Passion Play (River of Souls 1)

Unsettled, she finished off the outgoing letters, then turned to the stacks of incoming correspondence. Her duties had changed somewhat in the past week. Now she was to open and screen letters from certain addresses.

Absorbed by her thoughts, she cut open the first letter without reading the address:

Dear Raul, Our predictions were correct. The levies for ordinary soldiers have surpassed the increase in taxes, though we are now instructed to use a different accounting …

Ilse dropped the letter. This was not an invitation or social letter. Nor was it the typical correspondence between business partners—she knew that from her father’s household. She checked the address against her list, feeling faintly queasy. Lord Nicol Joannis, regional governor from Osterling Keep. His was one of the names under “confidential.” She had blundered—badly.

I’ll have to tell Maester Hax that I opened it by accident. He’ll understand.

But her hands were still shaking when she picked up the second letter and compared its name and address to her list. It was another letter for investments, but the address read Duenne’s University.

Not my business, she told herself. Lord Kosenmark might receive financial advice from a professor, for all she knew. She put the letter into the proper stack and reached for the next.

Her hand knocked against the edge of her desk. One of the stacks tilted dangerously. Ilse lunged to stop it—too late. The stack tumbled over and the letters spilled across the floor in a glorious cascade. Cursing loudly, Ilse dropped to her knees and hastily started gathering them up. She could just picture Lord Kosenmark’s expression if he walked into her office now. At least Maester Hax could not see through two sets of closed doors.

She deposited the letters on her desk then saw she had missed one—a dirty parchment envelope without any address that had skittered underneath her desk. As she retrieved it, the sheet unfolded, and her eyes took in three words, hastily scrawled across the sheet in large blocky print: Vnejšek. Jewels. Yes.

Ilse sank back onto her heels and stared at the letter. It read like a game of word links but with strange unaccountable connections. Why was someone writing such nonsense to Lord Kosenmark?

She reread the three mysterious words, and her skin prickled. Vnejšek was the Károvín word for Anderswar—the magic realm, what the poets called the knot where all magic converged. And jewels could only refer to Lir’s lost jewels. Yes. There her imagination failed. Obviously the sender was answering a question posed by Lord Kosenmark. But why? What did he have to do with Károví’s king and Lir’s jewels?

She placed the letter in the third pile and returned to her desk. The next letter came from a merchant’s guild in the north. The name appeared in the second category. Keep going, she told herself. Stop asking questions and you’ll finish sooner. But the questions refused to subside. Why would this merchant write to Lord Kosenmark? She cast her memory over the letters she had copied during the past month. Some were directed to private merchants, but many went to the king’s advisers in Tiralien, or governors through Veraene’s far-flung provinces. Each letter revealed little. It was the larger pattern that left her breathless.

Duenne. The King’s Council. Baerne’s death. Exile.

Impossible, she thought. And yet it explained so much.

&nbs

p; He had fashioned his own court, here in Tiralien.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“… IF YOU PRESSED me for my opinion, I would recommend a barricade of thick posts, bound together with tempered metal. Of course, even metal has disadvantages. If you do not choose the highest quality, the metal rusts or breaks along hidden flaws …”

… and an alliance often requires careful tending, Ilse thought to herself as she wrote to Lord Kosenmark’s dictation.

Ten days had passed since her discovery of Lord Kosenmark’s shadow court. What she suspected to be his shadow court, she reminded herself. She had no proof other than three cryptic words from one anonymous writer.

And yet, the more Ilse considered the matter, the stranger she found all of Lord Kosenmark’s correspondence. It was like those clever paintings that seemed to depict one scene, but if the beholder closed one eye, or looked through a specially ground glass, the painting showed an entirely different subject. Otherwise innocuous phrases—a request to a duke to remember Lord Kosenmark to their friends, a passage advising another friend to have patience with his errant son—took on new and doubled meanings. A world alongside ours, Tanja Duhr had written about magic’s plane. One both surrounded and contained by other worlds. If Ilse was right, she had discovered another such realm here, in Lord Kosenmark’s pleasure house.

Ilse only hoped that her face did not betray her. Maester Hax had said nothing when she confessed to opening the letter by accident, but sometimes she caught Lord Kosenmark observing her—as he did now, she realized with a start.

“You write neatly,” Lord Kosenmark said. “Your tutors trained you well.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

He let his gaze linger on her face, as though reading something in her expression, but then shook his head. “How is Berthold today?” he asked. “Tired?”

“Tired but in good spirits, my lord.”

She thought Kosenmark looked exhausted as well. There was a languid quality to his speech and faint smudges darkened his eyes. Lord Vieth had invited Lord Kosenmark to a formal banquet next week. Judging from the increase in visitors and correspondence, Ilse guessed there would be more to this affair than just music and delicacies.

Once he finished dictating, Lord Kosenmark reviewed the letter and nodded. “Good. Bring the fair copy to me later for a signature. I’d like all these letters posted today. Speaking of today, did Berthold mention the time for our session with the tailor?”

“This afternoon, my lord. It should be the final fitting, according to Maester Hax.”

“The gods grant us mercy, I hope so.”