Sophia nodded. She had already mapped kinship lines in the margins of her list: who was related to whom, who had small farm holdings that could be threatened with debt, who had lovers in hidden corners of the household. In the palace, relationships were knots. Pull one, and you might unravel the rope entirely.
"We'll do it in phases," she said. "Phase one: leave them in place and begin feeding small, believable rumors. Phase two: create the performance, public coldness between us, a visible decline in the prince's health. Phase three: when the rival houses lean in, use our insiders to gather confirmation of overt moves. Repeat and amplify until they betray the names of their patrons."
Alexander's fingers curled lightly around the edge of the folder. "We must also stage a few small mistakes that look like incompetence on your part, forgotten audiences, misfiled documents, a curt order given in the wrong tone. Enough to convince the servants and minor nobility that your position is being eroded."
Her face went still. "You mean to allow the palace to see me falter?"
"Yes," he said. "But under controlled circumstances. Your authority must appear to slip in public while privately remaining intact. It will require you to take losses, to be cold, distracted, make errors ... but those are acts. You will not truly lose what is yours."
Sophia sensed the cost. She would have to let go of the image she had painstakingly built: the competent consort who reorganized the household, exposed embezzlement, and stood in the prince's stead when needed. She had fought to be taken seriously; now she would pretend to be less ... an uncomfortable, counterintuitive covert operation. Her love for Alexander warred with her distaste for pretense, but she saw the method in his calculus. She would wear humiliation if it meant drawing the malice from the shadows.
"And what of the two Valehart men?" she asked. "They are less enmeshed with the household. They will be easier to direct, perhaps, but also easier for Valehart to recall."
Alexander's eyes took on a diplomat's coolness. "They will be given tasks that replicate friction: lost letters, delayed stalls, a rumor that the prince is about to change his steward. They will be incentivized with small privileges we control, a favored spot near a fireplace, an extra ration, a plausible story of favor bestowed. Let Valehart's men think they are prospering while they feed us the chords of their master's plan."
She imagined the palace like a room with many hearing lips; if one played the right lullaby, the others would ease into dream. That lullaby would be their staged fractures: Sophia's supposed mistakes, Alexander's supposed decline, a visible change in routine that would be read as vulnerability.
"If we do this," she said quietly, "we must also decide the boundaries. We cannot let rumors produce real harm. No blood, no removal of life. This is information warfare, not war."
"Agreed," Alexander said. "We will be ruthless with words, not with blade. We will set traps, not make enemies immovable."
Sophia's mind drifted to contingencies. What if a well-placed noble heard a private, damning whisper and moved without consulting their own spy network? What if Selene or the eldest concubine decided to retaliate quickly, before their spider-threads had loosened enough to be plucked?
"We need a safety protocol," she said. "A named excuse for reversing course if a pivot becomes too dangerous. A sign. A simple phrase that means 'halt and regroup.' Damien will be the keeper of that phrase. He will be the only one outside us who knows the whole plan."
Alexander nodded. "And when we need to expose a name, we do it decisively. A single trial, swift and public, that proves the stakes without giving our opponents time to react."
The two of them spent the rest of the afternoon laying out the skeleton of the plan. They assigned roles with surgical clarity: Damien to manage the physical placement and the butler he would brief in private; Sophia to orchestrate staged errors and direct which benign rumors to drop into the palace stream; Alexander to approve public gestures, missed audiences, a curt refusal, an inattentive look...that would sell the drama.
Before the meeting broke, Sophia read the list one last time. She had scribbled beside several names the tag useful and beside others watch. A smaller row stood under risk; those were the men who had loyalties that reached into households outside the palace. They would be monitored but not trusted.
"Once this begins," Alexander said softly, "you must be prepared to be vulnerable in public. And I must be prepared to look worse than I am. There will be hearts to soothe, reputations to guard elsewhere. We will lose some credibility among the shallow. We will gain what matters: their overconfidence."
"And privacy," Sophia added. "If we lose privacy, we lose everything. Only You, Damien and I will know the whole plan. The butler and the head maid will only be told the parts necessary for them to play their roles."
They sealed the plan with a shared glance, not a romantic one but a pact that felt like steel. There was love in the room, modest and steady, but for the moment it was subordinated to strategy. They would dress weakness and fever in public and keep the truth like an unlit lantern close to their chests.
As dusk thickened into night, Alexander wheeled the folder back toward him. "Prepare the lists," he said. "Lay out the rumors you want seeded in the next three days. Damien will prepare the butler and the head maid. I will send a note to the steward suggesting our reduced interest in East Wing refurbishments, a small, plausible seed. Then we wait."
Sophia closed the folder, feeling the leather warm from their hands. Her mind wove through the names again, a private catalog of faces she now intended to use rather than purge. It felt cold in one way and controlled in another. She would be patient; she had to be. The palace could not know she listened. The houses could not suspect the hand that would pull them into talk.
Outside the study, in the long corridors of the palace, unknowing feet passed: a footman carrying candles, a maid with a basket of linens, a groom pushing a wheelbarrow. Among them, some names in Sophia's folder stood, smiling or bowing or busy with tasks. They would become louder now, carriers of small lies that would loosen the ropes strung between noble houses.
For the first time since she arrived in the palace, Sophia welcomed a kind of theater where she would play the fool, only to trap the cunning. She would perform her own decline to reveal other people's truths. It was cruel and subtle, but necessity had become both a blade and an ally.
They parted then, without ceremony. There would be rehearsal, practice, monitoring. The plan would be slow and deliberate.