The Husk of Kings: A Crown of Knives

The smoke from a hundred perfumed braziers coiled through the vaulted hall of the Glasskeep, thick enough to taste. Beneath it, the auction house breathed its own sour perfume: lanolin from the sheepskin seats, lamp oil gone black, and the metallic tang of silver laid out in trays for inspection. Seryn Vash stood at the rear of the gallery, her fingers resting on the velvet rope that separated the privileged bidders from the standing room, and watched the catalogued lots parade beneath the suspended chandeliers.

She wore borrowed finery. A gown of charcoal wool, close-woven to disguise the calluses at the knuckles of a sword hand. Pearl combs pulled her hair back from her face, hiding the shaved temple. A widow's veil of black lace hung from the combs and fell past her shoulders, and behind it she had allowed herself the smallest grimace when the seamstress had pinned it in place. The seamstress had mistaken her for a mourner and said something kind about it being a comfort to wear grief so openly. Seryn had not corrected her. Grief was a costume she understood.

The auctioneer, a thin man with a voice like a saw on green wood, called the next lot. "Lot seven-one-two. A folio of letters, undated, said to be from the late Prince Eiran to a servant. Estimate opens at forty silvers."

Seryn's jaw tightened beneath the veil. Eiran. The younger prince. The one whose name the crown had scrubbed from the public records before she could finish her apprenticeship. The one whose body had never been produced for mourning. She made a small mark in her catalog. The letters were not why she had come, but they would fetch a price, and she needed to know who would pay it.

The bidding climbed in five-silver increments. She watched hands rise. A jewelled hand from the alcoves. A gloved hand from the press of merchants. A bare hand, ink-stained, that belonged to a clerk she recognized from the Office of the Apothecary General. The clerk won the lot at a hundred and ten. Seryn filed the face away.

The hours passed in this way. Lot after lot. A locket of human hair braided with gold wire, said to come from the temple of Saint Avren. A treatise on the breeding of eunuch horses. A pair of ceremonial gloves belonging to a king who had never reigned. The crowd thinned and thickened in waves, and Seryn kept her place against the rear railing and did not bid.

She was waiting for lot seven-nine.

When the auctioneer cleared his throat and consulted his slate, the quality of the silence in the hall shifted. Even the braziers seemed to burn more quietly. "Lot seven-nine," he announced, and his saw-voice had softened to something almost reverent. "A sealed jar of dried grief-wort, weight three ounces, harvested under licence from the royal plantations in the Pale Marches. Estimate opens at four hundred silvers."

A murmur moved through the gallery like wind through barley. The medicinal properties of grief-wort were whispered of in every alehouse and court alike. It calmed the bereaved. It steadied the hand of the surgeon. It quieted the voices of those who had lost too much. The crown had forbidden its private sale for a generation, which had only made the trade richer.

Seryn lifted her catalog and let her fingers tremble, just slightly, so that the clerk at the podium might think her a nervous bidder. She made a small, affected sound and the clerk glanced up and nodded. Good. Let him think her harmless.

The bidding began. Four hundred. Four-fifty. Five. A woman in widow's grey, seated three rows ahead, raised a fan. The fan was painted with mourning irises. Six hundred. Seven. A man in the merchant's press, his face hidden by a high collar. Eight. Nine. The numbers climbed past what most in the hall could afford in a year.

Seryn waited. She let three others bid ahead of her and made notes of their faces, their stances, the rings on their fingers. When the price reached twelve hundred, she raised her catalog.

"Twelve-fifty," she said, her voice clear and clipped beneath the veil. The northern edge of it had flattened itself into something approximating the capital's clipped vowels.

The auctioneer inclined his head. "Twelve-fifty from the veiled lady. Do I hear thirteen?"

The woman in widow's grey raised her fan again. Thirteen.

Seryn made a small, theatrical sigh and raised her catalog once more. Thirteen-fifty. The widow did not look back. The merchant in the high collar was studying her now with the careful disinterest of a man who was, in fact, very interested indeed.

"Thirteen-fifty on the floor," said the auctioneer. "Thirteen-fifty once. Thirteen-fifty twice. Going at thirteen-fifty. Sold to the veiled lady."

The clerk produced a receipt and made his way down from the podium. Seryn met him at the foot of the gallery, her hands steady, her voice soft.

"I would like to inspect the jar," she said.

The clerk hesitated. "Madam, the lot is sealed."

"I understand it is sealed. I would like to inspect the seal."

The clerk glanced toward the back of the hall. Seryn did not turn to follow his gaze. She had counted the men at the doors when she had entered. Six. Now six. No change. But the clerk's glance had been a fraction of a second too long, and she filed that too.

"Madam," the clerk said, recovering his courtesy, "the seals are examined prior to sale by the Office of the Apothecary General. I am assured of their integrity."

"I am sure you are." Seryn produced a coin from her reticule and pressed it into the clerk's palm. A silver, not a gold. Enough to be polite without being suspicious. "I have come a long way. I have lost my husband. I would like to see the jar."

The clerk's expression softened. He inclined his head. "This way, madam."

The secure room lay behind the auctioneer's podium, down a corridor of whitewashed stone that smelled of damp plaster. The clerk unlocked a door of iron-banded oak and stood aside to let her pass. Seryn stepped into the room, and the door closed behind her with a sound like a held breath.

The room was small and windowless. A single lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling. A wooden table stood at the center, and on the table rested a wooden box bound with iron straps. The clerk crossed to the box and produced a key from his waistcoat. He unlocked the box and lifted the lid, and Seryn saw the jar.

It was the size of a child's fist, blown from green glass, stoppered with a cork sealed over in wax. The wax was impressed with the sigil of the Glasskeep, a tower pierced by three arrows. The clerk set the jar on the table and stepped back.

Seryn drew a fold of her veil across her face as if to shield her mouth from dust. Beneath the veil, her breath was very slow. She had seen grief-wort before, in the small pharmacy her brother had kept in the northern market town. She had seen it in jars much like this, with seals much like this. She had smelled its bitter, green-tinged scent in the sickrooms of the bereaved. But the herb in the jar before her was the wrong shade. The genuine article, when held to a lamp, glowed a faint, bruised violet at the core of the leaf. This herb was uniformly grey-green, like any dried weed.

She did not let her face change. She lifted the jar and tilted it, watching the herb shift. It shifted too quickly, too fluidly. Real grief-wort crumbled when moved. This moved like sand.

She set the jar down. "It is well-preserved," she said. "I will take it."

"Madam." The clerk produced a paper and a pen. "If you would sign the receipt. And the buyer is required to give a name for the ledger."

"Seryn of Lowspire," she said, without hesitation. Lowspire was far enough from the capital that no one would recognize the name. Lowspire was where her brother had last been seen alive.

The clerk wrote. Seryn watched his pen. It did not hesitate over the name, which meant the ledger was not being cross-checked against any watch-list she might be on. Which meant she was not yet suspected, or which meant the watchlist had been removed to make room for something else. She could not tell which.

She paid in silver notes drawn from a letter of credit she had obtained in Lowspire under a different name. The clerk counted the notes twice and handed her the receipt and the jar, still sealed. She tucked the jar into her reticule and felt its weight settle against her hip. The weight was wrong, too. Heavier than three ounces of dried herb.

She thanked the clerk and stepped back into the corridor. The corridor was empty. She walked toward the hall, and her hand did not stray toward the knife she carried in her boot, because her hand knew better. When she reached the door to the hall, she paused and listened. From beyond the door came the murmur of bidding on the next lot. Beneath the murmur, the faint creak of the door hinges behind her, as if someone had moved in the corridor.

She pushed through the door and did not look back.

The hall had thinned. The late hour had driven off the curious, and only the serious bidders remained. Seryn made her way toward the main doors, the reticule pressed against her side, the jar a stone of false grief against her hip. The doors were guarded by men in the livery of the Glasskeep, and one of them inclined his head to her as she passed. The courtesy was a fraction of a second too deliberate. She returned the inclination and stepped out into the night.

The street was wet with an earlier rain, and the lamplight lay in pools across the cobbles. The smell of the city rose to meet her: woodsmoke, river water, and the green-rot of the butchers' quarter to the east. Seryn turned up the collar of her cloak and walked east.

She did not go to her lodgings. Her lodgings were in the Hound's Tooth, a tavern in the city's south, and the Hound's Tooth had been watched for three days by men she did not recognize. Instead she walked east through the Saltmarket, past the shuttered stalls of the fishmongers, past the chapel of Saint Evaine with its door ajar and its altar candles guttering in the wind. She turned north into a lane she had mapped two days before from a stolen city plan, a lane that led through a passage between two warehouses and out into a court she had paid a locksmith to show her.

The locksmith had taken her money and not asked why she needed to know. Locksmiths, like seamstresses, did not pry. The court was empty. At its center was a well, and beside the well a locked door. Seryn produced a key of her own and let herself into the building beyond.

The building was a disused warehouse, long ago stripped of its contents. The air inside was cold and tasted of dry timber and rat musk. Seryn set her reticule on the floor and knelt beside it. She drew out the jar and held it to the light of a tallow stub she had brought in her pocket.

The jar was sealed. The seal was impressed with the sigil of the Glasskeep. She tilted the jar again. The grey-green herb shifted. She lifted the cork with the point of her knife and sniffed. The smell was faint, but unmistakable: a base of river clay and a top note of something sharper, something chemical.

She upended the jar onto the floor. The herb spilled out, and among the leaves there fell a second object, wrapped in a twist of oiled silk. Seryn picked it up. The silk was knotted with a knot she did not recognize. She worked it loose with her knife and unrolled the silk.

Inside was a folded paper. The paper was thin, almost translucent. Seryn held it to the light and read the words written on it in a hand she knew. She knew it because she had seen it before, on a letter she had kept for nineteen years, a letter from her brother that had arrived three days after his death had been reported to her.

The hand was her brother's.

The words read: "Sister. The Physician keeps the records. The Physician knows the count. Do not trust the Grave-Digger. The Pale Watch will not help you. Find Old Marrow. Burn this."

Seryn read the words twice. Then she read them a third time. Then she folded the paper along its original creases, slid it back into the silk, and tucked the silk into her bodice against her heart. The jar and its false grief she left on the floor.

She sat for a long moment on the edge of the well, in the dark, and listened to the distant bells mark the hour. The bells of the Glasskeep rang eight, and the sound rolled across the rooftops and faded into the wind.

Somewhere in the city, a man named Calden Orvhast was dining at the queen's table. Seryn did not know his name yet. She only knew, from the letter in her bodice, that a physician was the man she needed to find.

The physician left the queen's table before the second course was cleared, and Seryn, watching from the doorway of the lower hall, counted the seconds it took him to vanish down the corridor that ran east toward the Spire of Letters and the old anatomies. She had not known his name an hour before. She knew it now because the steward at the table had leaned close to the cupbearer when the physician rose, and the cupbearer had murmured it in the soft, carrying whisper that servants use when they wish their words to travel: Orvhast. Lord Calden Orvhast, the queen's own physician, who had come up from the provinces six years ago with a chest of instruments and a reputation for asking questions that made powerful men look away.

Seryn had not intended to follow him. She had intended to leave the palace before the guards changed at the ninth bell, to slip back through the gate by which she had entered, to find her way to the city gate and out onto the north road before the dawn patrol rode. But the letter in her bodice pressed against her heart with the weight of a second pulse, and the words in it were a knot she could not leave untied. The Physician knows the count. The Physician keeps the records. She had counted bodies in graves for a year and a half. She had counted names in ledgers that were kept by men who wore the queen's seal. She had counted discrepancies that added up to a number she could not yet speak aloud. Now she had a name.

She followed him at a distance, keeping to the shadows where the torchlight from the sconces did not reach, her boots soft on the stone. The corridor was long and smelled of damp plaster and the faint sweetness of the incense the palace used to cover the smell of old wood. Orvhast walked with the unhurried gait of a man who knew exactly where he was going and had no fear of being stopped. His cloak, dark green and lined with something that caught the torchlight like oil on water, swung behind him as he walked. He did not look back. He did not need to. A man who kept the queen's secrets walked where he wished.

He turned into a narrow stair that descended. Seryn hesitated only a moment at the top of the stair, then followed. The stair wound down in a tight spiral, and the air grew colder as she descended, and the smell of incense gave way to a smell she recognized: the cold mineral smell of stone that had never seen the sun, and beneath it, fainter, the sweet, almost sugary smell of old preservation fluids. Formaline. Salt. The smell of the rooms where bodies are kept when they are not yet ready to be put into the ground.

At the bottom of the stair a door stood ajar. Beyond it, a room opened, lit by a single high window through which the last of the evening sky showed, a deep blue going to black. Shelves lined the walls, and on the shelves stood jars and stoppered bottles and trays of instruments laid out on white cloth with the neatness of a man who valued order above most things. In the center of the room, on a long table of dark wood, lay a shape covered by a sheet.

Orvhast went to the table and stood looking down at the shape beneath the sheet. He did not remove his gloves. He did not speak. For a long count of breaths, he simply stood, and Seryn, pressed into the shadow of the stairwell, watched the line of his shoulders and saw, in the way he held his head, something she had not expected to see in the queen's physician. Grief. A grief so still and so controlled that it looked, from a distance, like the composure of a man reviewing a specimen. Up close, it would have looked like something else.

He reached down and adjusted the sheet where it had slipped from the shape's shoulder. His hand lingered there. Then he drew back his hand and stood again with his hands clasped behind his back, and he spoke, and his voice was low and even, and it was not directed at the door or at the room.

"You should have told me before you went," he said.

Seryn did not breathe.

The shape beneath the sheet did not move. Of course it did not move. But Orvhast spoke to it as if it could hear him, and the words he spoke were not the words of a physician to a patient. They were the words of a man to someone he had known when they were both younger, and had loved in some way that had left its mark on him, and had lost in a manner that had not yet finished with him.

"I would have gone with you," he said. "You know that. You knew that, and you went anyway, and now I am standing in this room talking to a sheet, and the queen is asking me questions I cannot answer, and I cannot tell her the truth because the truth is that I did not know what you were doing until it was already too late to stop you."

He paused. The silence in the room was very deep. Seryn could hear, beneath the silence, the faint tick of a clock somewhere in the walls of the palace, counting out the seconds in the way that clocks do when there is no one to listen.

"You were always the one who went first," Orvhast said. "You were always the one who opened the door. I came after. I always came after. And now there is no door to open, and there is no after, and there is only this room and this sheet and the question of what I am supposed to do with what you left me."

He drew a breath. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It had become the voice of a man addressing a problem rather than a person, and the change was, in its way, worse than the grief.

"The count is wrong," he said. "I have looked at the records, and the count is wrong. There are names in the book that do not match the names in the pit, and there are bodies in the pit that do not match the names in the book, and I cannot find the hand that moves them. You would have found it. You would have known where to look. But you are not here, and the Grave-Digger is, and I cannot trust the Grave-Digger, and the Pale Watch will not help me, and I do not know who to ask."

Seryn's blood went cold. The words were the words of the letter. The Physician keeps the records. The Physician knows the count. Do not trust the Grave-Digger. The Pale Watch will not help you. Find Old Marrow. Burn this. He had not seen the letter. He could not have seen it. And yet the words he spoke were the same words, as if the letter had been written by someone who knew this man, who knew what this man would say when he thought he was alone.

Orvhast turned from the table and went to the shelves. He took down a jar, unstoppered it, and inhaled from it the way a man inhales from a cup of something strong. Then he replaced the jar and stood for a moment with his hands at his sides, and Seryn saw, in the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders, the look of a man who has carried a weight for longer than he can remember and has begun to wonder whether the weight is not, in fact, the shape of his own spine.

He crossed the room to a cabinet set against the far wall. The cabinet was of dark wood, and its doors were locked with a lock of brass that looked older than the rest of the furnishings. He drew a key from his waistcoat and turned the lock, and the doors opened with a sound like a small, tired sigh.

Inside the cabinet, on shelves lined with velvet, lay a collection of objects. Seryn could not see them clearly from where she stood, but she could make out the shapes of broken things: a cracked locket, a snuffbox with a hinge torn away, a watch with a face that did not have hands, a fan with three broken ribs, a ring from which a stone had fallen. The collection of a man who gathered what other men threw away. The collection of a man who could not pass a ruin without wanting to mend it.

Orvhast reached into the cabinet and took from the lowest shelf an object wrapped in cloth. He unwrapped it carefully, and the object he revealed was a crown. It was not a queen's crown. It was too small, and it was made not of gold but of a dark metal that might have been iron or might have been something older. Its points were not the points of a diadem but the points of knives, and between the points, set into the metal, were small, dark stones that did not catch the light.

He set the crown on the table beside the sheeted shape and stood looking at it. Then he did something that Seryn did not expect. He pushed back the sleeve of his coat and the sleeve of the shirt beneath it, and on the inside of his wrist, just above the palm, she saw a mark. It was a small mark, no larger than a thumbnail, and it had been made with ink that had faded over the years until it was only a suggestion of a shape. But Seryn had seen that shape before. She had seen it on a letter she had carried for nineteen years, and on a jar she had upended onto the floor of an apothecary's shop an hour ago, and on the cuffs of a coat she had seen once, long ago, on a man she had been told she could trust.

It was the sigil of the Self-Crowned. The mark of the order that had outlived the empire it had been founded to serve. The mark that her brother had worn.

Orvhast looked at the mark on his wrist as if he were reading a sentence he had read many times. Then he drew down his sleeve and covered the mark, and he wrapped the crown again in its cloth and returned it to the cabinet, and he closed and locked the doors, and he stood for a moment with his hand on the brass lock as if he were drawing from it a strength he could not draw from anything else.

"The records are kept in the Spire of Letters," he said, to the room, to the sheet, to himself. "The count is in the book with the red leather cover. The names are written in a hand I do not recognize. I have to find the hand that writes them. I have to find the hand that moves the bodies. I have to find the man who sits at the center of this and pull him out by the roots."

He paused.

"I cannot do it alone," he said.

The clock in the wall ticked. The evening sky beyond the high window had gone fully dark. Somewhere above them, in the hall where the second-course plates were being cleared, the queen was dining without her physician, and the absence was a thing that would be noticed, and the noticing would be a thing that would be recorded, and the record would be a thing that would, in time, find its way into a book with a red leather cover.

Orvhast turned from the cabinet and crossed the room. He went to the door. He paused there, with his hand on the frame, and he looked back at the sheeted shape on the table as if he were memorizing it for the last time.

"I will find them," he said. "I will find who did this to you. And I will put the count right, and I will put the names right, and I will find the man at the center, and I will pull him out by the roots, and I will lay him at your feet, and then I will sit down beside this sheet and I will not get up again. That is what I will do. That is what I owe you."

He stepped through the door and up the stair. His footsteps went up the spiral and faded into the corridor above.

Seryn stayed in the shadow of the stairwell. The clock ticked. The room was very quiet. The sheeted shape lay on the table. The cabinet stood against the wall with its lock turned. The crown of knives lay in its cloth on the velvet shelf, and the sigil of the Self-Crowned was hidden on the wrist of a man who had just promised a corpse a vengeance he might not live to keep.

Seryn drew a breath. She stepped out of the shadow and into the room. She crossed to the table and stood where Orvhast had stood. She looked down at the shape beneath the sheet. She did not lift the sheet. It was not her place to lift the sheet. It was not her hour.

She turned, instead, to the cabinet. She did not touch the lock. She had no key. But she stood close, and she looked at the shape of the keyhole, and she noted its size and the wear on its edge, and she memorized them as she had been taught to memorize such things in the years when she had still worn the queen's colors and the queen's colors had still meant something.

Then she turned and went up the stair, and out into the corridor, and out into the night.

The night air was cold, and it tasted of stone and river-weed and the smoke from a hundred chimneys. Seryn stood on the cobbles outside the physician's house and she breathed it in, and she let it scour the taste of dust and old paper from her tongue. Her fingers were still curled around the shape of the keyhole she had memorized, and she had to make herself open them, one by one, and let the phantom key go.

She looked up at the windows. They were dark. The street was quiet. Somewhere a dog was barking, the sound thin and rhythmic, and somewhere a woman was singing a lullaby in a language Seryn did not know, the melody low and sweet and edged with a sorrow that made the hair on Seryn's arms rise.

She turned, and began to walk.

She did not walk toward the inn. She did not walk toward the harbor. She walked toward the river, and she walked along the river, and she walked until the cobbles gave way to mud and the mud gave way to the slick stones of the foreshore, and the water came up and lapped at her boots and soaked through the leather and made her toes cold. She did not stop. She walked until she came to the place where the willows bent down and touched the water, and then she stopped, and she stood in the dark, and she looked at the black water.

She had not been here in eleven years.

She had been here on the night they brought her brother home.

She remembered the willows. She remembered the mud. She remembered the way the water had looked in the moonlight, and the way the men had set down the long bundle on the bank, and the way the captain had stood behind her and told her that they had found him in the marshes to the south, and that he had been dead for a week, and that they were sorry, and that the queen had sent her regrets.

She had not cried then. She had cried later. She had cried in the long years after, in the barracks, in the watches of the night, in the moments when the sword felt too heavy in her hand and the oaths felt too heavy on her tongue. She had cried until the crying was wrung out of her, and then she had stopped, and she had become the woman who walked the city and asked questions and did not flinch.

She stood in the dark now and she did not cry. She looked at the water. The water looked back.

"I am close," she said to the dark, and to the brother she had buried in a pauper's grave, and to the man she had left on a sheet in a room that smelled of dust and old paper. "I am close now. I can feel it. The thread is in my hand. I will not let it go."

The water lapped at the stones. The willows stirred. Somewhere behind her a bell rang, low and clear, the hour sounding from a tower she could not see.

She turned, and walked back toward the city.

She did not go to the inn. She went to the harbor. She went to the wharf where the small boats were moored, and she found the man she had paid to keep an eye on the physician's house, and she gave him another coin, and she told him to watch, and she told him to come to her at the inn if the physician left, and she told him to come to her at the inn if anyone else came to the physician, and she told him to come to her at the inn if the physician did anything unusual at all.

The man nodded. He was a bargeman, and his face was weathered, and his eyes were the color of the river, and he did not ask questions. He took the coin and he went back into the dark.

Seryn walked to the inn. She climbed the stairs. She went into her room. She shut the door, and she barred it, and she stood with her back against the wood, and she breathed.

The room was small. The bed was narrow. The window looked out over the rooftops, and the rooftops were silver in the moonlight, and the moon was a thin crescent, and the stars were sharp.

She sat down on the bed. She took off her boots. She did not sleep. She sat, and she thought, and she turned the threads over in her mind.

Orvhast was the queen's man. Orvhast had found something. Orvhast had hidden something in the cabinet. Orvhast had lied about the count. Orvhast had come to her in the middle of the night, and he had offered her a fortune, and he had asked for her silence.

Why?

She turned it over. She turned it over again. She did not have the answer. Not yet. But she had the threads. She had the keyhole. She had the sigil. She had the man.

She would find the answer. She would find it before the next turning of the moon. She would find it, and she would lay it at the feet of the dead, and then she would rest.

She lay down on the bed. She closed her eyes. The moon moved across the window. The stars turned. The city slept.

She did not sleep. She listened to the sounds of the night, and she waited for the dawn.

The dawn came grey and thin. The mist rose from the river. The bells rang for the first hour. Seryn rose, and washed, and dressed, and went down to the common room of the inn, and she drank a cup of broth that was thin and hot, and she ate a heel of bread that was hard and dry, and she thought.

The physician's house was in the scholars' quarter. The scholars' quarter was near the palace. The palace was where the queen was dying.

She had a thought. She had had it in the night, and she had turned it over, and she had not been able to let it go.

She went to the door of the inn. She looked out at the street. The street was waking. The bakers were opening their ovens. The carters were coming in from the country. The smell of bread was in the air, warm and yeasty, and it reminded her of the mornings in the barracks, when the cooks had made the bread and the smell had filled the long hall and the men had eaten and gone out to the yard.

She went out into the street. She did not go to the physician's house. She went to the palace.

She did not go to the great gate. She went to the postern. The postern was in the wall behind the fishmarket, and it was watched by two men in the queen's colors, and she knew them, and they knew her, and they let her pass without a word, because she had served the queen, and the queen had not yet revoked her service, and the men at the postern were old, and they remembered.

She went through the postern and into the palace. She went through the back ways, the service passages, the corridors that the courtiers did not use. She went up a stair, and along a gallery, and down another stair, and she came at last to a door that was plain and unadorned, and she knocked.

The door was opened by a woman in a grey dress. The woman's face was pale, and her eyes were red, and she looked at Seryn with a look that was neither welcome nor unwelcome, but simply tired.

"Is he in?" Seryn said.

"He is in," the woman said. "He has not slept. He has not eaten. He is asking for you."

Seryn stepped into the room.

Eilen Drau sat at a table by the window. He was in his shirtsleeves. His hair was disordered. His face was grey, and the lines in it were deeper than they had been the night before. He looked up when she came in, and his eyes were red, and there was a tremor in his hand as he set down the cup he had been holding.

"You came," he said.

"I came," she said.

She sat down across from him. The table was between them, and the morning light fell across it, and the dust motes turned in the light, and the room was very quiet.

"Tell me," he said.

She told him. She told him about the physician's house. She told him about the cabinet. She told him about the keyhole, and the sigil, and the count. She told him about the fortune that had been offered, and the silence that had been asked in return. She told him everything, and she did not soften it, and she did not leave anything out.

He listened. He did not interrupt. His face did not change. His hand did not tremble again. He sat very still, and he looked at her, and when she was done he was silent for a long time.

Then he said, "The Self-Crowned."

"Yes," she said.

"There is no such thing," he said. "It is a story. It is a thing the tutors tell the children to make them behave."

"It is on his wrist," she said. "I saw it. It is there."

He looked at her. He looked at the wall behind her. He looked at the window, and the light, and the dust.

"The queen," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"The queen is dying."

"Yes."

"The physician is with her."

"Yes."

"The physician has been with her for seven years."

"Yes."

"And the heirs."

"Yes," she said. "The heirs. The heirs are dead. And now the queen. And the physician is in the middle of it, and he has a sigil on his wrist that should not exist, and he has a cabinet in his house that he will not open, and he has offered me a fortune to be silent."

Eilen Drau was silent for a long time. The light moved across the table. The dust motes turned.

"If I go to him," Eilen Drau said, "if I confront him, if I demand to see the cabinet, I will have to use my authority. And if I use my authority, I will have to tell the court. And if I tell the court, the queen will know. And if the queen knows, she will know that I have moved against her physician, and she will know that I have done it in the hours when she is weakest, and she will not forgive me, and I will be broken."

"Yes," Seryn said.

"If I do not go to him," he said, "if I wait, if I watch, the queen will die. And when the queen dies, the succession will be uncertain, and the court will tear itself to bits, and the physician will be gone, and the cabinet will be gone, and the truth will be gone, and my brother will have died for nothing."

"Yes," she said.

He looked at her. His eyes were red, and his face was grey, and the tremor had come back into his hand, and he pressed it flat against the table to make it still.

"What do you want me to do?" he said.

"I want you to wait," she said.

"Wait?"

"Two days," she said. "Give me two days. I will find the key. I will find what is in the cabinet. I will find what is on the wrist. I will find what is in the count. I will give you the thread, and you will pull it, and when you pull it the court will see, and the queen will see, and the truth will be known."

"And if the queen dies in two days?"

"Then we will have failed," she said. "And the failure will be mine. And I will bear it."

He looked at her for a long time. The light moved across the table. The dust motes turned. The bells rang for the second hour, and the sound was clear and sweet, and it came through the window and filled the room and faded.

"Two days," he said.

"Two days," she said.

He nodded. He did not speak. He sat, and he looked at the window, and the light was on his face, and the lines were deep, and the tremor was in his hand, and the room was very quiet.

She rose. She went to the door. She stopped, and she turned.

"Eilen," she said.

He looked at her.

"I will not fail you," she said.

He did not answer. He sat, and he looked at the window, and the light was on his face, and the room was very quiet.

She went out, and she shut the door, and she went down the stair, and along the gallery, and out into the morning, and the morning was bright, and the smell of bread was in the air, and the bells were ringing, and the city was waking, and she had two days, and she would not waste them.

She walked toward the city. She did not walk toward the inn. She walked toward the river, and toward the bridges, and toward the scholars' quarter, and toward the house where a man sat in a room with a sheeted shape and a locked cabinet and a sigil on his wrist that should not exist, and she would find the key, and she would open the cabinet, and she would find what was inside, and she would lay it at the feet of the dead, and then she would rest.

The sun came up. The mist rose. The city woke. Seryn Vash walked into the day, and the day was before her, and she did not flinch.