H - 135: The Power of Friendship (Patreon)

“Another one? Already?”

Kaln had only just had time to turn back toward the lair once Rafaela was freed and the twinned portals collapsed before Commander Sharamin materialized alongside him, saluting and reporting the arrival of another guest in need of his attention.

“If I may, sir,” said the ghost, “we appear to be in for…what they call ‘one of those days.’ In addition to the gentleman I mentioned, who is currently being entertained in the library, another petitioner has appeared who I believe genuinely requires a bit of your time.”

Kaln repressed the urge to rub his forehead. It had been, a few ups and downs aside, a blessedly peaceful four weeks since the battle at Boisverd, but he’d known that could not last long. Evidently this was the day those bills started coming due.

“And this one is…less important than the one you already let through?”

Sharamin’s immaculate eyebrows lowered in a frown which was as graceful and efficient as everything he did. “It is more that I believe keeping him waiting better serves your strategic aims, sir. He has come concerning one of the Dragonvale bandits we…appropriated.”

“The last of those were sent home last week. Unless you mean…”

“Indeed, sir. It appears the first Vale power has decided to take you up on your offer to argue over your decisions.”

“I see. Well done as always, then; you’re right, let’s keep this one cooling their heels for a bit. Then the other one is more urgent?”

The ghost’s frown deepened. “Debatable, sir. It’s more that he successfully talked his way past my soldiers, right into the heart of the lair. Rest assured I will be debriefing everyone involved in detail; whether or not their decision to admit him is deemed appropriate, the fact he did this makes him seem worthy of immediate attention in my view. Currently, the matter appears to be under control. Lady Emeralaphine enjoys flattery, but seems less swayed by it than she likes to pretend.”

Kaln blinked twice, drew his eyebrows together in sudden concern, and set off for the library doors at a brisk pace with the Commander floating along just behind and to his left.

The scene upon which he arrived within was more or less as he’d expected from Sharamin’s description. Emeralaphine sat in the wide, dragon-sized clear area between the library’s two larger doors, her neck highly arched and a pleased smile upon her muzzle as she regarded the visitor.

He was a Valefolk man, well-dressed and immaculately groomed, silver-haired with age but trim and poised as any soldier, and currently in the process of skillfully attempting to cajole Kaln’s wife.

“…regardless, good lady, I do believe myself to have been remiss. As a professional I can agree that someone recently salvaged from physical trauma should be left to rest, but as a gentleman it has weighed heavily upon me that I failed to properly express my appreciation for your great kindness.”

“Well, you may consider yourself to have done so, sir,” she replied, dipping her head once. “It was no more or less than the right thing to do. Ah, husband, good. Monsieur Clarent wished to thank me for extricating him from that djinn bottle last month in Boisverd, but I believe it is you with whom he properly has business.”

“Ah, Dragonlord Zelekhir!” The visitor turned to him and executed a courtly bow—deep, and smooth, both humble and surprisingly athletic for so simple a movement. “I am Lord Ambrose Clarent, and most honored to be in your presence under convivial circumstances. When last we were in proximity, I regret that I was too out of sorts to claim that we have properly met.”

“I do recall you, my lord,” Kaln said courteously, nodding. “Percy has spoken of you. It’s a great relief to see you well enough to travel. I am surprised that her Majesty chose to send her spymaster as a delegate, however. I thought we had established arrangements for communication?”

The spymaster—someone capable of smooth-talking his way right through the Phantom Legion. Percy had indeed spoken highly of Clarent, but Kaln was never sure exactly how much she truly understood when it came to politics. This time, she had clearly been right. This was a dangerous man.

“Ah, I fear I must correct a misconception, Dragonlord,” Clarent said with a diffident smile. “I am not here representing Boisverd or her Majesty the Queen, nor can I any longer. Owing to my role in recent events of which you are all too aware, I have been dismissed from my post.”

“The Queen is attempting to place blame upon you for her regime’s failure to control Cora d’Acron?” Izayaroa asked, approaching them from the opposite door.

None of them had said so in explicit terms, but Kaln by now was certain that this was an expected and universal draconic courtesy: they did not enter one another’s private spaces except in their smaller forms. Even though Emeralaphine had explicitly said her library was open to all members of the family, Izayaroa evidently felt it counted enough to come on two claws.

Of course, three quarters of his vault was filled with bookshelves; it could also have been that it would have been quite cramped with two full-sized dragons present.

“There is an extent to which that is true, your Excellency,” Clarent replied, turning to her and bowing again, “but I personally would not characterize it that way, nor do I feel her Majesty has treated me unfairly. Multiple failures had to occur to enable Cora’s actions, and mine were both indisputably among them, and most central to the state’s mechanism of preventing such events. My dismissal from my post was, in my opinion, proper. And if I can in the process help lend stability to the von Holtzman regime by taking with me a larger share of blame than I perhaps earned, I am content to provide this service to the kingdom I so recently failed.”

“What brings you here, then?” Kaln asked.

Clarent inclined his head toward him, smiling a benign little smile that Kaln probably would have found reassuring if he didn’t know who this man was, and how many knives it must conceal.

“It has come to my attention, my lord, that your nascent regime here in Dragonvale is bereft of an intelligence apparatus of any kind. I have come, as a seasoned professional of some considerable renown and no small personal achievement, to offer my services as spymaster.”

Kaln, both dragons, and Commander Sharamin stared at him in impassive silence, loudly pondering. Clarent smiled patiently at them all, unflinchingly poised.

“A fellow needs a job,” he added after several seconds, with a self-deprecating little shrug.

“Well, can’t say he isn’t bold,” Emeralaphine observed. “Straight from acknowledging that his own lapse nearly blew up the kingdom to suggesting we should pay for more of that kind of service.”

“Boldness can be an asset or a drawback,” Izayaroa mused, “depending on what other traits accompany it.”

“Well said,” Emeralaphine agreed.

“In addition to espionage,” Clarent said smoothly, “my duties primarily involved managing the people in my ministry. Of all the lessons I have learned about leadership, I think the most important was this: never punish failure. Whatever damage resulted from an honest mistake from which a lesson was learned was the price of the education I just spent on that subordinate. The costlier, the more unwilling I am to let someone else reap the benefit of that lesson.”

He spread his hands again, smiling up at them with humorous diffidence.

“This time, the needs of politics have dictated that Queen Henrietta is, unfortunately, unable to benefit from the very costly investment she just made in her spymaster’s ongoing development. It would be quite a coup if you were to do so in her stead.”

“This might be the smoothest talker I have ever met, and that is really saying something,” Kaln admitted. “That certainly seems relevant to his professional skills…though far from the whole of them.”

“Indeed,” Izayaroa said. “You raise an intriguing argument, monsieur. I would like to hear, then, what lesson you have learned from the disaster at Boisverd. How exactly did you fail, and how will you avoid such a debacle in the future?”

At that, Clarent’s easy smile finally faded.

“That, of course, is the question which has wholly predominated my mind every minute since,” he said without a hint of his previous savoir faire. “The entire time I was piecing together the sequence of events which led to Cora’s utter break from reality. I have withheld drawing a final conclusion until all the facts were available, as a professional must, but in truth, the conclusion I reached mere hours after the event itself proved to be the final one to which I committed.”

He paused, pressing his lips together briefly and adjusting the collar of his shirt in a manner that looked like an unconscious tic, but which Kaln was sure was meticulously calculated. To what end exactly he wasn’t sure, but nothing about this man’s presentation was left to casual impulse.

“I fear my answer will not satisfy you,” Clarent admitted, “and as such, I beg that after hearing it you grant me the opportunity to explain myself. In other circumstances I would simply tell you a more palatable one, but the fresh information flowing from Dragonvale insists that you are in possession of a marvelous magical machine that sees through all attempts at deception. It seems I had better be scrupulously forthright, for once.”

He managed a wry little smile at that.

Kaln nodded, silently, and gestured with one hand for him to proceed.

Clarent’s gray eyes flicked from Izayaroa to Emeralaphine almost too rapidly to be noticeable before fixing upon Kaln’s own, and he answered.

“I should have been a better friend to Cora.”

Both dragons tilted their heads thoughtfully to the side, which made an amusing contrast given their currently different forms.

“Interesting,” Kaln mused, gazing at Clarent’s suspiciously open expression and keeping his own as neutral as he could manage. “Counter-intuitive in a way that prompts further questions, obviously calculated to appeal to my sensibilities in particular, and apparently, on pain of discovery by the Storyteller, factually accurate.”

“Oh, is that what it is called?” Clarent said pleasantly. “I say, how apt.”

“If we regard this as an interview,” Kaln continued, “I can’t say I’m pleased by all these games. But as an audition, sir, I must say your ability to spin reality in whole new directions with a few words is a strong endorsement of your skills.”

Clarent bowed again, as poised and smooth as before.

“Very well, sir, I’m interested,” said Kaln. “Please, enlighten us as to a spy’s view of the power of friendship.”

“There are many who assume that a spy must be paranoid,” Clarent said seriously. “It’s an understandable mistake, for those outside the business, but a lethal one for those within it. Paranoia is the emotional certainty that everyone is out to get you; a spy must be calmly aware that anyone might be, and able to know who. A paranoid individual is sloppy and prone to panic. A paranoid organization is so rent by internal suspicion it barely requires any outside action to be destroyed. Often as not, it will rip itself apart with no one else’s help.”

Izayaroa and Sharamin each nodded once, expressions thoughtful.

“So no,” Clarent continued, “it is not sentiment which prompts me to say that an organization must be bound by trust and something stronger than purely pragmatic self-interest. I have destroyed enemies of my Queen by inducing paranoia within their ranks, and protected her interests by warding it away from ours. Queen Henrietta, for her part, is a skilled leader—in many ways, but notably in her ability to gather talented individuals and manage their sometimes fractious natures toward a greater purpose.”

“You trusted Lady Cora,” Kaln said quietly.

Clarent nodded. “I did. And I was, in principle, right to do so. There must be trust within the organization if it is to function. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes; it was the manner in which I trusted Cora which made me accidentally complicit in her downfall.”

“Go on,” Kaln prompted.

“Friendship can mean a lot of different things, some of them surprisingly pragmatic; people can care for one another irrespective about how much they care about each other. Truthfully, I did think of Cora as a friend. I very much liked her…prickly pragmatism, her impatience with social convention and stubborn regard for both truth and ethics at the expense of personal advantage. But more than that, it was my responsibility as the spymaster of the royal court of Boisverd to make sure that the Court Mage, like all other ranking officials, was well. And in that… I failed. Because I did indeed see Cora beginning to unravel. I took it as a sign of the stress she was under from her final task, and the need to tend to it alone—”

“Why alone?” Izayaroa interrupted.

Clarent turned to her, inclining his head politely. “As she explained it, rescuing Princess Perseverance from your clutches had to be the act of a renegade rather than the Crown itself, to draw your retaliation away from Boisverd. She explained that she planned to secure her Highness elsewhere than the capital and lay false trails leading your wrath hopefully elsewhere, but as a final resort, strictly to herself and not the kingdom.”

Emeralaphine made a soft rumbling sound deep in her chest, but offered no comment when everyone turned to look up at her. She stared at the far wall, expression lost in thought.

“As my Queen’s spymaster and Cora’s friend, both,” Clarent continued after a short pause, “it was my duty to note that she was unraveling and, despite her assurances, investigate more deeply. In truth, I did so, but…too late, and in the wrong way. It was because I confronted her at the wrong moment that I ended up in the predicament from which you graciously rescued me. Because I trusted that my old friend knew what she was about, in defiance of my own instinct that something was wrong. Cora was loyal to the last, but had I done as I ought, I would have learned she had lost her sanity before it was too late.”

“You truly believe you could have changed the outcome?” Izayaroa asked softly.

Clarent sighed. “I have learned, since, what conjuration sickness is, and means. It seems it was too late for Cora before I even met her. But in my profession…sometimes the only kindness that can still be offered a friend is a gentle, dignified end to their troubles. If I had been there for Cora, and given her that… Boisverd, at least, would have been spared the disaster she caused.”

“That,” Kaln said thoughtfully, “is a fascinating perspective.”

Clarent nodded deeply to him, wearing a sad little smile.

“It could, of course, be a barrel of bullshit,” Kaln continued, “and frankly if it was, that would still be a mark in favor of your skills, sir.”

“But right now,” Clarent replied, his smile widening, “I surmise that I am on the hook to prove my trustworthiness more than my skill, is it not so?”

“I am as impressed as I am annoyed that that silver tongue got you all the way in here,” Commander Sharamin stated curtly. “I think he’s right, my lord. This man is good, even if he did dramatically err once that we know of. Such skills are not to be taken lightly…if they can be trusted.”

“And we do have the means to seeing through even his caliber of deception,” Emeralaphine added with an eager smile.

“Please, consider me at your disposal,” said Clarent, spreading his arms again and showing zero reaction to the array of massive, murderous teeth now looming above him.

“Are you truly willing to subject yourself to an apparatus which can draw forth all your secrets?” Izayaroa said pointedly. “That seems it could be…lethal, for a veteran spymaster.”

“The answer is, as it nearly always is, it depends,” Clarent replied. “This is indeed a situation I could scarcely have imagined a very short time ago. Here and now? I find there is nothing I would like more.”

“Very well,” Kaln agreed, “I will take you at your word. This way, if you please.”