Better watch it or I’ll be peeing all afternoon, she thought. And remember what the headaches were like the last time you had to cold-turkey, the stuff’s too expensive and the supply’s too unreliable to get really dependent on it.

“Sit, Dame Lilianth. I am going to make you the possessor of a secret and part of a conspiracy. I have instructions from the Lady Regent and wide latitude on how to carry them out.”

The older woman sat, her plain brown eyes deliberately and annoyingly bland. “By your word,” she said, an ironic twist to her voice. “What can I do for my lady the Spider?”

Tiphaine leaned back in her swivel chair and put her hands behind her head, staring thoughtfully at the coffered ceiling.

“It’s complicated and it will need us to be very quiet and sneaky. As a start, I want you to have a fainting fit—people actually believe in those again, so useful—and call for your son-in-law’s brother’s help. He’s on garrison duty with the city castellan, isn’t he?”

“Garrick? Certainly . . . what next?”

“It’s enough like my special-ops days to make me feel nostalgic. We—”

As the door closed on Dame Lilianth, Tiphaine broke open the next dispatch. My head hurts again . . . but not as much as Astrid’s does!

Alone, she let a sudden sharp grin split her face. She relished the second of pure, unadulterated joy contemplating Astrid Loring’s concussion gave her. The thought of how the fact that Tiphaine had rescued her from the wreck of her covert ops mission gave a more subtle pleasure; it would be grit under the Hiril Dúnedain’s eyelids for the rest of her life.

Or it would be for me, in her position, and I can hope we’re enough alike for that to be so for her as well.

She worked her way through the day’s stack of wallets and made a good start on the stack of allocation files. The Association’s military system was largely self-financing, but only as long as you didn’t need to use it for anything but routine. Once vassals had done more than their regulation forty days of service in the field, they had to be paid. And of course all the allied contingents were trying to shift as much of their costs as possible onto the Portland treasury.