Earlier that morning, before the ships had rounded the bend in the river, before Gerffron had stood at the royal docks in his navy-and-gold formal attire, the queen had received a visitor.
Not a formal visitor — not the kind that appeared in the palace's official reception calendar. The kind that appeared at the western wing's back entrance at the seventh bell, brought by one of the palace's lower servants whose discretion had been purchased at the appropriate rate, conducted through the corridor that the official record described as a maintenance passage and which functioned as the gap between the palace's visible life and the one running parallel to it.
The man's name was Corvis.
He was forty-three years old and had the specific, unremarkable appearance of someone who had spent his professional life cultivating unremarkability. Medium height, medium build, the kind of face that rooms forgot within minutes of him leaving them. He wore the clothes of a minor merchant and carried himself with the posture of a man who was used to having no particular claim on any room he occupied.
He served the queen through a chain of intermediaries sufficiently long that any direct association would have required a dedicated investigator several months of work to establish.
He had been the queen's primary intelligence resource for the investigation of the lost heir for two years.
He sat across from her in the private sitting room.
He accepted the tea that was offered.
He said: "The location confirmed by our previous source has been cleared."
The queen looked at him.
"Cleared?" she said.
"Ransacked is perhaps more accurate," he said. "The property was searched thoroughly. No persons were found. No evidence of recent habitation. The neighbors confirmed that the person in question vacated the premises several months ago, at minimum." He held the tea cup in both hands with the care of a man who appreciated warmth on a cold morning. "No one in the area knows where he went. There is no forwarding information. No record of a destination."
The queen was quiet.
She looked at the window.
She looked at the city beyond the window.
She thought about a young man who had spent eighteen years in a dungeon and had emerged from it and had, apparently, disappeared so thoroughly into the world beyond the border that two years of professional searching had not produced a reliable location.
She thought: he is somewhere.
She thought: somewhere has a direction.
"You don't need to continue the search anymore over there," she said.
"Of course, Your Majesty."
"Expand the territory. The northern border settlements. The trade routes between the kingdoms." She looked at him. "He will have needed resources. He will have attached himself to some institution or household that could provide them. Find the institution."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
She looked at his tea cup.
"You haven't drunk your tea," she said.
He looked at the cup.
"I apologize," he said. "I was—"
He put the cup to his lips.
He drank.
He set the cup down.
He opened his mouth to say something. But then his hand went to his throat.
It went to his throat with the specific, involuntary quality of a hand that has been sent there by the body without being asked.
His eyes changed.
He looked at the queen.
The queen looked at him with the composed, entirely level expression of a woman watching a thing she has arranged conclude in the way she arranged it to conclude.
He tumbled down from the chair.
The sound was significant.
The blood was less significant than sounds of that kind sometimes produced — not dramatic, only present, the specific minimum of it that the circumstance required.
The queen looked at him on the floor.
She looked at her own hands.
She smoothed an invisible mark from the back of one with the thumb of the other.
She looked at her mouth in the mirror above the side table — she had not drunk the tea, had not touched the tea, her reflection confirmed this without her having needed to check — and pressed her lips together once in the specific, finishing gesture of a woman completing a task.
She went to the door.
She opened it.
"Mel," she said.
Mel was in the corridor.
She was always in the corridor.
"There is a mess in the sitting room," the queen said. "See to it."
She walked down the corridor.
She did not look back.
Mel went into the sitting room.
She looked at Corvis on the floor.
She looked at the tea cup.
She stood in the sitting room for a moment.
She thought about the chain of intermediaries that connected this man to the queen — the specific, carefully insulated chain that meant his death produced no traceable connection to the western wing.
She thought about the investigation.
She thought about what Corvis had found and not found and what the not-finding meant.
She thought about the dock.
The royal dock, where the Veldrathi delegation's ships were currently arriving.
She thought about a roster that she had seen, in the brief interval when it had passed through the administrative processing office two days ago, before it had been filed with the court's formal records.
She thought about a name on that roster.
Styrmir Voss.
She clicked her tongue.
Not at the body on the floor — the body on the floor was beyond the reach of her opinions at this point.
At the waste of it.
"You don't have any family," she said to Corvis, who was in no position to respond. "No one who will be looking for you. No one whose grief I could — no one I could bring to the cause." She looked at him. "Completely useless to me, even as a martyr. You're not even a good cautionary tale because nobody knows your real name."
She called for the relevant staff.
She stood in the corridor while they worked.