She's A Superspy ? OMG, What A Plot

For three days, we were trapped in a state of bureaucratic paralysis. My office, the newly-christened headquarters of the Royal Special Task Force for Absolutely Nothing, had become a pressure cooker of simmering frustration. We had our villain’s name, Grand Cleric Alistair, but we had no proof. And accusing a high-ranking official from the Holy Kingdom of terrorism without proof was the political equivalent of juggling live grenades just to see what would happen.

It was, I had to admit, the perfect excuse to do nothing.

“There’s no proof, so there’s no mission,” I declared for the tenth time from my comfortable position, feet up on my desk. “This is a cold case. All leads have been exhausted. Wake me up when you find a smoking gun. Or, preferably, don’t.”

This philosophy was not shared by my new co-workers. Justus, my personal paladin, spent his days pacing the office like a caged lion, muttering about purging heresy and his betrayed honor. He was a tightly-coiled spring of righteous fury, and it was making it very hard for me to concentrate on my nap.

Eliza, on the other hand, had buried herself in a mountain of historical records and financial ledgers she had requisitioned from the royal archives. She was a bloodhound searching for a paper trail, but as she’d angrily announced this morning, Alistair’s official record was “disgustingly, impeccably clean.” She was hitting a bureaucratic brick wall, and her frustration was radiating off her in cold, analytical waves.

Edgar was just trying to keep up, his desk now covered in half-finished drafts of a new report titled “Preliminary Investigation into Potentially Heretical, Non-Demonic, Holy-Powered Vandalism.” The poor kid was going to need therapy.

On the evening of the third day, just as I was about to call it a day and retreat to my castle bedroom, the door to the office opened without a knock.

Princess Marie stood there, silhouetted by the hallway light. She was dressed not in a royal gown, but in a simple, dark traveling cloak, her silver hair braided back. She dismissed the two royal guards who had escorted her with a simple nod, and they vanished, leaving us alone. Her usual teasing smile was gone, replaced by an expression of sharp, serious purpose.

She glided into the room, her eyes taking in the scene of stagnant despair: Justus’s pacing, Eliza’s mountain of scrolls, my expertly-feigned indifference.

“So,” she said, her voice cutting through the tense silence. “You have a dragon by the tail, but you can’t prove it has scales. A classic political dilemma.”

“We have a name, but no evidence,” Eliza said, not looking up from her work. “Without evidence, any action would be tantamount to a declaration of war against the Holy Kingdom.”

“Indeed,” Marie said. She walked over to my desk and placed a slim, unmarked leather portfolio on it. It landed with a soft, definitive thud. “Which is why I took the liberty of acquiring some for you.”

We all froze. I slowly took my feet off the desk.

“After our meeting with my father,” Marie continued, her voice low and conspiratorial, “I realized that your official channels would be insufficient. The Bureau of Order is powerful, but it is public. It cannot act against a foreign power without cause. I, however, am not bound by the same restrictions.”

My mind was racing. Wait a minute. What is she saying?

“I utilized my own… private channels,” she said, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “Contacts my family has maintained for generations, well outside the purview of the court. Spies, informants, disgruntled scribes in the Holy Kingdom with a fondness for Lysvalde’s gold.”

Holy crap. The princess is a superspy. I thought she was just a professional troll, but she’s running her own private intelligence agency. I have severely, catastrophically underestimated how scary this woman is.

Eliza was on her feet now, her usual composure gone, replaced by a look of sheer, professional astonishment. She opened the portfolio. The rest of us gathered around.

The documents inside weren’t a signed confession. They were better. It was a collection of encrypted shipping manifests, coded financial ledgers, and copies of intercepted magical communiques, all pieced together with meticulous care.

Marie pointed to the first document. “These are financial records from several businesses owned by the Holy Kingdom’s church. Over the past five years, large, untraceable sums of money have been funneled from them into a series of shell corporations.”

She laid out the next document. “These are the purchase orders from those shell corporations. They’ve been buying rare, volatile, and highly restricted magical components. The kind needed for large-scale, experimental rune magic.”

She then produced a map, placing it on my desk. It was marked with a dozen different locations, spread across several kingdoms. “And these,” she said, her finger tracing a line, “are the final shipping destinations for those components. All of them are within a day’s ride of a place that reported a major, unexplained ‘magical anomaly’ within a month of the delivery.”

It was a perfect paper trail of terror, a conspiracy laid bare in receipts and ledgers.

“But this is all circumstantial,” Eliza breathed, her eyes wide with a mixture of horror and academic excitement. “It doesn’t name him.”

“No,” Marie said, pointing to the bottom of the final authorization form. “But this does.”

At the bottom of each high-level transaction was a single, complex magical cipher, an authorization seal that could not be forged.

“The royal cryptographers worked on this for two days straight,” Marie said. “It’s a cipher known to be used by only one person in the entire Holy Kingdom, on his most private and sensitive correspondence.”

Her eyes met mine. “Grand Cleric Alistair.”

It was the smoking gun. It was the entire armory.

Justus stared at the documents, his face pale. The vague heresy he had been forced to reveal was now a concrete, documented plot of international terrorism, orchestrated by the man who had been his mentor.

“Now you have your proof,” Marie said, her voice calm but filled with a cold fury. “Alistair’s plot is a threat to the peace my grandfather fought to secure. I will not stand by and watch a fanatic drag our nations back into a dark age for his own glory.” She looked around at all of us, her gaze settling on me. “This task force my father created in a fit of inspiration may be a collection of misfits, but it is now Lysvalde’s only hope of stopping him before it’s too late. I am no longer just an observer. I am your royal patron, and your chief of intelligence.”

The room was silent. We were no longer just a dysfunctional sanitation department with an auditor and a paladin. We were a conspiracy-fighting unit, armed with proof and backed by a princess who was also a spymaster.

My beautiful, simple, lazy life was officially over. The plot had not only found me; it had given me a terrifying new boss and a mountain of irrefutable, action-requiring evidence.

Great, I thought, staring at the pile of treason on my desk. Now the scary princess-spy is in charge. This team just keeps getting better and better. I'm going to need a bigger nap pillow.