The “Emperor’s little bird” she referred to was the lord of one of the fourteen manors in his Duchy, a man who had been there as long as he could remember, although he was not in any way related to the original lord who had held that land and title. Whether Lord Merrin had been specifically planted there during Kordas’s father’s tenure, or had volunteered for the position of “Emperor’s ‘secret’ informant” after taking over the property, was a mystery he wasn’t particularly concerned with solving. Getting rid of the man was the last thing on Kordas’s mind. Much better to know who all the informants were, so he knew exactly what the Emperor was being told at all times.

The fellow actually thought he had a foolproof method of sending his reports to his master; he wrote them by hand and placed them in a box on his desk. The box had a spell on it that caused anything placed in it to travel to an identical box somewhere in the Emperor’s Palace. Probably not directly to the Emperor’s private office; Lord Merrin was a very small bird, and Kordas was an equally small fish.

Merrin, however, is absolutely sure that he has the ear of the Emperor himself. His attitude of smug “I know something you don’t know” was a dead giveaway. If Kordas hadn’t already known Merrin was the resident spy, that attitude alone would have told him.

What Merrin didn’t know was that the magnificent desk he had in his private office also had a spell on it. Anything that he wrote on it was reproduced in Kordas’s study, on stacks of paper kept in a drawer in Kordas’s desk for just that purpose. The drawer and Merrin’s desk were made from the same tree, which had made the spells trivially easy for a competent mage to create. Kordas had done it himself as one of the first pieces of magical business after his father had died and he had been confirmed as the Duke.

It had also been trivially easy for him to get Merrin to want that desk. It had taken the sacrifice of one of the Duchy’s most magnificent deramon elm trees, a tree which featured amazing grain and spectacular color. And it had taken the best cabinetmaker in the Duchy most of a year to produce the beautifully carved, ornamented, and polished desk. After that, all it had taken was for Merrin to see the desk, and hear the sad and entirely fictitious story that the cabinetmaker had hoped to sell the desk to Kordas, but that Kordas had laughed and said, “What do I need with a desk when I already have one?” That piqued Merrin’s curiosity, and the low-but-not-suspiciously-low price for it, coupled with the cabinetmaker’s eagerness for more work, had cemented Merrin’s avarice.