Ancar was nearly purple with anger - and yet he held his peace and his tongue. Ancar did not want to talk about it. Now that was a curious combination....
And to Falconsbane's mind, that spelled "obsession."
When one was obsessed with something, logic did not enter into the picture.
When one was obsessed with something, one was often blind to all else. An obsession was a weakness, a place into which a clever man could place the point of his wit, and pry until the shell cracked....
As Ancar sat silently fuming, Falconsbane made some rapid mental calculations, adding up all the information he had been gleaning from courtiers, servants, and underling mages. Ancar was a young male, and any young male hates to be defeated, but that defeat must be doubly bitter coming as it did from the hands of females. He had failed to conquer Valdemar, failed to defeat its Queen, failed to get his hands on its Princess. He had failed a military conquest not once, but twice.
But that was by no means all, as Falconsbane's probes had revealed. He had tried, with no success whatsoever, to infiltrate a spy into the ranks of the Heralds. The only agents he had in Valdemar itself were relatively ineffective and powerless ones, placed among the lowest of the merchants and peasantry. Mercenary soldiers under yet another female leader had thwarted every single assassination attempt he had made, even the ones augmented by magic.
In short, the Queen and her nearest and dearest seemed to have some kind of charmed existence. They prevailed against all odds, as if the very gods were on their side. Their success mocked Ancar and all his ambitions, and without a doubt, it all maddened him past bearing.
So Falconsbane thought.
Until Ancar finally spoke, and proved to him that in this one respect, he had underestimated the young King.
"I must expand," he said, slowly, his flush cooling. "I am using up the resources of Hardorn at a rapid rate. I need gold to pay my mages, grain to feed my armies, a hundred things that simply must be brought in from outside. I cannot go South - perhaps you will not believe me, but the Karsites are the fiercest fighters you could ever imagine in your wildest nightmares. They are religious, you see. They believe that if they die in the defense of their land, they rise straight to the feet of their God...and if they take any of the enemies of their God with them, they rise to his right hand."
Falconsbane nodded, a tiny spark of respect kindling for the King. So he understood the power a religion could hold over an enemy? Mornelithe would never have credited him with that much insight. Perhaps there was more to the boy than the Adept had assumed. "Indeed," he said in reply. "There is no more deadly an enemy than a religious fanatic. They are willing to die and desperate to take you with them."
"Precisely," Ancar sighed. "What is more, their priests have a magic that comes from their God that is quite a match for my own. When you add to all that the mountains that border their land - it is an impossible combination. Those mountains are so steep that there is no place to bring a conventional army through without suffering one ambush or trap after another."
"Well, then, what about North?" Falconsbane asked, reasonably. And to his surprise, Ancar whitened.
"Do not even mention the North," the King whispered, and glanced hastily from side to side, as if he feared being overheard. "There is something there that dwarfs even the power Karse commands. It is so great - believe me or not, as you will, but I have seen it with my own eyes - that it has created an invisible fence that no one can pass. I have found no mage that can breach it, and after the few who attempted it perished, not even Hulda is willing to try."
Falconsbane raised his eyebrows involuntarily. That was something new! An invisible wall around a country? Who - or rather, what - could ever have produced something like that? What was the name of that land, anyway? Iften? Iftel?
But Ancar had already changed the subject.
"Most of all, I cannot go Eastward," he continued, his voice resuming a normal volume, but taking on an edge of bitterness. "The Eastern Empire is large enough to swallow Hardorn and never notice; the Eastern mages are as good or better than any I can hire, and their armies are vast...and well-paid. And they are watching me. I know it."
That frightened him; Falconsbane had no trouble at all in reading his fear, it was clear in the widening of his eyes, in the tense muscles of his neck and shoulders, in the rigidity of his posture.
"At the moment, they seem to feel that Hardorn is not worth the fight it would take to conquer it. They had a treaty with my father, which they have left in place, but the Emperor has not actually signed a treaty with my regime. Emperor Charliss has not even sent an envoy until very recently. I believe they are watching me, assessing me. But if I fail to take Valdemar, they will assume that I am weak enough to conquer." He grimaced. "My father had treaties of mutual defense with Valdemar and Iftel to protect him. I do not have those. I had not thought I would need them."
"Then do not attempt Valdemar a third time," Falconsbane suggested mildly.
Ancar's jaw clenched. "If I do not, the result will be the same. The Emperor Charliss will assume I am too weak to try. They have sent their ambassador here, and an entourage with him, as if they were planning on signing the treaty soon, but they have not deceived me. These people are not here to make treaties, they are here to spy on me. There are spies all over Hardorn by now. I have found some - "
"I trust you left them in place," Mornelithe said automatically.
He snorted. "Of course I did, I am not that big a fool. The best spy is the one you know! But I am also not so foolish as to think that I have found them all." He rose and began pacing in front of the fire, still talking. "One of the reasons I am sure that I have been unable to attract mages of any great ability is that the Emperor can afford to pay them far more than I can offer. I am fairly certain that the mages I have are not creatures of his, but there is no way of telling if he has placed mages as spies in my court and outside of it. So long as they practiced their mage-craft secretly, how would I ever know what they were?"
Falconsbane refrained from pointing out that he had just told the boy how he would know, that disturbances in the energy-fields would tell him. Perhaps neither he nor his mages were sensitive to those fields. It was not unheard of, though such mages rarely rose above Master. Perhaps he was sensitive, but only when in trance. If so, that was the fault of his teacher.
Ancar abruptly turned and strode back to the window, standing with his back to Falconsbane and the room, staring at the rapidly-clearing clouds.
"This is something I had not seen before," he said, as if to himself. "And I had not known that magic could wreck such inadvertent and accidental havoc. It would be an excellent weapon...."