Chapter 104: Three names
"You want me to do what, exactly."
Fennick had asked the question three times already in slightly different phrasing, each time with the particular tone of a man hoping the answer might improve on repetition, and each time Lancelot had given him roughly the same answer, patient in the specific way that meant he wasn’t going to change his mind no matter how many times it got asked.
"Temple records. Patient logs, admissions, whatever the healing hall keeps to track who came through the doors and who didn’t."
"That’s not information, Lancelot. That’s a filing cabinet. Nobody pays for filing cabinets."
"Somebody’s about to." Lancelot slid a small purse across the table of the library annex, heavier than the one he’d given Garran, and watched Fennick’s fingers close around it out of pure professional reflex before his mouth had finished arguing. "I don’t want gossip. I don’t want rumors about her being secretly cruel to kittens or whatever the usual court nonsense sounds like. I want facts. Names, dates, who was treated and who wasn’t, and if there’s a pattern in it, I want to know what the pattern is before anyone else does."
"You think there’s a pattern."
"I think a woman who’s spent her entire life building a reputation for mercy has had a great many opportunities to decide, quietly, who that mercy actually gets spent on." Lancelot leaned back, watching Fennick weigh the purse in his palm with the same automatic care Garran always used. "Nobody’s that good at something for that long without occasionally making a choice they wouldn’t want written down."
Fennick was quiet for a moment, turning the purse over, and when he spoke again some of the usual careless humor had drained out of his voice. "You’re not just curious anymore, are you. This isn’t a theory you’re testing."
"No."
"You’re actually going to do this. All of it. Starting with her."
Lancelot didn’t answer immediately, and the silence sat between them long enough that Fennick’s eyes flicked toward the door, an old habit of a man checking exits before a conversation got dangerous enough to need them, and when Lancelot finally spoke his voice had none of its usual lightness left in it at all.
"I watched a man kill his cousin without hurrying because he’d worked out there wasn’t another way. I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life waiting to find out whether one of my siblings reaches the same conclusion about me first."
"That’s not really an answer."
"It’s the only one I’ve got that’s honest." Lancelot’s mouth curved, thin and humorless. "Yes, Fennick. All of it. Starting with her, because she’s the only one of the six whose entire strength is a story other people believe, and stories can be unwritten a great deal more quietly than a man can be beaten in single combat or out-maneuvered by an army."
Fennick pocketed the purse slowly, and for a long moment looked like a man doing arithmetic he genuinely didn’t enjoy the results of. "I’ve known you eleven years. I sold your mother information twice, before you were old enough to remember her clearly. I’ve never once asked you what you actually wanted out of this palace, because I always assumed the answer was to survive it, and that seemed like a reasonable enough thing to want that it didn’t need explaining." He stood, tucking his coat straight with more precision than the gesture required. "I’ll get you your filing cabinet. But you should know I’m charging you for the risk now, not just the work, because helping the Seventh Heir dig up dirt on the Fifth is the kind of thing that gets a man’s throat cut quietly if it’s discovered, and I’d rather be paid properly for that particular flavor of danger before I go looking for it."
"Name your price."
"I already did. You just handed it to me. I’m telling you it’s about to go up." Fennick offered something that wasn’t quite his usual grin on his way to the door. "Give me four days."
He was gone before Lancelot could answer, and Lancelot sat alone in the library annex for a while afterward, turning an old agricultural record between his fingers without reading a word of it, thinking about the particular weight of having just said the plan out loud to another living person for the first time, how much heavier it sat once it existed as spoken words instead of something turning quietly behind his own eyes in the dark.
The four days passed slower than they had any right to. He kept to his usual patterns, out of habit as much as caution, the granary steward’s silence stretching long enough that Lancelot began to suspect the man had either decided to take the offer or was working up the nerve to report him instead, Aldrik’s occasional passing comment about roofs continuing without ever quite tipping into an actual accusation, Wren watching him with the same too-sharp attention she’d shown since the temple quarter, asking careful, sideways questions he answered with careful, sideways evasions, both of them apparently content to let the game continue rather than force it into the open.
Fennick found him on the fourth evening in the same corner of the same library annex, dropping a thin folder onto the table between them with none of his usual theatrical flourish.
"Here’s your pattern."
Lancelot opened it, and read, and felt the cold thread in his chest pull taut in a way that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the particular satisfaction of a suspicion proving correct.
"Three names," Fennick said, before Lancelot could finish reading. "All three turned away from the healing hall in the last two years, officially for lack of capacity, officially because the line was too long that day, officially because a hundred small, reasonable-sounding things that happen to healing halls all the time. All three, as it turns out, were connected to families who’d publicly opposed Serenya’s temple appointments, or her allies’ land claims, or her charitable foundations getting first pick of provincial grain surplus. Two of them died within a week of being turned away. The third survived, but lost the arm the wound was in, and lives now in genteel poverty because the family’s standing never recovered from being seen as unworthy of the saint’s mercy."
"And nobody noticed."
"Nobody was looking to notice. A saint turning away three people over two years, out of the thousands she’s actually healed, isn’t a pattern to anyone who isn’t specifically hunting for one. It’s a rounding error. It’s the kind of thing that gets explained away before anyone finishes asking the question." Fennick tapped the folder. "You asked for a pattern. I found you one, and I’ll tell you honestly, I don’t love what it says about her, and I don’t love what it says about the two of us going looking for it in the first place."
Lancelot closed the folder slowly, running his thumb along its edge. "Three names isn’t a scandal. Three names is a coincidence, if you squint at it the way the whole court’s apparently been squinting at it for two years."
"So what do you need."
"I need someone who was there. Someone inside the hall who watched it happen and knows it wasn’t capacity or bad luck, someone who can put a voice to the pattern instead of just numbers on a page, because numbers get explained away and a witness standing in a crowded square does not." Lancelot’s mind was already moving, sorting the shape of the problem into pieces that fit, the particular cold clarity settling over him that Garran had once called, not entirely as a compliment, the look you get right before something in this palace gets a great deal more complicated. "Someone who worked the hall during at least one of those turnings-away. A healer, an attendant, someone low enough in the temple hierarchy that Serenya never bothered learning their name, and high enough in it that they’d have actually been standing close enough to see what happened."
Fennick’s expression had gone careful again, weighing something Lancelot couldn’t quite read. "There’s an attendant. Left the temple’s service about eight months back, under circumstances nobody talks about very loudly. Runs a small apothecary near the tanner’s district now, on considerably less coin than temple work would’ve paid her. I could find her."
"Find her."
"And if she doesn’t want to talk?"
Lancelot considered the question with more genuine weight than Fennick had probably expected, because it was, underneath everything else, a real question, and he’d learned a long time ago that the answers he gave to real questions when nobody important was watching mattered a great deal more than the ones he gave for an audience.
’If she doesn’t want to talk,’ he thought, ’then I find out exactly how much her silence is worth to her, and whether that’s a price I’m willing to pay, or a fear I’m willing to become.’
"Then we’ll find a way to make her want to," he said instead, and didn’t let himself examine too closely how easily the words came, or how little, if he was honest with himself, they’d actually cost him to say.