The third-nicest brothel in Westcrown, the Fig & Honey, has three pointy slits in the shutters, and a wasp carved on the door, and a fig tree, and its own beehive because someone was confused or possibly because they just wanted an in-house source of eponymous honey. It makes people think twice. Of course to compensate they have Asmodean stuff all over the place wherever it wouldn't be too in the way, but that's mostly a polite fiction. It's a brothel. They're Calistrians-who-live-in-Cheliax, not Asmodeans-who-live-in-a-bordello.

Anyway, the threatening presence of sacred insects makes customers think twice about abusing the staff. It doesn't make them think twice about collecting the services they paid for and then leaving behind the associated detritus. The laundry wizard who works out of their outbuilding takes care of some of it and the retired whores nanny the rest while their mothers are at work. (There's public daycare, of course, but it doesn't really align with the schedules the Fig & Honey keeps, and the retirees don't have a lot else to do and only some of them have alienated their co-workers enough to be turned out when they can't bring in the johns anymore.) In this environment was dragged up one Raimon Pages.

Raimon reckons his dad must have been a sorcerer. Common enough in the area. He can't undercut their laundry wizard because he doesn't have Prestidigitation, but he has Mending, so that's nice, and later Flare and Message and Scrivener's Chant. He can see in the dark. When he practices enough he adds Mount and also a weird one he's never heard of in any other context that lets him help people permanently commit to memory a pageful of writing or drawing. He mostly uses this to help the musically inclined workers at the Fig & Honey ditch the sheet music for tricky parts of their repertoire. (Some johns are awkward and you want a way to fill the silences.) It stops working for each person after a while, but they don't notice that in time to write up some ultra-dense sheets of paper crammed with forty verses of The Wenches of Westcrown, more's the pity.

Raimon does middling in school. He's not good at math so he can't refine his raw magic, but he learns to read well enough. He makes friends, the shallow kind of friend who'd rather screw over a random other kid than him and a few closer yet than that, and watches the quick ones get whipped into shape to go die at the Worldwound, and the reflective ones go to church retreats where they pull all-nighters contemplating the overwhelming majesty of Asmodeus till they're blobby candlestubs of themselves and tedious to be around, and the dull ones get ground down into sawdust. He does not have any boyfriends left by the time he's coming up on the end of his mandatory schooling.

And when they're done with him, Raimon's a teenage boy and can't trivially live at home any more. Not that the Fig & Honey doesn't have boys, but the most popular sort is waifish, and if there's a niche for Raimon's robust maybe-a-splash-of-orc-in-there build it's already being filled by another fellow at the time. He only gives it that much thought because he likes it there, not the way the customers do but the way a five-year-old does. He's not five any more. It's time to do something else.

He gets a job as a letter carrier. There's always a lot of mail flying around, and he can summon up a few horses in a day if he's in a hurry, and he can see in the dark if he's traveling with a group going the same way and someone's got to be on night watch. It's fun to see new places. In some ways they're all trying to be the same - same textbooks in the schools, same holy books in the churches. And they fail! Even with all the mail going back and forth between the central authorities, communication fails and people take liberties and make errors and implement adjustments. Raimon brings a sack of orders from on high to some village and comes back later to discover that they have evaporated to no avail more often than not. (He isn't opening the letters, but people will talk, sometimes. He's chatty and he's got openwork three-dagger symbols embroidered on his shirt cuffs and nobody's ever gotten burned telling the mailman what the loons in Egorian want them to pull off this month.)

So overall he likes his work. Gets to travel, spends little time expected in specific places at specific moments because everyone knows the mail may run a few days late depending on conditions on the road, meets lots of people, seduces some of their sons.

He meets some people with triple dagger symbols on their persons too. They get to talking, in snatches whenever he's in their areas. What has he seen in his gallivanting about? What's the scuttlebutt on this or that? Where's so-and-so's correspondence getting addressed to nowadays? He's not really taken aback when his pals are spies. It's one of the most obvious ways to fuck somebody over - you get some hints and you tell somebody bigger and stronger than you, like Lastwall, or Andoran, where it'll most hurt to place the sting, and then you stand back.

His funny spell is - well, funny. People with important mail seal it. You can Mending a seal closed but you can't get its picture all lined up with itself. You can slit the envelope, but you can usually only get it a bit more than half closed up again, so attentive letter-receivers know that even a little mousenibble on the corner could mean it was compromised.

Raimon doesn't have to open the letter. He just has to hold it, and whoever his friends scare up to receive it can know it and copy it out, and the envelope can make it unmolested to its destination. Maybe a little late, depending. Everyone knows the mail may run a few days late depending on conditions on the road.

Anyway, then the country's conquered. As far as Raimon knows this has flatly nothing to do with his efforts, but it also seems singularly unlikely to wind up with him Maledicted or burned at the stake. He hikes up his fees, travels at night, personally breaks the news to a bunch of villages who didn't notice much, gets the most urgent letters wherever they're going, and watches things settle down.

He posts bulletins - it's not harder to bring a piece of paper somewhere not in an envelope than in one, and tacking it up someplace isn't far out of his way. So he knows they want clerics, but he isn't one.

The next morning he is.