The girl who’d done Orlanko’s dirty work for so many years, who’d flitted from shadow to shadow like a breeze and spent hours waiting for a single unguarded moment, that girl would never have let the queen come so close to disaster. Just thinking about it brought bile to the back of Sothe’s throat, the thump of the explosion and the rush of realizing how close they’d come. Soft.

So she stalked through the grounds of Clover-by-Ost, sneaking up on her own men, trying to approach as an intruder might. A smart, patient, knowledgeable intruder, someone who knew the security inside and out and wasn’t afraid of dying if it meant success. Herself, in other words.

She’d chosen Clover-by-Ost, an estate that had been gifted to the crown by the late queen’s family, because its remote location and rambling, enormous size meant that the illusion she planned to create was that much more plausible. The staff was as big as the house, and Sothe had taken care to give the various branches contradictory instructions in the matter of cleaning, meals, and laundry. The resulting confusion, with bedding regularly changed twice or not at all, feasts delivered to the wrong room, and garments ruined from overwashing, meant that it was easy to conceal the fact that meals went uneaten and beds unslept in.

Everyone knew the queen was staying at the house. No one had seen her, of course, but everyone had a friend who’d caught a glimpse, or knew someone whose cousin had been scrubbing a window when the royal presence had turned the corner, or—

It was a simple game, almost a childish one. Sothe played it out more from habit than anything else. Gossipy staff worried her less than the watchers the Directory deployed, official and unofficial. She thwarted these spies by layering the house around with elaborate security—easily justified, in the name of protecting the queen—and a great deal of straightforward bribery. Maurisk’s agents wrote long, carefully annotated reports, unaware that the couriers they trusted to deliver them instead handed them to Sothe to amend. Their simple ciphers would have made the least of the Last Duke’s analysts roll his eyes in contempt.

Standards, Sothe reflected, had certainly fallen since the old days. Orlanko had been a vicious, backstabbing, power-mad bastard, but no one could say a word against the efficiency of his organization. Sothe had always respected efficiency.