A Dagger of the Mind (The Imperial Metals) Read Online Free

man the Countess once knew, also named Harold Rutherford. She had hoped that incompetence wasn’t a family trait, as incompetence was the only thing she remembered about the previous Harold Rutherford.
    Unfortunately, the new Harold Rutherford, while a more pleasant person to talk to, was just as incapable of running the County as his predecessor. Harold made such a mess of the reconstruction project that Vye assumed he was stealing money. But when she checked over the paperwork, she discovered it was just horrible management of resources. It would have been easier to steal the money than to mess it up this badly.
    Vye then had the fortune of meeting a young man named Duncan.
    The Peace with the Turin was still being negotiated at the time . In the early days of the Treaty, less than a month after the end of the war, Landos and the Queen always brought Vye along to the meetings. They didn’t want to be threatening. But they imagined the Turin would be a little intimidated by the woman who had killed their leader. Walk softly and carry the most fearsome warrior-wizard the land has ever known .
    It was in those early meetings that Vye first encountered Duncan. The Towers of Seneca had sent some of their best scholars to the peace negotiations, and the best of the best was Duncan. He understood the Turin language backwards and forwards. He was just supposed to help the leaders understand one another, but he was smart and proactive, and he ended up having a lot of influence on the early versions of the Treaty.
    Vye was impressed with Duncan. Because he wasn’t just smart and capable, he also seemed to be good at getting along with people. Tall, youthful, a thin beard, and a hell of an athlete. Maybe not the strongest or fastest, but always picked first for every sport. Maybe not the handsomest, but always surrounded by women. If people were magnets, he was a huge deposit of iron ore.
    So Vye planted a flag in him. She basically told Landos that when the early stages of the Peace Treaty were finalized, she was taking him home with her. And she hadn’t regretted it for a moment. His first order of business was rebuilding the Castle. Everyone assumed that, in order to fix his predecessor’s mistakes, he was either going to have to spend more money than he had or take twice as long as he was supposed to.
    Neither of those suppositions turned out to be true. The Castle came in under budget and was finished in two years. And it wasn’t a shoddy product. The Towers soared, the decor was stately, and the walls gleamed in the sunlight . So, how did he do it? Did he learn magic from Countess Vye?
    No, but he did come up with an ingenious strategy. The War had devastated many structures in the County, and they all needed rebuilding. Sir Noble and Sir Rutherford, Duncan’s predecessors, had planned to address each of these projects piecemeal. But Duncan organized the repairs as one enormous undertaking. Castle Hartstone, Rutherford Manor, Fort Lockmey, the Deliem Bridge, and the Merrick Tower were folded into a single, huge project. Taking advantage of an economy of scale, Duncan restored all the landmarks in Deliem to their prewar condition . His second biggest task was the staff. About three months before the Castle was completed, Countess Vye had become ill because of some bad food.
    “This never used to happen when Michael ran the show,” Vye explained to Duncan.
    “Was Michael that good of a chef?” Duncan smirked.
    “Well, he did have the Sword of Kings,” Vye mused in her fever, “So really, nobody was better at peeling a potato.”
    “I’ll start looking into the whole staff. But are you sure you don’t want to be involved in this process?”
    “What did I tell you when I first hired you?”
    “That you liked being the Countess because everyone had to listen to you,” Duncan recited from memory, “But you didn’t want to actually have to do anything.”
    “Correct.”
    So Duncan met everyone who worked in the