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Low Fantasy starring a woman who acts as a sort of spymaster for the king. The king has a whole system of them, who are always cloaked and masked in public. These 'spies' all have split personalities (only two) which have different skills and temperaments, usually without overlap. The spies use a silver mirror in order to switch personalities.
The plot involves the conflict between the main kingdom and these tundra dwellers who vaguely inuit-like. The king holds a race periodically, the winner of which can request a boon. This year is the first that the tundra land people are sending a runner, who is a shooin' to win. The tundra people are the only ones who refuse to be subjugated.
Anyway, our spy is in the middle of a mission to the tundra lands. After she lets her other personality out to party (and so the 'main' personality loses consciousness), she wakes up broken at the bottom of a tundra. She gets saved, eventually, by some tundra dwellers, the plot plays with the whole Going Native thing while our protagonist struggles vainly against the charms of oh-so-noble and righteous nature loving xenophobes she stays.
Its eventually revealed that the protagonist is a long lost daughter of these tundra people. What happens is the kingdom tortures child prodigies A.) so they'll never become brilliant and influential enough to be threat, and B.) so that their personalities will fracture and allowed to be molded into spies. The protagonist has a third personality, with the memories of her people AND the memories of her torture, repressed. Hooray.
Our protagonist makes it back home, does some espionage, figures the above out, and sides with her people. The runner for her people wins the race with the protagonist's help, and the runner does some voodoo on the king that doesn't do much except make him into a genuinely better person, and the runner declares her people will bow to the rule of the king, 'cause you can't fight progress even if you should (or something. Progress is definitely a bad thing in this book, but they accept it anyway. Probably because that's a stupid message.).