Chapter 99: Theft
The tax steward’s ledger said the eastern granary had lost four hundred pounds of grain to rot over the winter. Lancelot Veyrion knew for a fact that it had lost closer to two hundred, because he was the one who’d arranged for the other two hundred to disappear into a cart bound for a miller in the lower city who asked no questions and paid in coin that didn’t trace back to anyone with a name worth remembering.
He sat now in the back corner of the steward’s office, technically present because Seventh Heirs were required to witness the quarterly grain accounting the same as anyone else with a claim to the Veyrion name, and watched the steward frown over numbers that would never add up correctly again as long as Lancelot kept finding new ways to make sure of it.
"Rot," the steward muttered, mostly to himself, tapping his pen against the ledger. "Every winter it’s rot."
"Damp seasons," Lancelot offered, from his corner, not looking up from the apple he was eating. "Everyone knows the eastern granary has a damp problem. Someone really ought to fix that roof."
The steward glanced at him the way people generally glanced at him, which was to say briefly, and without much interest, filing him away under the useless one before returning his attention to the numbers. Lancelot took another bite of the apple and thought, not for the first time, that being underestimated was the single most useful gift anyone had ever handed him for free.
He’d learned it the hard way, the way most useful things get learned. Somewhere around his eighth year at court, after watching two separate attempts on his life fail only because the people sent to carry them out hadn’t thought a nine-year-old with no magic and no swordsmanship worth doing properly, he’d understood something that none of his six siblings ever seemed to grasp, busy as they were competing to be the most obviously dangerous person in any given room. Nobody plans carefully around a threat they’ve already decided doesn’t exist. Nobody double-checks the man they’ve written off. And a man nobody double-checks can walk out of a granary accounting with two hundred pounds of Imperial grain in his pocket, so to speak, and nobody will ever think to ask him where it went.
He finished the apple, dropped the core into the steward’s wastebasket on his way out, and went looking for Garran, because it was that time of the morning and because he had money to hand over, and because Garran was the only person in the entire palace who both knew exactly what Lancelot was and had decided, for reasons Lancelot had never fully worked out, that this was something to be managed rather than reported.
He found the old retainer by the stables, arguing quietly with a groom about a lame horse, and waited until the argument resolved itself in the horse’s favor before falling into step beside him.
"You’re smiling," Garran said, without turning. "You only smile like that when you’ve stolen something."
"I don’t steal. Theft implies I took something that belonged to someone. This was grain that belonged to an Empire that has never once asked me if I wanted to be part of it."
"That’s the same thing with better words."
"Everything’s the same thing with better words. That’s most of what running an Empire actually is, from what I can tell." Lancelot pressed a small purse into the old man’s hand, the weight of it settling with a soft clink. "For the roof over the west stable. The one you keep complaining about."
Garran weighed the purse without opening it, an old habit, judging coin by feel the way another man might judge a blade. "This is more than a roof costs."
"Then fix the roof and keep the rest. Buy something you actually want for once, instead of something the horses want."
"The horses can’t ask for things. That’s rather the point of my job."
"The horses also can’t complain when you don’t spend the coin on them, which is also rather the point." Lancelot fell silent as a pair of guards passed, nodding at Garran with the easy familiarity of men who’d known him twenty years, not sparing Lancelot more than the barest glance, and once they were gone he continued, quieter now. "Anything from the east wing? Isolde’s people were supposedly asking around near my rooms."
"Nothing since. Might have been nothing at all. Might have been someone testing whether anyone would notice if they were." Garran’s eyes cut sideways at him, sharp despite the age in the rest of his face. "You should still be careful."
"I’m always careful. Careful is the only thing keeping me breathing at this table."
"Careful is not the same as what you actually do, which is walk directly at trouble and hope it’s too surprised to hit you before you’ve already picked its pocket."
Lancelot grinned at that, because it was, annoyingly, an accurate description of at least half his methods, and he was saved from having to admit it by the sight of Wren crossing the yard ahead of them with a basket of linens balanced against one hip, moving with the particular brisk irritation of someone who considered every task beneath her but had decided, apparently permanently, to do it anyway rather than make a scene about it.
"You look like you’re plotting something," she called over, not stopping.
"I’m always plotting something. Keeps the mind sharp."
"Last time you said that you ended up with a black eye and half the kitchen staff wouldn’t look at you for a week."
"That was an unrelated incident."
"You told me yourself it was about a card game."
"The card game was the plot. The black eye was an unrelated incident that occurred during the execution of the plot." Lancelot fell into step beside her, ignoring Garran’s low, unimpressed sound behind him. "You’re up early even for you."
"Somebody has to get the east wing linens done before midday, and it’s apparently not going to be whoever’s actually assigned to it, because she’s decided she’d rather be sick today." Wren shifted the basket, glancing at him sideways. "Garran said Isolde’s people were poking around near your rooms."
"Word travels fast."
"Word travels at the speed Garran walks, which is not fast at all, so you’ve had this information for at least an hour before I did." She said it without any particular edge, the flat observational tone she used for most things, the tone that made it easy to forget she noticed nearly everything that happened around her, which Lancelot suspected was rather the point, though he’d never managed to work out why a servant would need that particular skill as badly as she seemed to have it. "You’re not worried?"
"I’m mildly curious. Worried is a lot of effort for something that might turn out to be nothing."
"And if it’s not nothing?"
"Then I’ll be worried later, properly, with all the effort it deserves. Getting the order wrong just means I waste the worry on something that never happens." He said it lightly, and mostly meant it, though somewhere under the ease of the words there was a small, cold thread of attention that never quite switched off, the same one that had kept him breathing this long, quietly cataloguing every strange thing that happened near him and waiting to see which of them mattered.
Wren didn’t answer that, only shook her head in the particular way she had that suggested she found him equal parts ridiculous and exhausting, and peeled off toward the east wing without further comment, leaving Lancelot to continue on alone toward the lower gardens, where he was due to meet a man who did not officially exist about information that did not officially matter.
Fennick was already waiting under the dead fig tree when Lancelot arrived, sitting with the easy sprawl of a man who considered every space he occupied his by default, picking at something under his fingernail with a small knife.
"You’re late."
"I’m exactly on time. You’re just early, which you do specifically so you can say things like that."
"Can’t argue with a strategy that works." Fennick tucked the knife away and produced, from somewhere inside his coat, a small folded paper, which he did not hand over immediately. "Before I give you this. It’s about the Third again, and it’s stranger than the last thing."
"Stranger how?"
"Her people aren’t just asking about old succession law anymore. Someone in the lower archive says she’s had them pulling records on a family that isn’t even part of the main line. Some minor branch, distant cousins of a cousin, nothing that should matter to anyone with a real claim to anything."
Lancelot took the paper, unfolding it slowly, and found a name on it he didn’t recognize, in a hand he didn’t recognize either, and felt that same small cold thread of attention pull taut.
’That’s an odd thing for a woman with no interest in anyone outside her own research to start caring about,’ he thought, and didn’t say it out loud, because saying things out loud was how they stopped being useful and started being overheard.