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As for the treasure hunting teams, they still hadn't made much headway, but the Vantalay team was able to tell him about one "John Wright," a.k.a. Donald Elias.

Hector had asked them to find out what they could about the man's status, but considering how busy they already were with keeping the residents of Miro safe, he hadn't been expecting much.

Donald Elias was an undercover operative of Atreya who used to work for Hanton Gaolanet. The Sparrow had asked King William to see about securing the man's release, but Hector, already having people in Vantalay, couldn't help being curious about him, too.

Plus, Hector kinda doubted that the King or Queen would be able to do much in this case. With Vantalay in the middle of a war that it instigated, that country probably wasn't going to be in the mood to negotiate with some tiny nation on the complete other side of the continent for a random prisoner.

But heck, maybe the Belgrants would prove him wrong. They'd certainly surprised him before.

In the meantime, though, he was interested to learn more about this spy that Hanton had talked up so much. From what the Vantalay team was able to gather, Donald was being held at a rather infamous prison deep in the heart of the country. If they were to mount a rescue, they said, then it would first mean a long and difficult trek through multiple heavily fortified locations.

Hector definitely hadn't intended to ask them to do that, but he appreciated their forward thinking. Hector wanted to be mindful of overstepping his bounds here. They were already playing with fire by having a team of wanted fugitives infiltrate the country. Having them attack a military installation and stage a daring rescue would've been seriously pushing it.

...Unless he got the Queen's permission, maybe. But he figured that could wait until after the team had finished dealing with the Killer of Krohin, at least. They didn't need more distractions from that objective right now, Hector felt.