeling every bit of the strain and fatigue slowing her mind. This was…not a disaster. Not yet. She was going to have to sacrifice some advantage here, but maybe…she could still keep them pointed in the direction she wanted. In the end, that was all that mattered. If it meant they had to be a bit less in the dark than she preferred…

Well, you couldn’t have everything.

“All right,” she said. “His name is Kaln.”