˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
They stayed in the workroom until the tenth bell.
By the end of it the bread was gone, the list had seven new items added to it, and Eurydice Hughes had learned three things about the people sitting across from her that she had not known at the beginning of the evening.
Rex Marius thought out loud, which was alarming until you understood that his conclusions were usually sound even when his process looked like controlled chaos. Paion Dmitri was the steadiest person in any room she occupied and did not waste a single word. And Hayden Wolffe watched everything with the patient attention of someone who had spent years learning that the most important information was usually in the details other people walked past.
She had not expected to find them impressive. She was finding them impressive.
She was also finding it deeply strange to be sitting in a medical workroom in the subject district at the tenth bell eating shared bread with three people who had every reason to be frightened of her and were treating her, more or less, like a fourth member of a group that had not existed a week ago.
Nobody had called her Your Highness since Hayden at the door. She had not corrected them.
She was not entirely sure what to do with that.
When the meeting ended Paion collected the updated list, locked the cabinet, and told them all to go home and sleep because decisions made on no sleep were bad decisions and they could not afford bad decisions. Rex said goodnight to everyone including the locked cabinet, which Eurydice decided she was not going to think too hard about. Hayden walked to the door and held it open.
Eurydice stopped beside him.
"I need to speak with Mistress Calla," she said quietly. "Without it being obvious that I am speaking with her specifically."
"I can arrange that," Hayden said. "I go to the library every morning. If you came at the same time, it would look like a coincidence."
"Princesses do not visit the subject district library by coincidence."
"Princesses doing archival research for their mothers do," Hayden said. "The Queen assigned you to review founding era military records. That is a matter of palace record. It is entirely plausible that you would visit the library to cross-reference the public holdings."
Eurydice looked at him. "You thought of that quickly."
"I have been thinking about cover stories since the moment you walked into the neglected wing," Hayden said. "It seemed like a useful thing to prepare."
She almost smiled again. It was happening more than she expected tonight.
"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Seventh bell."
"I will be there," he said.
She walked out into Tanner's Row and the cool night air of the subject district and pulled her coat closer and looked at the lamplit street around her. The subject district at night was quieter than the palace district but warmer somehow, the buildings closer together, the light from the windows more golden, the sound of people living their lives drifting through the walls.
She had not spent much time down here. She was realising, not for the first time tonight, how many things she had not spent much time doing.
She walked back toward the palace, alone, through streets that did not know who she was, and thought about everything she had learned in that small locked room.
The fortnight clock was running.
Mistress Calla knew something.
And somewhere in the subject district behind her, in a locked cabinet between two unremarkable documents, the scroll was waiting.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚
The next morning Hayden arrived at the library at the seventh bell and found Eurydice already there.
Not inside. Outside, standing at the base of the library steps in her plain dark coat, a leather satchel over one shoulder, looking up at the library facade with an expression he could not immediately read.
He climbed the steps and stopped beside her.
"You are early," he said.
"I did not sleep again," she said.
He nodded. He understood that. He had not slept particularly well himself.
They went in together. Mistress Calla looked up from the archivist's desk as they entered, and something moved across her face, quick and controlled, there and gone, at the sight of the two of them side by side. Hayden watched her file it away behind her professional expression.
"Master Wolffe," she said. "And a visitor."
"I am here to cross-reference the founding era military holdings," Eurydice said, with the calm authority of someone who had rehearsed this and did not sound like she had rehearsed it. "For the palace archive review."
"Of course," Mistress Calla said. She looked at Eurydice for a moment with those eyes that saw things. Then she looked at Hayden. "The eastern wing is available. As usual."
"Thank you," Hayden said.
They walked through the main hall toward the eastern wing, and Hayden counted the seconds until they were out of earshot, and then counted a few more to be certain.
"She knows," Eurydice said quietly. Not a question.
"Yes," Hayden said. "She always has."
"We need to talk to her."
"I know. But not yet. Not here in the open. We need to be certain she is safe to approach."
Eurydice was quiet for a moment. They had reached the entrance to the Military Archives. The dim cool air of the old records section settled around them.
"Hayden," she said.
He looked at her.
"What happens if we run out of time before we are certain of anything?"
It was the most direct she had been with him. Not the composed princess voice, not the authority she had worn all evening in the workroom. Just the question, asked plainly, by someone who needed an honest answer.
He thought about it honestly.
"Then we act on what we have," he said. "Imperfectly. With incomplete information. Because the alternative is doing nothing and watching a war start that we could have prevented."
She looked at him for a moment.
"That is not reassuring," she said.
"No," he agreed. "But it is true."
She nodded once. The weight-accepting nod he was beginning to recognise as her version of understood and moving forward.
They walked into the Military Archives side by side and neither of them spoke again until they reached the low archway of the neglected wing, where the lamp burned steady and quiet and the gap on the third shelf from the bottom waited, clean of dust, patient as it had always been.
Eurydice stopped under the archway and looked at the section around her properly for the first time in the light of day. At the shelves, the old volumes, the founding era documents that had been sitting here for four centuries waiting for someone to understand what they contained.
"She kept all of this," Eurydice said quietly. "Zephyrine Callas. She did not just write the scroll and hide it. She preserved everything around it. The whole context."
"So that whoever found it would be able to verify it," Hayden said. "So it could not be dismissed."
Eurydice looked at the gap on the third shelf.
"She thought of everything," she said.
"She had four years to think," Hayden said. "Four years of knowing the truth and knowing she could not say it and deciding to do the only thing she could instead."
Eurydice was quiet for a long moment.
"I keep thinking about her," she said. "What it must have been like. Sitting in the council chamber watching it happen. Knowing and not being able to stop it."
"I think about her too," Hayden said.
"She was brave."
"Yes," Hayden said. "She was."
Eurydice looked at the lamp. Then at him.
"We need to be braver," she said.
It was not a question and not quite a statement. It was the kind of thing a person says when they are deciding something that cannot be undecided.
Hayden looked at the lamp too.
"Yes," he said. "We do."
Outside the library walls, Nephoria went about its morning. The palace was up there somewhere above the cloud roads, enormous and certain and moving toward a war it did not know was built on nothing.
A fortnight.
They had a fortnight.
Hayden sat down at the table and opened his journal and Eurydice sat across from him and opened her satchel and pulled out a notebook of her own, and they began.
˚₊‧✩ ˚₊‧꒰ა ʚིᵋº̣̥͙̣̥͙ᵌɞྀ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ✩‧₊˚