He shouldn’t have said “a few weeks.” The younger man had looked ready to faint when he’d said that.

He had written a hurried letter to the High Lord about the discrepancies he had found in the service fair records but then had hesitated over sending it, wondering if his own exhaustion had made something sinister out of what was really just sloppy clerical work.

No matter. As soon as he was home again, he would write a more thoughtful, carefully worded letter, one that expressed concern rather than alarm.

He had just reached this decision when the door swung open and Lord Jorval entered the room.

“I’m glad you came, Magstrom,” Jorval said a little breathlessly. “I wasn’t sure who else I could trust. But anyone who’s worked with you knows you couldn’t be involved in this.”

“And just what is ‘this’?” Magstrom asked cautiously.

Jorval went to the shelves holding the records and pulled out a thick folder.

Magstrom’s stomach tightened. It was the Hayllian folder—the same one he had examined before his hasty departure from Goth.

Jorval’s hands trembled as he leafed through the papers, then put several on the large table. “Look. There are discrepancies in these lists.” Hurrying to the shelves, he pulled out several folders and dumped them on the table. “And not only in the Hayllian lists. At first I thought it was a clerical error, but…” Taking a sheet of paper from one of the folders, he pointed. “Do you remember this man? He was most unsuitable to immigrate to Kaeleer. Most unsuitable.”

“I remember him,” Magstrom said faintly. A brute of a man whose psychic scent had made his skin crawl. “He was accepted into a court?”

“Yes,” Jorval said grimly. “This one.”

Magstrom squinted at the scrawled writing. The Queen’s name and the territory she ruled were almost illegible. The only thing he could definitely make out was that the territory was in Little Terreille. “Who is this…Hektek?”

“I don’t know. There is no Queen named Hektek who rules so much as a village in Little Terreille. But thirty Terreilleans were accepted into this alleged court. Thirty.”

“Then where are these people going?”

Jorval hesitated. “I think someone is secretly creating an army right under our noses, using the service fair to cover the tracks.”

Magstrom swallowed hard. “Do you know who?” he asked, half expecting Jorval to accuse the High Lord—which was ridiculous.