Chapter 106: Inspection
Lancelot spent the walk back from the tanner’s district turning Odile’s description over from every angle he could manage, tall, dark-haired, plain speech, careful eyes, and arrived back at the palace gates no closer to certainty than when he’d left, which was, he decided, its own kind of useful information. A description that vague could belong to half the women in Caldrenor. It could also belong to exactly one of them, and the fact that his mind kept circling back to the same name without any actual evidence to justify it told him something about how much attention he’d already been paying to Wren, whether or not he’d admitted that to himself before tonight.
He didn’t confront her. Confronting people before you had leverage on them was, in his experience, the single fastest way to teach them how to lie to you more effectively going forward, and if there was even a chance Wren was exactly what she appeared to be, a sharp-tongued servant with nothing to hide, he had no interest in spending that trust on a guess he couldn’t back up. Instead he did the only thing that had ever reliably worked for him, which was to lay a small, harmless trap and see what walked into it.
"I need the west wing linens moved by tomorrow evening," he told her the next morning, catching her in the courtyard with an armful of folded sheets, his tone light, entirely unremarkable. "There’s an inspection I’d rather not have anyone poking through my rooms for."
"What kind of inspection."
"The kind where I’d rather not say specifics out loud in a courtyard." He let just enough weight into the words to make it sound like something real, without giving her anything she could actually verify. "Just get it done before evening. I’ll be out most of the day anyway."
It was, in its entirety, a fabrication. There was no inspection. There was only the question of what Wren would do with a piece of information given to exactly one person, and whether that information found its way anywhere it shouldn’t over the following few days. It was a small lie, cheap to tell, cheap to lose if it came to nothing, and Lancelot had learned a long time ago that the cheapest lies were usually the most efficient way to learn something true.
Fennick found him in the library annex that afternoon, dropping into his usual chair with rather less of his usual sprawl than normal, which had become, over the last several weeks, its own kind of warning sign.
"Anything on the woman."
"Nothing solid. Nobody in that neighborhood knows her, which either means she’s careful or means she’s not local, and both of those point the same direction, toward someone who knows what they’re doing." Fennick rubbed at his jaw, tired in a way that had less to do with sleep than with the particular exhaustion of a man being asked to solve problems he hadn’t signed up for. "I did learn one thing. Whoever she is, she wasn’t only asking about Odile. The cooper mentioned she asked, in passing, whether anyone unusual had been through the street lately. Strangers. New faces."
Lancelot went very still. "Us."
"Could be us. Could be nothing. Could be a woman doing her actual job, whatever that job turns out to be, and simply being thorough about it." Fennick’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite his usual grin. "I don’t love any of the versions of this where it turns out to matter, Lancelot, I’ll be honest with you."
"Neither do I." Lancelot let the silence sit for a moment, turning the shape of the problem over, and then set it aside deliberately, the way he’d trained himself to set aside problems that weren’t ready to be solved yet. "We move forward regardless. I’ve been thinking about where to burn Serenya’s protection down, and I don’t think it can happen quietly. Quiet gets buried. I need something loud enough that even the temple can’t smooth it over with a closed door and a week of silence."
"You have somewhere in mind."
"The Sowing Blessing. Ten days from now, in the central square, half the city turns out to watch her open the season formally, and by every account it’s the largest public gathering she does all year." Lancelot’s voice had settled into the particular flat, precise register it took on whenever a plan had finished forming somewhere behind his eyes and only needed saying out loud to become real. "If Odile stands up in the middle of that crowd and tells them what she told us, in front of thousands of people who came specifically to watch a saint bless their harvest, there is no closed door big enough to make that disappear afterward."
"That’s ten days for the temple, or whoever that woman answers to, to find Odile first."
"I know." Lancelot’s jaw tightened, the first real crack in his composure since he’d sat down. "Which is why she doesn’t stay in that shop for the next ten days. I want her somewhere safer, somewhere I control, and I want it arranged in a way that doesn’t put a trail on her that leads straight back to a Veyrion."
"You want to hide a witness inside the palace grounds without anyone noticing a new face."
"I want you to find her somewhere that isn’t the palace, somewhere close enough that I can reach her quickly and far enough that nobody thinks to look there first. Pay whatever it costs. I’ll settle the difference." Lancelot met his eyes, and something in his expression had gone entirely serious, the humor stripped out of it for the moment, leaving only the cold, careful thing underneath. "I got her into this. I’m not going to let her die alone in a shop that smells like herbs because I couldn’t be bothered to think three steps ahead of whoever’s already asking questions."
Fennick studied him for a long moment, and whatever he saw apparently satisfied whatever internal accounting he was running, because he nodded once, short, and rose from the chair with more purpose than he’d shown since arriving. "I’ll have her moved by tomorrow night."
He was gone before Lancelot could say anything further, and Lancelot sat alone in the annex as the light through the narrow window shifted slowly toward evening, running the plan forward in his mind, testing it for the places it might break. Ten days. A crowd large enough to matter. A witness who had to survive that long without being found, and a saint who would walk into that square utterly unaware that the mercy she’d spent years performing was about to be measured, in public, against the mercy she’d actually shown.
He found Wren in the west wing that evening, precisely where he’d told her to be, the linens moved as instructed, the room swept and orderly in a way that suggested she’d taken the fabricated inspection more seriously than the lie had actually deserved. She looked up when he entered, brushing a strand of hair back from her face with the particular brisk irritation she always wore around any task she considered beneath her.
"Done. Whatever your inspector’s looking for, they won’t find fault with the linens."
"Good." He watched her for a moment longer than the situation strictly required, cataloguing the tiredness in her eyes, the faint dust on her sleeves that suggested real work rather than performed work, nothing in her manner that read as anything other than exactly what she appeared to be, and felt, for one brief, uncomfortable moment, the particular vertigo of a man who’d set a trap and genuinely didn’t know yet whether he wanted it to catch anything at all.
"You’re staring," she said, without looking up from folding the last of the linens.
"I’m thinking."
"About the inspection."
"Among other things." He let the lie stand, because pulling it back now would only teach her that his lies came apart under pressure, and that was a lesson he had no intention of giving her for free. "You’ve been careful lately. More than usual."
"Somebody has to be, in a household run by a man who spends his days pretending he isn’t planning anything." She said it lightly, the same dry tone she always used, and if there was anything underneath it, any flicker of something more deliberate, Lancelot couldn’t find it in her face no matter how closely he looked.
’Ten days,’ he thought, watching her finish the linens and gather her basket, unbothered, ordinary, exactly what she’d always seemed to be. ’Ten days to find out whether I’ve been wrong about you this whole time, or whether I’ve simply been too busy planning a murder to notice the one person standing closest to me the entire time.’
Somebody has to be, in a household run by a man who spends his days pretending he isn’t planning anything." She said it lightly, the same dry tone she always used, and if there was anything underneath it, any flicker of something more deliberate, Lancelot couldn’t find it in her face no matter how closely he looked.
’Ten days,’ he thought, watching her finish the linens and gather her basket, unbothered, ordinary, exactly what she’d always seemed to be. ’Ten days to find out whether I’ve been wrong about you this whole time, or whether I’ve simply been too busy planning a murder to notice the one person standing closest to me the entire time.’