Months bled into a full year. The peace, bought with our deception, held. The Kingdom of Aerthos, convinced of our internal collapse, remained quiescent. It was a golden age for the Wastes Confederacy. Our cities grew, our trade flourished, and our people knew a level of prosperity and security their ancestors could only have dreamed of. And all the while, the snake we had charmed, the double agent Cassius, sang his soothing, poisonous lullabies into the ear of Lord Vaelin.
Now, it was time to see the first real fruits of our shadow war. I needed to test the extent of my control over the kingdom's intelligence apparatus and to further entrench their mistaken beliefs. I conceived of a grand deception, a lie so large and so tempting that Vaelin would have no choice but to act upon it.
Through Cassius, I began to feed Vaelin a carefully constructed narrative. The "weak" new lord of Ironpeak, Ulf, had been "deposed" by an even more brutish faction of miners who were hoarding the settlement's "meager" remaining iron stores. More importantly, Cassius reported that a "schism" had occurred between Oakhaven and the Ashen tribe. The proud nomads, he whispered, were chafing under my "tyrannical" rule and my plans to turn their grazing lands into farms. He reported that Chieftainess Anya was dead, and her "impetuous" son Kai was planning to break from the Confederacy, taking his horse archers with him.
To make the lie irresistible, Cassius informed Vaelin of the location of a "secret meeting" between Kai's rebellious faction and the new "isolationist" leaders of Ironpeak. The meeting was to take place at a remote, abandoned oasis, where they would forge their own separate alliance, leaving Oakhaven isolated and vulnerable.
It was, of course, a complete fabrication. The location was a trap.
The bait was too tempting for Vaelin to ignore. The chance to shatter the Confederacy completely by sponsoring a civil war was the culmination of his entire strategy. As I had predicted, he took it.
He dispatched a secret shipment of royal gold and a cadre of his own agents, led by one of his most trusted lieutenants, to the rendezvous point. Their mission was to formalize the alliance with the "rebels," to provide them with the gold to fund their war against me, and to coordinate their attacks.
The "secret meeting" was a carefully staged piece of theater. The "rebellious" Ironpeak miners were actually a company of Grak's most loyal Iron Guard, disguised in rougher gear. The "rebellious" Ashen archers were Kai's own elite Rangers.
When the royal delegation arrived at the oasis, they walked into a perfectly laid trap. They were surrounded and captured without a single drop of blood being shed. The King's gold, sent to fund a civil war against me, was now in my treasury. The King's spies, sent to orchestrate my downfall, were now in my dungeons.
The captured royal lieutenant, a proud and arrogant noble, was brought before me in my war room in Oakhaven. He stared at me, his face a mask of utter, uncomprehending shock.
"How?" he stammered. "Our intelligence… it was perfect."
"Your intelligence was a story I wrote for you," I told him calmly, pushing a stack of captured royal dispatches across the table, all of them detailing Vaelin's plans, all of them provided by Cassius.
The man's face paled as he realized the truth. He was not a victim of bad luck. He was a pawn in a game he had not even known he was playing.
The victory was total. We had not only avoided a civil war, we had funded our treasury with the King's own gold and captured a dozen more high-level intelligence assets. I sent another message back to the capital via my own network. It was not a message for the King, but for Lord Vaelin himself. It was a single, perfect, uncut diamond from a mine deep within Ironpeak—a resource the kingdom did not know we possessed. There was no note. None was needed.
Vaelin would understand. He would know that his agent was turned, that his plans were compromised, and that I knew things he thought were utter secrets. He would know that I was not just reacting to his moves, but that I was now three steps ahead, manipulating his entire strategy. The Master of Whispers had been outplayed. His shadow war had failed. And he now faced a terrifying new reality: his enemy was not just a barbarian with a strong army, but a rival spymaster who seemed to be able to read his very mind. The game had changed, again.