“He keeps saying he’s really a Halveric soldier and he doesn’t know anything about the other one.”

“I am a Halveric,” the man said. “I mean, not a Halveric by family, but I’ve been in Halveric Company eleven years.”

“I don’t believe you,” Kieri said. He hitched a hip onto Garris’s desk and looked into the man’s eyes. The man blinked, as most people did, and unlike the most egregious liars Kieri had known. “But let’s begin. Why didn’t you give your message to a courier at the relay station?”

“Because there wasn’t a courier at the relay station,” the man said. “Nobody was there. Just horses in the stable. I thought they’d probably already been sent, but Captain Talgan said his message had to get through. So I left my horse, and a note, and took one of the others.”

“Why did you think others had gone if horses were there?”

The man’s brow furrowed. “Well … I guess I thought those were the horses they’d left—but they were fresh. Maybe they left enough earlier the horses had rested up—”

“And maybe you’re lying. What happened at the next relay post? More missing couriers?”

“No—but they let me have a horse when I told them I had to get through.”

“You didn’t think to hand it over and go back to your captain?”

“No, sir—my lord—because I was already too far to be back by when Captain Talgan said, and if I was going to be over my time, I thought it didn’t matter how much—and they said fine, because they were a courier short anyway.”

That sounded almost reasonable. Kieri tried to think of something to ask that a Pargunese spy couldn’t have learned by lurking near the camp. “Did you come north with Talgan in the summer?”

“Yes, sir—my lord.”

“Where was your closest camp to Chaya?”

The man stared, as if surprised. “Why, sir—my lord—you know—it was just down behind the palace, in the water meadows.”

“And what did you eat—what were your trail rations?”

“Trail rations! We didn’t eat trail rations. We had food sent out from the palace. Bread still hot from the oven, roast meat, even some of those funny little pastries with pointy tops—”

The man must have been with the Halverics, then.

“What’s Captain Talgan’s nickname among the troops?” Kieri asked. “The one you think he doesn’t know?”

The man flushed. “It’s … not polite … sir.”

“I know that. Most nicknames aren’t. Come now, tell me.”

“You won’t tell him I said it?”

“No,” Kieri said.

The man knew the nickname and came out with it, still red in the face. “And it’s only because that time old Sergeant Manka, that’s been retired these five years, saw him in the—”

“I know,” Kieri said. He sighed. “Beldan, I now believe you are in fact a Halveric soldier, but I am not certain you aren’t also a traitor. Why is your pouch wet?”

“I told Sir Garris—it was the snow, falling off the trees and landing on the saddle. But the inside’s not wet; I opened it to check before I went to the jacks.”