The queen did not hurry.
This was one of her most reliable qualities — the ability to move at the pace that a situation actually required rather than the pace her own anxiety suggested. She had watched powerful people ruin themselves her entire life through the specific mistake of urgency, the impulse to resolve immediately what could be resolved more safely slowly, and she had made herself, through deliberate practice, the opposite of that impulse.
She took four days.
Four days to map the situation with the precision of a woman who has been doing this kind of mapping for thirty years — who has, in that time, developed an almost architectural sense for the load-bearing elements of a crisis and the decorative elements, for the pieces that must be moved and the pieces that can be moved through the pieces that must.
Mel's brother was named Torvin.
He was thirty-four years old, eleven years younger than his sister, and had inherited from their shared mother none of the discretion and all of the ambition. He was quick, resourceful, and had the specific quality of usefulness that comes from a man who has made himself knowledgeable about things that powerful people need done and has never asked too many questions about why.
He had been useful to the queen for eight years.
He had been useful in the way that tools are useful — you pick them up when you need them and set them down when you don't, and you don't spend much time thinking about the tool's perspective on the arrangement.
Now Torvin had a face.
He was describable. He was the link between the queen's instructions and the hired men in the Veldrathi garden, and the king's investigation would, given sufficient resources and the king's well-documented tenacity, eventually arrive at a face, and the face it would arrive at was Torvin's.
This was the problem.
The solution was not complicated.
The complicated part was the execution — specifically, the part where the execution had to be accomplished without Mel.
Mel was the queen's eyes. Mel was the queen's ears. Mel was the thread that connected thirty years of accumulated knowing to the queen's daily life with a reliability that had become, over time, something close to structural. The queen had managed the Torvin problem through Mel on three previous occasions — had used Mel's loyalty to her brother as the activation mechanism for his usefulness, had relied on Mel's own discretion to keep the arrangements clean.
She could not use Mel for this.
She could not use Mel because Mel, however loyal, however well-trained, was a woman who loved her brother. And some things love made people do that training could not reliably override.
The queen had been trained by someone who loved her.
She knew this from personal experience.
She called instead for a woman named Perrith — not a member of the household, not someone who appeared in any record associated with the palace — who arrived at the western wing apartments through the servants' access, in the hour between Mel's morning duties and her afternoon ones, and sat across from the queen for precisely twenty minutes.
The queen spoke.
Perrith listened.
"Torvin will be found in possession of documents," the queen said. "Documents that describe, in terms specific enough to satisfy the king's investigators, a commission for violence against the Veldrathi crown princess. These documents will be in his handwriting — or something indistinguishable from it." She paused. "The commission in these documents will appear to originate from a financial motive: a dispute over Veldrathi border trade rights, a grievance of the mercantile kind that has nothing to do with—" another pause "—court matters."
Perrith nodded.
"The documents will be found," the queen continued. "Not by my people. By the king's investigators. They will find them because they will be led to find them through a chain of suggestion that begins with an anonymous report and ends at Torvin's current lodgings in the merchants' quarter."
"And the timing?" Perrith said.
"Before the king's investigation has produced its own independent findings." The queen's voice was level. "He has promised a thorough investigation. Thorough investigations take time. We have approximately three weeks before his people begin arriving at faces. We need Torvin's face to be the one they find, with the explanation already attached, before they have the opportunity to look for a different one."
Perrith was quiet for a moment.
"The handwriting," she said.
"Can be managed," the queen said. "I have samples. From correspondence." She opened a drawer in the side table and produced a small packet of letters, sealed, which she set on the table between them without opening. "These are enough."
Another silence.
"The sister....." Perrith said. Careful. Testing.
"Will be informed when the investigation reaches him," the queen said. "She will learn of it through the appropriate official channels at the appropriate time. Her reaction will be—" she considered "—managed."
The word managed, in the queen's vocabulary, had a range of meanings.
Perrith took the packet of letters.
She left through the servants' access at the same hour she had arrived.
Mel returned to the apartments twenty minutes later with the queen's afternoon correspondence, sorted in the order she had long since learned the queen preferred, and performed her duties with the flawless precision of thirty years of practice.
The queen watched her over the edge of a letter.
She felt nothing that she would have named as guilt.
Guilt was a response to the wrong that was done. The queen had long ago made her peace with the specific distinction between doing wrong and doing what was necessary, and had found, on the other side of that peace, a clarity that most people spent their entire lives unable to access because they couldn't make themselves pay the admission price.
Mel set the correspondence down.
"Will there be anything else this evening, Your Majesty?"
"No," the queen said. "That will be all."
Mel withdrew.
The queen returned to her letter.
Three weeks, give or take.
It would be enough.
It was always enough, when you moved at the pace the situation actually required.