Initially, the Plan was for Valdemar to escape the Empire, which has turned even worse since Father devised it. Then I twisted the Plan into getting the abused children out, and then the Dolls, and the truth prisoners, and supplies, and now I’ve found myself thinking about the innocents in the City, from blacksmiths to noodle-cooks. Father’s Plan is My Plan now, not The Plan. If the City will be annihilated, anything and anyone left here would be incinerated anyway, so—my conscience is clear about my secret sacking of the City. If the Emperor sees the Foreseer reports, though, he’ll be enraged with paranoia, unleash every hound he has—and he’ll discover the Plan. It’s all about what the Emperor reacts to.

He exhaled hard, because he could only come up with one solution.

It never stops. It only escalates.

—

Kordas resumed his performance the next morning. He stormed around Court abusing Isla and Hakkon to anyone who would listen. He channeled his very real anger at not being allowed to go home into feigned anger at them. In a few more days, anyone who saw him coming would hastily find something else they urgently needed to do.

Then he changed his tune again. He begged people to tell him how to win his wife back—or at the very least, get the Emperor to hear his petition to go home. He would bargain with anyone, which made him amusing again, as people gave him all sorts of absurd advice about his wife. No one, however, was willing to bargain with him for access to the Emperor. That was apparently one line they would not cross.

He kept that up for about six days more. Some of his desperation was real. It was perilously close to the day of the Regatta. He still had no good idea of how to protect the stubborn people who were intending, no matter what, to remain in Valdemar. The Record Keeper had been unable to give him any help either. In fact, the only other thing the Record Keeper had been able to advise him on was what to do about Merrin’s spies . . .

Which had been, quite simply, to take them prisoner and allow the Record Keeper to forge reports to Merrin from them. So the spies were cooling their heels securely locked in the never-used prison cells of the Valdemar manor. They were being treated well, and on the day after the Regatta, the spell-locked door would swing open. So that was all right.

But it didn’t help Kordas at all.