The sack came off.
Not dramatically — one of the people behind her pulled the drawstring loose and lifted the fabric in the matter-of-fact way of someone completing a step in a sequence, and the room came in all at once: low ceiling, stone walls, river smell, a single lamp placed to illuminate the other person rather than herself.
Mel looked.
She had been in the both the queen's service for thirty years. She had been in the rooms where things happened and had watched those things happen and had carried what she witnessed with the patient, durable discipline of a woman who understood that information was currency and that the value of currency depended on when you spent it.
She had been in the room when the doctors attended Selara in her final months.
She had been in the room when the king had received the news.
She had been in the corridor on the night the child was born.
She had seen Selara's face.
She was looking at Selara's face now.
Not Selara — a young man of twenty three, with the late autumn hair and the specific bone structure of the former queen arranged into its male version, the structure that she had been looking at in a woman's face for five years before that woman was gone. The eyes were the specific color that she had last seen in an older face, that the king had last seen in an even older one before that, that had been looking out of portraits in the palace's eastern gallery for two hundred years of the Zenos royal line.
Those eyes.
"Your Highness, Queen Selara," she said, before she could stop herself.
The name came out at the volume of something involuntary.
The young man looked at her.
"So, that was her name," he said. His voice was even. Whatever the word had done to him was not on his face, because his face was the face of someone who had been practicing not showing things for a very long time and had gotten good at it.
"You look—" Mel stopped. She reorganized. "The eyes. The structure. She had—" She stopped again.
"How old would she have been?" he said.
"Forty-eight," she said. "She was twenty-nine when she died. I was there."
"I know you were there," he said. "You were always there. That was your position."
"Yes."
"And you knew," he said. "About the child. About what was done. You knew."
Mel looked at her hands.
"I suspected," she said. "For years I suspected and I did not act on it because acting on it required acting against the queen and the queen was — she had my position and my brother's position and everything I had built in that palace in her hands. This is not an excuse. I understand it is not an excuse. I am stating it as a fact about who I was then."
"And who are you now?" he said.
She looked at him.
"Someone who has run out of reasons to keep the things I have been keeping," she said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"She killed your brother, huh?" he said.
"Yes."
"Tell me how."
Mel told him.
She told it with the flat, comprehensive precision of someone who has been rehearsing this account in their own mind for months and has arrived at the version of it that contains everything relevant without the performance of the emotion around it, because the emotion was hers and the information was for him and she was clear about the difference.
The assassination attempt on the Wadee consort. The queen's trail too close to the surface. The specific, cold decision — she had made it quickly, Mel had observed this afterward, had recognized the speed of it as the speed of someone for whom this category of decision was not new — to produce a face for the investigators. Her brother's face. The false documents, the false trail, the poisoning on the road.
The cheap white flower.
"She sent condolences through a single white flower from a street vendor," Mel said. "Through one of her junior attendants. She did not come to the funeral. She did not send a letter."
Styrmir was looking at her.
"She did it because she could," Mel said. "And because she knew I would not — she knew that I would understand what it meant and that I would keep it to myself because keeping it to myself was what I had always done. She had been counting on that for thirty years."
"And you have something that will change things," he said.
"I have thirty years of being in the right rooms," she said. "I have the specifics of the former queen's illness — the pattern of it, the timing, the people who were present. I have the name of the woman from the palace dispensary who was paid and then removed. I have the history of your birth as I witnessed it and the history of what was done with you immediately after." She looked at him steadily. "I have the king's investigation's current status, because I know which rooms that investigation has been conducted from and I have been in those rooms. He is close. He is considerably closer than either the queen or the Crown Prince are aware."
Styrmir was quiet for a long moment.
"Why should I trust you," he said.
"You shouldn't," she said immediately. "Not yet. You have a letter and a dock and a sack over your head as the full extent of your experience of me. Trust is not what I am offering."
"Then what—"
"Evidence," she said. "I am offering evidence. I will give you things you can verify independently. Things that don't require you to take my word. And when you have verified enough of them to establish that my information is accurate, the trust follows from that — you don't have to decide to trust me, you only have to decide whether what I can demonstrate is real."
He considered this.
He considered it with the unhurried quality of someone for whom rushing decisions was a luxury he had long ago decided not to afford.
"When do you believe I will be arriving at the palace," he said.
She looked at him.
Something in the phrasing of it — when do you believe rather than when will you — told her something about the current state of his plans and confirmed something she had been assembling from the fragments of the correspondence.
"I believe," she said carefully, "that you may already be in the capital."
A pause.
Something almost happened in his face.
"You'll find out soon enough," he said.
He nodded to the person behind her.
"Wait," she said.
He looked at her.
"The king's investigation," she said. "He is specifically looking for information about the night your mother died. The physician who attended her for the final four months — his name is Corvel, he is in the southern territories. He has the information. He has had it for nineteen years and he has been waiting for the right moment to give it." She paused. "The right moment is arriving."
He was still looking at her.
"This is the first piece of evidence," she said. "Verify it. You'll find it's accurate."
The sack came back.
She did not struggle.
She was carried back to the boat and back to the river and deposited at the third pier as the sky became the pale, specific quality of early dawn.
She pulled the sack from her head.
She looked at the river.
She looked at the first light on the water.
She thought about those eyes.
She thought: I said I would do this and I am doing this.
The sun came up.
She folded the sack under her arm.
She went home to sleep for three hours.
She would need the energy.
There was considerably more to do.