When the last letter is in Cam conjures another little metal splinter of a computer chip, tucks it in, and starts hunting through the library for maps.

Once he's including everything in the library including little maps drawn in-line in books, there are several hundred! 

Most of the small ones are either very un-detailed, clearly wrong or incomplete or outdated, or of individual towns rather than countries let alone the continent. 

There's one huge map that gets nearly all of the continent though! It's three hundred years old and was made by a scholar in somewhere called the Eastern Empire - the main difference is that the western area shaded out as uninhabitable stretches a lot further east, eating a lot of Valdemar and Rethwellan - and the annotations are all in a different alphabet, but it's otherwise workable.

He can also find pretty up-to-date individual maps of all the countries bordering on Valdemar, and many of their neighbours on the other side; the list ends up including Rethwellan, Karse, Hardorn, Iftel, Menmellith (only showing up on some maps, it seems to go in and out between being Karsite-held territory), two teeny places on the western edge of Valdemar called Lineas and Baires, and some southeastern countries - Jkatha, Ruvan, Seejay. 

"Does Karse own Menmellith right now?" Cam inquires.

"- No, not right now. No one, er, really knows what goes on there - it's in this little triangle of horrible mountainous land, it's mostly mountain clanspeople, they keep themselves pretty isolated and don't have a lot of trade right now."

Cam makes a note of this. "Anything else these aren't going to be up to date on?"

"Hmm. Let me look... The Hardornen map is old, a bunch of their southern bit is Karse's territory now. And Rethwellan's expanded some to the west. Valdemar looks accurate, that map is new from Queen Elspeth's reign." 

"Cool, thanks." He annotates the map. He appears to be controlling the projected image with his mind. "Anything else that's in here that you wanna call my attention to?"

Tran peers at the map. 

"Situation's heating up in Lineas and Baires recently." He points them out. "Some sort of dispute about whether the heir to one of them is illegitimate. We're - taking measures about it, but it's not like Valdemar has a lot of slack right now." 

"You're at war, that kinda eats slack, yeah. Is the one of them without the succession dispute involved somehow?"

"Yes. There's - all right, so a couple decades ago they were fighting and Queen Elspeth sent some Heralds in to try to calm things down, and there was a peace treaty. With an alliance marriage - the King of Lineas and the fourteen-year-old daughter of the ruler of Baires at the time. Except now there are rumours that the boy looks exactly like his uncle and people are claiming he's a bastard - worse, born of incest, that his lady mother bedded her own brother before she was married off. It's...gross and implausible, but it's causing an enormous fuss. ...Also, supposedly a lot of people think the boy isn't quite right in the head, which doesn't help." 

"And I suppose doesn't help convince anyone that he isn't inbred, yikes. Okay. Uh, so, food. I can just fly around and leave packages of food lying around, but will people eat that or will they be too freaked out? Should I have it delivered in some more locally conventional way?"

"Er, what do the 'packages' look like? If it's unusual enough people might not realize it's food." 

"I'd want to copy local styles. Maybe adding some features to keep pests and such out but I could at least make it look superficially like what you'd expect."

"Probably wagons left at the edge of town would do better than just randomly? And, hmm, maybe with signs that it's approved by the Heralds. Crates and canvas or burlap sacks are the most common packaging for transporting food. Or wrapping in paper, for cheese and things." 

"Right, and nobody's going to have can openers, are they."

"- what openers?" 

"There's a way of preserving food where you put it in a jar, and seal it, with some complicated associated cooking process I don't know offhand, do you have that?"

"Oh, like making preserves? We do have some of that, though it's usually glass jars sealed with wax, and mostly foods in brine or vinegar or sometimes sugar to help with keeping it from going off." 

"Right, so, with somewhat higher tech you make the whole jar out of metal and you seal it so that you can't open it without a specialized tool and you have shelf-stable canned beans or fish or whatever."

"Huh! That's really clever. Can you make the cans and the opener for them too?" 

"Yes, though that won't help if people are bewildered by both."

"Fair enough, I guess we'd better check how hard it is to learn before we try that. And there's plenty else that would work fine in the meantime, probably. If we wanted to be really careful about not confusing people, maybe I could show you the food-storage behind the kitchens and you could just copy some of that, if it works that way?" 

"It does work that way! Lead on. Hopefully no one will be alarmed by a layer of plastic under the burlap."

Tran doesn’t comment on this; he’s a little curious about why the layer of plastic, whatever “plastic” even is, but mostly his brain is kind of hurting from sheer information overload. 

He shows Cam to the kitchen storeroom. There are sacks of wheat and oats and dried pease, and some ceramic urns of milled flour, and lots of potatoes and other root vegetables plus some slightly withered apples in baskets, and dried cooking herbs hanging from the ceiling, and lots of cheese of varying ages. Meat and milk are usually brought in fresh from the relevant barns, rather than stored here. 

Cam takes some photos. Designs a wagonload of groceries he can leave lying around wherever. "Okay, is there any reason I should not go fly around and leave a bunch of food wherever I see houses someplace nobody's obviously looking all around the hungry regions? With, in Valdemar, a note saying the Heralds are behind it."