The Rogue Guardian

Chapter 81: Old Rooms

Joshua and I met in his old office. No one had been appointed to his old position yet, so it was empty and dark in the late evening.

"The Sage is in disgrace," he explained, sitting sideways in his old desk chair with his legs over one arm. "The king won't be letting him appoint anyone to anything for quite some time."

"You found that out today? I thought you were planning how to get to Iso."

He shrugged. "I was. I also overheard a lot of gossip while I was at it, and Tobias... well, no one likes him, so nobody can shut up when he gets knocked down a peg or three."

I snorted. That was true. Not so long ago the same was also true about Joshua. When I beat him in the training yards during the duel of words versus sword, the guards' mess hall hadn't let it go for weeks. But at least Joshua had been respected as a good fighter and tough trainer and honorable man even when people grumbled about him. Only nobles who had to face Tobias's influence over the king respected (or rather, hated and had to cover it up) the Sage. The guards and servants and clerks would be ecstatic about his humiliation.

"Alright, so what's the plan for Iso?"

"Simple. I found out that he tends to take late night walks around the castle, often up to the ramparts. Insomnia, or something."

I raised an eyebrow. "You know, I did run into him one night, very late. He looked suspicious, but—" I shrugged. "He always looks suspicious." And I hadn't been very focused on him anyway. I'd been more interested in how Caer apparently knew about the secret records room in the dungeons and visited it regularly. Of course, I realized now that as the spymaster Caer probably had business with the records there, or had been on his way to interrogate a prisoner. It was truly astonishing how many clues I'd missed.

"Why were you— no, never mind, I don't want to know why you were walking around in the middle of the night. The point is, that's our plan. We'll scale the wall up to his window, keep watch, and follow him when he leaves. I can't predict his route, but we'll corner him in the first isolated nook we come across."

"Oh, simple."

"Why does that sound sarcastic?"

I rolled my eyes. "Because you make it unnecessarily complicated. Why don't we just take care of it in his rooms and not bother with the following and cornering?"

"Because, genius, there could be spies listening."

I stared at him. "Uh, how?"

He swung his legs from over the arm of the chair and stood up, going over to the wall. "You know there are passages in the castle walls?"

"Of course. But only in some places."

"Yeah. Some of those places are the ambassador's rooms. All of the different ambassador quarters, actually. Places for the royal spies to listen in on anything ambassadors might be planning in the so-called privacy of their rooms. We're not big on trusting foreigners in our castle." He pointed at a detail in the molding above his head. "In Iso's sitting room, for example, there could be a spy hole hidden in something like that."

So anything that happened in Iso's rooms might be known by any number of people. Like my horrible dinner with him, for example,

"You knew!" I realized. "When I came to tell you that Iso threatened me during our dinner, you already knew! Someone was listening to us talking, weren't they?"

"I had an informant in the royal spies," Joshua admitted. "A previous auxiliary guardsman who didn't see anything wrong with answering any questions his old captain asked him. Once people get used to answering to your authority, they have trouble accepting they're supposed to belong to someone else."