“As hungry as the Empire is, if that place is wild, that means it’s too costly for the Empire to expand into. The way things are going, Kordas sees it—and, word has it, the Foreseers, who have ever more distressing visions—it’s either be preyed upon by monsters there, or by the Emperor here,” her sister said, with a clenched jaw. “I’ll take the monsters. At least they’d be honest about destroying us.”

“But—” Delia began, then paused. “You say that Foreseers are making predictions? How would you know that? How would Kordas know what visions Foreseers have?”

Isla answered, “That, neither the Circle, nor Kordas, nor Hakkon will tell me. The most I know is that Kordas said something about salvage.”

Delia snapped her fingers. “‘What one layer knows, the second layer over on each side can’t learn,’ Ceri said earlier. The Circle seem like they’ve always been here, so they must be the mages that Kordas’s father wanted to gather. Now, they are Valdemaran, and nobody questions them being at the manor because—because they’ve always been there, to everyone alive now. And what each of us knows isn’t the same as what every ‘layer’ knows. None of us know the whole plan. Need to know, Dole said.”

“There are three things to do when someone is too close to keep a secret safely hidden. You can tell them nothing, which makes the person resentful or even more curious, and they dig where they shouldn’t. Another way is to tell them everything, which gives them too much knowledge of the whole, which makes it harder for them to maintain the self-control of keeping it all secret. The third option is what we’ve all agreed upon: tell enough that the person knows when to stop asking for details,” Isla confirmed. “Staying away from Court means more than just staying at an inconvenient distance for being stabbed. It means that none of the powerful players in Court recognize Valdemar’s ways as anything but plodding, weird, and harmless. And, since none of them could trust each other enough for a long-term, many-pieced plan to work, they don’t even think to look for one.” She jerked a thumb toward the manor. “Enough so that the Imperial spies think of Valdemar almost as a punishment assignment. Nothing apparently happens here. The highest-ranked spy in all of Valdemar is widely known as the highest-ranked spy in all of Valdemar, and he’s practically retired.”

“Right. A good spy wouldn’t have even been suspected, but someone has to care about their work to do it well. So he found a place to stay drowsy, and keep his rank without the work.”