Chapter 64: Maren
It had been two days since the ball, but the castle hadn’t moved. No one knew what she was anymore. The bed warmer who was called a whore or the bed warmer who then danced with the duke while his fiancée watched.
People who had ignored her for weeks were now making eye contact with her.
Emeric approached her after the breakfast. He had been watching everything with scholarly interest.
"You’ve been upgraded," he said, falling into step beside her. "From furniture to weather event. Nobody knows what you’ll do next, so they’re all carrying umbrellas."
She smiled.
"You looked distracted earlier," he said.
"I have a meeting."
"With whom?"
She hesitated.
"It’s okay ," he said. "But be careful."
Then he walked away.
Austin was waiting for her in the corridor outside his room. Alina arrived and they both walked together without speaking a word. He led her through the corridors she hadn’t seen before.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"You’ll see."
She glanced at him but he didn’t turn. He stopped at a door and knocked. Then again and the door opened.
The room was small with no windows. Walls were covered in maps. Threads stretched between pinned locations and red marks she couldn’t understand. The desk was buried under papers and the room smelled like ink and something old.
A woman in her forties stood behind the desk.
She looked at Alina the way Austin looked at chess boards, reading her.
"This is your bed warmer," she said.
"This is my intelligence consultant."
The woman raised her eyebrow. She looked at Alina again and the eye contact made her uncomfortable.
"What do you know about cipher analysis?" she asked.
"Nothing." Alina replied.
"Good," she smiled. "People who think they know things are harder to teach."
She extended her hand.
"Maren."
"Alina Ashworth," she replied taking her hand.
Maren then moved and sat behind her desk. Austin leaned against the wall by the door, his arms crossed. In this room, he wasn’t the duke instead, a guest in Maren’s kingdom.
"You mapped the Voss network from trade registries," Maren said.
"Partially. His Grace added three names."
"I’ve added seven more." Maren pulled out a map.
Alina stared at it. It was her map but was now more detailed and was being used by a spymaster as a working document.
"Your instincts are good," Maren said. "But you’ve made two errors in the timeline that would have sent an agent in the wrong direction for weeks."
"Which ones?"
Maren pointed at the grain contract, Alina had the date wrong by a year, and one of the family collapses she had connected to Voss was actually connected to a separate debt dispute.
She then spread new documents on the desk. It included closed encoded letters, shipping movements, and a few highlighted financial records.
"The network operates in negative space," Maren said. "You won’t find Voss by looking for him. You’ll find him by looking for the hole where Voss should be. "
"Is someone still operating the network?" Alina asked .
"Obviously."
"Who?"
Maren looked at Austin but he was looking at Alina.
"We don’t know yet," Maren said. "The network’s financial records connect to a trust which is controlled by a family with significant court connections. We don’t know about the family."
"But why do you suspect?"
Maren didn’t answer and that silence already answered her. Alina then read the encoded letters.
"This one," she said, pointing to the second letter. "The weather report is wrong."
Maren leaned in.
"How do you know?"
"It describes three weeks of rain in the southern ports during the harvest season. Evelyn’s uncle works in the southern docks. He complained about the drought this season. Whoever wrote this letter is using weather as a code because they assumed nobody would bother checking."
"Wow! You just found a cipher key my best agent missed for three weeks," Maren said.
"Intelligence consultant," Austin added.
"Right." Maren turned back to Alina. "If they’re coded, then every weather reference in the letters is actually a message. We need to decode the pattern. Rain might mean shipments, drought might mean delays and temperature could be personnel movements."
"Or it could be simpler," Alina said. "What if rain means money? It rains...money flows. Drought...money stops. Three weeks of rain in the south...three shipments of funds through the southern ports."
Maren stared at her and pulled out a financial record for cross reference.
"There were three deposits through southern intermediaries in the same period the letter describes three weeks of rain." She looked up. "You just cracked a cipher in ten minutes that’s been sitting on my desk for a month."
"I’m good at reading what people actually mean when they’re pretending to mean something else," Alina replied. "It’s the only language spoken in this castle."
Austin from the wall, watched her. He had a trade dispute, a military report to read but he was watching Alina discussing weather codes with his spymaster.
Alina had pulled a chair to Maren’s desk without Maren asking her to and asked her questions her no one else did. Maren had never been this much patient with anybody else not even with Austin.
She is extraordinary.
The thought came into his head uninvited.
Maren stood up after the briefing was over. She locked the encoded letters in a drawer and turned to Austin.
"Where did you find her?" Maren asked.
Austin hesitated.
"Her father... sold her to me."
"His loss."
Then she walked out and the room went quiet. Alina was still sitting at the desk, thinking about the letters.
"She likes me," Alina said.
Austin pushed off the wall.
"Maren doesn’t like anyone."
"She does. I can tell."
"How?"
"She told me my methodology was useless but then she let me sit beside her and read her encoded letters." Alina turned to look at him. "That’s affection in spy language."
He smiled.
"Thank you," she said. "For bringing me here."
"We should go," he replied. "I have other matters to attend."
"I also have to go to the garden for my sewing circle. I completely forgot about it," she almost panicked.
"From intelligence briefing to sewing circle?"
"My range is extensive."
He smiled again and opened the door for her.
They both stepped outside and walked in the same direction together with a new kind of understanding between them that was unspoken but impossible to ignore.