The investigation had a name.
It was called, in the king's private correspondence where it first appeared, simply The Selara Matter, which was the name that King Zemon gave it when he wrote it in his own hand in the small leather notebook that he kept in the locked drawer of his private study and which no secretary or advisor or attendant had ever seen the inside of.
The Selara Matter.
He had spent two weeks with the diary before he was ready to move.
Two weeks of reading and rereading — not in the obsessive, circular way of grief, though there was grief in it, newly surfaced grief for a woman he had mourned for nineteen years while mourning the wrong version of her death. The reading had been methodical. The reading of a man who was a king, who understood that what he held in his hands was not only the diary of a woman he had loved but a document with implications that extended far beyond his personal loss.
Selara had been poisoned.
She had known it was happening.
She had documented it — not in the explicit terms of an accusation, because she had not been able to prove it and had understood, with the specific political intelligence of a woman who had been navigating the palace court for five years, that an unproven accusation from a dying queen against a newly installed one would be treated as exactly what her enemies would call it: the desperate jealousy of a displaced woman.
But she had documented the symptoms. The pattern of them. The way they had intensified after certain events, certain dinners, certain evenings when the new queen had been particularly attentive. She had documented her suspicions with the careful, specific language of someone building a record rather than making a declaration.
She had documented one other thing.
The child.
She had written, in an entry four months before her death, with the handwriting that had become by that point slightly uneven from the trembling that the poison was producing in her hands:
He is alive. I know he is alive. They told it was a stillborn but I held him, I heard him, I know the difference between a child who is alive and a child who is not. She has done something with him. I do not know what. If anyone ever reads this please find him. Please find my son. His name is Styrmir. I gave him that name in the hour before they took him. Please.
Zemon had read this passage seventeen times.
He had read it and put the diary down and picked it up and read it again in the way that people read things they cannot yet fully believe, as if rereading will produce a different meaning.
It did not produce a different meaning.
It produced, instead, with each reading, a more complete and more devastating picture of a thing that had been done nineteen years ago in this palace, by a woman who was still in this palace, who had been in this palace every day for nineteen years while he had sat on the throne above her and believed himself to be a just king.
He had not been a just king.
He had been a deceived one.
He was going to be something different now.
The investigation's first operative was a man named Corath.
Corath had no official title. He appeared in no palace record. He had been used by the king on two previous occasions — once, twelve years ago, to verify the accounts of a treasury minister whose numbers had not aligned with the evidence; once, seven years ago, to investigate a rumour about a border lord whose behaviour had been generating complaints that official channels were not capturing clearly.
He was sixty-two years old, unremarkable in appearance, and had the specific quality of a man who has spent his entire career being trusted by powerful people and has survived by never betraying that trust in the direction that would provide short-term personal benefit at long-term structural cost.
Zemon summoned him through the channel they used — a message in a format that looked like a commercial correspondence, sent to a specific address in the capital's merchants' quarter.
Corath arrived at the palace's private entrance at the third bell of a Thursday morning.
He sat across from the king in the private study with a cup of tea he had not touched and listened to everything the king told him.
When the king finished, Corath was quiet for a moment.
"The queen," he said. Not asking. Confirming.
"Yes," Zemon said.
"You understand what this means if it is confirmed."
"I understand exactly what it means." Zemon's voice was entirely level. "That is why I am doing it this way rather than any other way."
Corath nodded.
"What are my parameters?"
"Everything," Zemon said. "I want the full history of it. The former queen's death. The child. Whatever was done with the child — where he was sent, under what circumstances, whether he is still alive." He paused. "And the Torvin matter."
Corath's eyes moved.
"The judicial investigation already—"
"The judicial investigation found Torvin," Zemon said. "It found a face. I want to know whose instruction was behind the face." Another pause. "And I want to know whether there is a connection between the Torvin matter and the Veldrathi assassination attempt. Because I believe there is. And I believe they connect to the child."
Corath was quiet for a long moment.
"This is three investigations at once," he said.
"Yes."
"It will take time."
"I know. I have been taking the wrong kind of time for nineteen years. I am now prepared to take the right kind." The king looked at him. "I want it done correctly. I do not want it done quickly in a way that produces error. But I want it moving. Starting tonight."
"Tonight?" Corath said.
"Tonight."
Corath looked at his untouched tea.
"There is one more thing," Zemon said. "The child."
"Yes. If he is alive—" the king stopped. Something moved through his expression that was not the performance of kingship, only the feeling of a man. "If he is alive, I want him found. Not as part of any legal proceeding. Not as evidence. I want him found because he is mine and he has been—" the king stopped again, breathed "—he has been somewhere I did not know, for nineteen years, because someone in my palace decided that my child's life was a liability she was entitled to dispose of."
Corath looked at the king.
In twenty years of serving powerful men, he had seen most of what power could produce in human terms. He had seen authority wielded as weapon and as shield and as compensation for the things that the powerful could not otherwise obtain. He had rarely seen it look like this — like grief, held in check by will, being directed toward a purpose that was not vengeance but was something older than vengeance.
"I'll start tonight," he said.
He left through the private entrance.
The palace continued around the king's private study with its ordinary sounds.
Zemon sat alone.
He opened the diary to the entry he had read seventeen times.
He read it again.
His name is Styrmir.
He sat with it until the morning bell.