Chapter 107: Odile
The safehouse Fennick found was a narrow room above a dyer’s shop three streets from the palace’s outer wall, close enough that Lancelot could reach it inside a quarter hour if something went wrong, far enough that nobody with a reason to look for a runaway temple attendant would think to start there. It smelled permanently of indigo and lye, a smell that clung to the back of the throat and never quite left, and Odile had taken up residence in it with the particular grim efficiency of a woman who’d already learned, the hard way, how quickly a life could be packed into a single bag.
"You didn’t have to come yourself," she said, when Lancelot let himself in on the third evening, closing the door behind him with the careful, unhurried motion of a man who’d checked the street twice before approaching it at all. "Your man’s already been by twice today."
"My man has other things to manage besides making sure you haven’t lost your nerve." Lancelot took the room’s single chair, leaving the narrow bed for her, and studied her face in the low lamplight, the tightness around her eyes that hadn’t been there in the apothecary. "Have you."
"Lost my nerve?" Odile’s laugh came out short and humorless. "I lost my nerve eight months ago, in a hallway, watching a boy’s mother scream at people who’d already stopped listening to her. What I’ve got left isn’t nerve. It’s just the only thing that’s left after the nerve’s gone."
"That’s a fine distinction."
"It’s the only distinction that matters, in my experience." She sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded tight in her lap, and for a moment the careful hardness she’d worn since the apothecary cracked just slightly, showing something younger and more frightened underneath it. "Ten days. I keep counting them down like it’s going to make the number smaller."
"It’s seven, now." Lancelot said it gently, which was, he noticed even as he said it, not a tone he used often enough to be entirely comfortable in it. "I know that’s not better."
"No. It’s not." She looked at him directly then, something searching in her expression. "Why does it matter to you. The real reason. Not the one about patterns and witnesses. I’ve watched enough nobles pretend at causes to know what the pretending looks like, and you don’t do it quite right, which either means you’re bad at pretending or you’re not pretending at all."
Lancelot considered the question longer than he generally considered most things, because it deserved better than his usual quick, deflecting answer, and because some part of him, the part he examined least often, genuinely wanted to know what he’d say if he let himself answer it honestly.
"I watched a man kill his cousin without hurrying," he said finally, "because he’d worked out there was no other way. I’ve spent my whole life being the person nobody bothers watching, and I always told myself that was survival, clever, careful survival. Then I found out the entire palace has been playing a game with rules nobody bothered explaining to me, and I’ve decided I’m done being the piece on the board that gets moved without being told why." He met her eyes. "You’re not the reason I’m doing this. But you’re the first person I’ve found whose story actually deserves to matter more than the game does. I’d like to keep it that way, if I can."
Odile was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke again her voice had steadied into something harder, more certain. "Then let’s make sure I say it right, on the day. I’ve been turning the words over every night since your man moved me here. I want to get them right."
They worked through it together for the better part of an hour, Lancelot asking the questions a hostile crowd or a temple attendant might ask, pressing at the weak points, testing where her voice cracked and where it held, and by the end of it Odile could recite the boy’s name and the date and the senior healer’s exact words without her hands shaking, which was, Lancelot thought, its own small victory in a plan built almost entirely out of things that could still go wrong.
He was three streets from the safehouse, walking back toward the palace through the early dark, when a hand closed around his arm from the mouth of an alley and pulled him sideways with enough force to nearly take his feet out from under him.
His first instinct was violence, fast and total, and it was only Fennick’s low, urgent voice hissing "It’s me, it’s me, stop" that kept him from doing something that would have ended badly for both of them in a narrow space with no room to properly fight.
"What."
"Someone was at the dyer’s shop twenty minutes ago. Asking the owner about the room above it, whether it was let, whether he’d seen anyone new coming and going." Fennick’s face, in the thin light, had lost every trace of its usual careless humor. "I was two streets over when I heard it secondhand from a runner I keep on retainer. I came straight here."
"Description."
"Tall. Dark hair." Fennick’s jaw tightened. "I know what you’re thinking. I thought it too. But it could be nothing, Lancelot, it could be half a dozen women in this city who fit that description, and I’m not going to let you go do something reckless off a description that vague."
"I’m not planning to do anything reckless." Lancelot’s voice had gone flat and cold, the humor stripped entirely out of it, and his mind was already moving fast, sorting the shape of the problem the way it always did when the stakes stopped being theoretical. "I’m planning to move Odile again, tonight, somewhere even you don’t tell me the location of until the morning of the Blessing, because if I don’t know where she is, nobody can pull it out of me, by trick or by force or by anything else."
"That’s paranoid."
"That’s precisely as paranoid as the situation currently warrants." Lancelot was already walking, fast, back toward the dyer’s shop, and Fennick fell into step beside him without further argument. "Seven days, Fennick. Seven days and one witness standing between me and the first real move of this entire war, and someone’s already circling close enough to ask a shopkeeper direct questions about a room he shouldn’t have any reason to care about."
They found Odile awake when they reached the room, alert in the particular way of someone who’d learned to sleep lightly out of necessity, and she took the news of the move with a steadiness that Lancelot found, despite everything, quietly impressive.
"Then where am I going."
"Somewhere I’ll arrange within the hour. You won’t know until you’re there, and after tonight, neither will I, not directly. Fennick will handle the details from here, through people who’ve never heard my name and never will." Lancelot watched her gather the single bag she’d brought, methodical, unhurried despite the urgency, and felt something settle in his chest that was almost, though he wouldn’t have called it that out loud, respect. "I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what I promised you three days ago."
"You never promised me anything." Odile shouldered the bag, and in the low light her face had gone hard and resolved in a way that made her look, for a moment, considerably less like a frightened witness and considerably more like a woman who’d already decided, some time ago, exactly how far she was willing to go. "You told me it might cost me everything, and that if it did, it wouldn’t be for nothing. I believed you then. I still do."
They moved her within the hour, through streets Lancelot deliberately didn’t memorize the route of, and it was well past midnight before he finally made his way back toward the palace alone, the cold night air doing nothing to settle the particular restless calculation running behind his eyes.
’Someone is close enough to smell this,’ he thought, watching the palace walls rise ahead of him, dark against a darker sky. ’Close enough to ask the right questions in the right street on the right night. And in seven days, whoever that is will be standing in the same crowd I am, watching to see whether I actually have the nerve to do what I’ve already decided I’m going to do.’
Someone is close enough to smell this,’ he thought, watching the palace walls rise ahead of him, dark against a darker sky. ’Close enough to ask the right questions in the right street on the right night. And in seven days, whoever that is will be standing in the same crowd I am, watching to see whether I actually have the nerve to do what I’ve already decided I’m going to do.’