Bad Spirits by Cherry Pickett

Author:Cherry Pickett [Pickett, Cherry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, romantic tragedy, gay fiction
Publisher: Ink & Bleed
Published: 2017-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

Five

It had been difficult to get a message off, much more difficult than Ilya had anticipated. He’d been hoping that, after three months in Norcross, he’d be given much more freedom than he had been. He couldn’t guarantee his mail wasn’t being read before it left Norcross. There were no phones, no telegrams, no wires. He’d been reduced to sending smoke signals, but he couldn’t do that within the city limits, and it was impossible for him to get outside the city walls without someone—usually Timmo—trailing him. Everywhere he went, so went one of the Nords. It was more than clear to him that they didn’t trust him, not even after three long months in their midst. It was starting to drive him mad, and not even because of how it was interfering with his mission.

Of course, he mused, it wasn’t all bad, not by a long stretch. Since he was constantly in their company, he often trailed them to places others would have been barred: the audience chamber, the parliament, the Queen’s own chambers; nothing was off-limits. And for people who didn’t trust him very much, they certainly spoke about a lot of sensitive information: the unrest in the North, the Rus closing in, the diplomats that Ilya had seen and watched—Rus diplomats who had no idea who he was or why he was here or what he was doing to further their cause. And he, for his part, was entirely silent about his complacency in Rus’s schemes.

They spoke of their military: quite weak, ill-funded, backwards, and understaffed, as far as Ilya gathered. They spoke of their border protection and their own spies in Rus territory, the reports of their spies in Rus’s capital. They spoke of their plans and their battles and debated when to put their troops into action. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they spoke of their magic.

Ilya hadn’t believed in magic before he came to Norcross, not since he was a very small child. But here, he could see it now, in everything: in the way the Queen moved, in the flickering starfaeries in the night, in Timmo’s wall of water summoned in the streets. And, though he didn’t understand it at all, he saw it and he reported it back to the intelligence officers in Rus. They could figure out what to do about it.

Because that was the secret, apparently; that was how the Nords had beaten the Rus back time and time again: with their magic. The Rus simply hadn’t understood it. The few had triumphed against the mighty, even with their backwards methods and weapons, and they had triumphed because they had this secret weapon that the enemy had never been able to quite wrap their heads around.

But now Ilya knew and, maybe he didn’t understand, and maybe he didn’t want to understand, but he saw and heard and he understood well enough what he saw and what was said.

The only problem was trying to get the damn information back to Rus.

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