"The deposed prince," Benjamin said, from behind the first princess, "died running."
He said it with the flat delivery of someone who had filed the event away years ago and was producing it from storage. His back was straight. His voice was entirely without heat, which was, if anything, more unsettling than anger would have been.
"She was afraid of capture. Afraid of what came after capture. So she chose the other option." He paused. "It's a pity. Mother, you wanted her alive. I would have been more thorough."
The first queen said nothing, which was apparently the correct response because Benjamin continued.
"She made her choice," he said. "The shame she brought to the royal family went with her. That's the end of it."
Still sitting with her back to him, the first queen ran her thumb along the armrest slowly.
A deposed princess. A woman who had been run down by Benjamin's forces and had made a final calculation about which outcome was preferable. Someone who had, according to the math, been terrified enough of what Benjamin specifically would do to her that she'd chosen not to give him the chance.
That was new information.
"Her child," the first queen said. "The boy. Do you know where he is?"
The silence that followed this was the particular kind of silence that occurs when a room realizes something has gone wrong with the script.
Benjamin's awareness sharpened.
The first queen servants had been sent out. There were only two of them in the room. The question she had just asked was not a question the first queen would have needed to ask. Unma knew. Unma had always known, or had access to finding out in thirty seconds. She would not ask it in this way, with this specific formulation, unless she were performing ignorance she didn't have.
He looked at the back of his mother's head.
"Who are you?" he said.
The first queen turned around. Her plump, pleasant face wore an expression of mild curiosity.
"Did I say something wrong?" she asked.
Benjamin's first response, forming immediately and proceeding through his body toward action, stopped.
His feet had stopped working.
Not numbness. Not an injury. Complete non-response to the signals he was sending them, the specific refusal of a body that was receiving different instructions from a different source. He tried to call out. The words formed in his throat and did not leave it: the first queen had raised one finger, given a quiet "Shh," and his voice had simply ceased to be available.
He stood in the sitting room of the first queen's apartments, completely controlled, while something wearing his mother's face looked at him with academic interest.
Benjamin had spent considerable time over the years studying what Manipulation-type Nen abilities looked like from the outside and what they felt like from the inside, because understanding the tools your enemies might use was basic professional practice. What he had never seriously modeled was being on the controlled end of an ability this thorough, applied without a single moment of telegraphed intent. No hostility when he entered the room. No malice. No warning signal that his faculties had been catching and he'd missed.
A trap, not an attack. Already complete before he knew to resist it.
"Manipulator," he said, because he was going to use the time he had for data collection. "You were in this room before I arrived. The mark was placed passively. Trap mechanic." He thought. "You're not a palace insider. You're running this from a distance, using her body as the terminal." He stared at his mother's face. "A three-year-old. Three years old when Babimyna started the file on you."
The first queen tilted her head slightly.
"Takaji," Benjamin said. "That's the name you were given. The deposed prince's illegitimate son. Babimyna's report flagged someone called Liam as a possible match. I thought he was being creative." A pause. "It seems reality has a worse sense of humor than Babimyna."
Liam, in Unma's body, considered the name Takaji with the critical attention he gave all bad names. There was a small island nation in the Hunter World with a particular aesthetic he had been vaguely aware of. If the deposed princes or her partner had any connection to that aesthetic, that would explain the naming choice.
It explained nothing about why you would inflict it on a child, but that was a separate issue.
"Revenge," Benjamin said, reading the room. "You're here for revenge."
"Partially," the first queen said. "I wasn't here specifically for that. But since the subject has come up." She paused. "Mother. The deposed prince. Where did she—"
"She's dead," Benjamin said, with the practiced flatness of someone closing a file. "She chose to be. You know this."
"I mean before that. Where was she from? Who was the father?"
Benjamin looked at her. The calculation running behind his eyes was visible in the quality of his attention: every piece of information he gave was a resource being spent, and he was currently not in a position to refuse. He was weighing what cost what.
"What does it matter?"
"I'm curious," the first queen said. "Curiosity is allowed."
"The body you're currently using is not of Hui Guo Rou bloodline," Benjamin said, in the tone of someone who has decided directness is more useful than deflection. "Chima Chiyuta had the boy by a foreigner. Not a Kakin citizen. Not a noble. Someone completely outside the royal context. That's the insult that warranted what warranted. An heir of foreign unknown blood, paraded around as a royal child. She was—"
"She was scared of you," the first queen said.
Benjamin stopped.
"She chose to die rather than be caught by you," the first queen said, conversationally. "That's the detail your version keeps glossing over."
The first prince's expression held several things at once: fury, contempt, and underneath those, something that might have been the discomfort of a man who had filed a story cleanly and was now being asked to acknowledge a different version of the same events. He opened his mouth.
His eyes went dark.
The world of Benjamin's thoughts narrowed rapidly, then became small, then became a room in the back of his own mind with the door closed from the outside. He found himself there: aware, functional, unable to reach any of the controls.
The first queen stood, straightened her sleeves, and walked to the door.
She opened it.
Two private soldiers standing at attention, exactly where they had been.
"Go to the king," said the first prince, in Benjamin's voice, wearing Benjamin's face. "I have something important to discuss."
"Yes, Your Highness," Vincent said.
They fell in behind him. Rihan watched the first prince walk and could not identify precisely what produced the small, persistent sense that something was marginally different about the way he moved through a corridor.
Probably nothing. Probably a long morning.
He followed anyway.