Hawkeye and Warrant Officer Karley were in the hotel room next door. The walls of the Rivieran hotel were thin enough that Karley had been able to rig up listening devices to amplify sounds from the room that shared a wall with theirs.

"Be careful, sir," she said. "I can shoot through these walls if I have to."

"We have to assume they have the room bugged, or at least someone from outside watching. Don't be hasty, Captain."

Roy went out in the hall, and then opened the door to the room on his left.

"All right, I'm here," he said, closing and locking the door, according to instructions. "Is Ed all right?"

"As long as no one else enters this room, and no one follows me when I leave, he'll be fine," came a man's voice from the far side of the room.

"I may be blind, but I'm still not easy to kill," Roy said.

"I don't want to kill you," the voice answered, sounding surprised. "I want to talk to you. The King sent me to find out the intentions of the Flame Alchemist."

"And you're just going to believe whatever I tell you?"

"Not necessarily. But I am considered a pretty good judge of people. There's a chair a couple of paces to your left. Please. Sit down."

Roy started toward the chair, stumbled, fell, and rolled in the direction of the voice. He knocked the man down, rolled him onto his stomach, and pulled his hands behind his back, transmuting ropes to bind them. Then he pulled him up and patted him down, checking for weapons. He was surprised to find that there were none.

"Are you finished?" the King's man asked, short of breath from the fall and being rolled around. "You still can't let anyone in, and you'll still have to let me go without following me."

"Let's just say I'm a little more confidant I'll leave this room alive now."

"Fine," said the King's man, sitting in a chair. "So what are they? The intentions of the Flame Alchemist?"

"The same as the intentions of Amestris," Roy said, remaining standing, so he could move quickly if he needed to. "The unconditional surrender of Creta. But Creta remains as a separate country, instead of being annexed to Amestris."

"You just said unconditional, and you're already making a concession?"

Roy shrugged. "On paper, it has to be unconditional. But we don't want to annex you. It would just increase the miles of border we have to guard. And there isn't really anything in Creta worth annexing anyway."

"That's true," said the Cretan, glumly. "We poked the dragon, and now here you are."

"There were foreign agents stirring up trouble. We've gotten rid of them, but there are still the home-grown troublemakers in each country to take care of."

"Foreign agents?" the King's man asked, intrigued. "From where?"

"I don't have the authority to reveal that kind of information. But they were well able to pass as Amestrians and Cretans."

"So when we offer our unconditional surrender, what will you take?"

"You disband your military and we take 10% of your GNP per year. Or we work out the equivalent in land and move the border."

"We can't afford the 10% and the nobles are already hurting for land. But certainly, the King can sign your terms and you'll be fighting again within a month. There'll just be a new King. Or none at all, maybe."

"Then I'll have to start burning down your forests. Three miles deep, along the entire border."

"Three miles deep?" the Cretan said. "You're mocking me now, Brigadier Mustang. Creta is covered with trees. You're planning on burning it all down."

"No," said Roy. "I'm not. We're not."

There was a silence that must have been only a few seconds but felt like an eternity.

"Thank you Brigadier General Mustang. I've heard all I need to know," came the cold voice of the King's man. "Please follow your instructions. I'm leaving now."

There was another pause.

"Oh, would you untie me first?"

The King's man rode up on a horse to the house where Ed was being kept. He entered the main room, where Ed was sitting bound and blindfolded in an easy chair by the fire.

"Your friends should be here to pick you up by nightfall," he said. "Your general thought he'd make fun of me."

"Don't take it personally," Ed said. "He does that to everyone. What did he say?"

"Foreign agents are responsible for the war. And he's only going to burn a three-mile wide strip along the border. How stupid does he think we are?"

"If Mustang says three miles, it will be three miles," said Ed, shrugging. "And the foreign agent part is right, too. I met some of them."

"You did?"

"You wanted to know how I lost my alchemy, right? I can tell you the whole story, including the foreign agents. Or to be more exact, the homunculi."

Ed was sitting at the table in Mustang's officer suite. Hawkeye and Roy were sitting across from him, and he could see Warrant Officer Karley monitoring the radio in the next room through the open door.

Roy stood up. "You told him what!"

"It's not that much of a secret," Ed said. "It's all over Ishval, you know. Scar, I mean 'Little Brother', told his Teacher - the High Cleric now - and they talk about it in the School too. They are studying the Gate of Truth and the role of the soul in Alchemy, after all."

"Are you telling me that everyone at the Alchemy School in Gunja knows that Bradley was a homunculus?"

"Well, uh, yeah," said Ed.

"What about Selim?"

"Oh," said Ed. "That could be a problem, couldn't it?"

"You think so?" Roy answered, voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Hey, I just told the King's guy. Little Brother told all the Ishvalans."

"But he didn't believe you anyway," said Hawkeye.

Ed shook his head. "I guess one automail leg isn't as good a proof as an empty suit of armor."

"Well, you're stuck with us now," said Roy. "Welcome back to the military, Ed. You've just been drafted."