The Rebel Assassin

Chapter 26: Little Princess

It was a testament to the effectiveness of her new circle that Magali accomplished as much as she did within a single day after the night of the meeting.

Arriving back at the castle in the middle of the night, she summoned Caer and informed him shortly of what had happened. Her new alliance with Aiden, the existence of a weapon that could harmlessly kill Guardians, and the death of the Sage he accepted with mounting levels of shock but without a word spoken. Possibly spending so much time around Morane had made him accept the nearly-impossible much more quickly.

"And he let slip that it was Iso's spy girl who informed him I was meeting with Aiden. Any ideas what he meant?" Magali finished briskly as she pulled her hair from its elaborate braids. There were no handmaids present to help with undressing, because she did not trust them to be within earshot while she talked to her spymaster. That was a new development that stabbed at her when she let herself consider it; she used to rely on the comforting presence of her attendants, the few people she had her back when others gossiped about her utter lack of royal presence or political finesse. Now, she felt a prickling uneasiness when they were around while she made plans with Caer or Irina.

Her Guardians were supposed to take their place. They were supposed to support her unwaveringly and help her particularly in times like this. Instead, she had a traitor Assassin, an ineffectual Thief, and a Knight held tauntingly just out of reach. It wasn't fair.

She had felt so... free, those few weeks when Morane seemed to take her side. She'd felt the rightness of the Heir and a Guardian working in tandem. But Morane had ruined it. And Irina, Caer, Luca... none of them could fill that emptiness.

Caer looked up from his notes, taken in a complicated code he could write in almost as quickly and naturally as the alphabet. "My first thought would be Galatea, though we haven't actually caught her spying on anything. She's just always turning up in places, you know?"

"That was my assumption too. If she was the one who told Tobias, I want to know by tonight how much spying she's done and why we didn't know before now."

Caer looked a little insulted at the idea that another spy could have been spying right beneath his nose, but he couldn't deny the urgency of finding out how much Galatea knew.

The ambassador's daughter had been a slippery shadow of her father since their arrival — a match for even Irina in her apparent talent for every aspect of court life. From matching wits with courtiers to beating the once-Royal Thief at a friendly duel, she'd gone out of her way to demonstrate Englescroft's supposed superiority, all the while barely maintaining a façade of naiveté. No one who paid close attention could miss the deadly aim of her veiled insults or the cunning in her eyes. It was just a matter of who bothered to look.

Once, Magali would have hated her on principal. It had seemed dirty to be so deceitful. But without Morane, she didn't know how else to achieve her goals without using Galatea's methods. Without meaning to, she had woken up one day and realized they were becoming more similar than she'd ever anticipated. It was not a happy feeling, yet there was a sort of pride to it as well.

They used to laugh at how inept she was as a future ruler, thinking her too shy and nervous. Soon they'd wonder if she had been faking all along. If she was good enough, they would think she had never been weak at all.

"We will search the ambassador's rooms while they're out," Caer promised. "...again, that is, since we must have done so a dozen times by now."

"Then do something different this time. Widen your search. You remember how when the Thief — I mean, the Assassin, that damned rebel, you know who I mean — when she and the former captain infiltrated the palace to assassinate the ambassador, we found Iso tied up in the empty wing?"