Chapter 103: The temple quarter
The temple quarter smelled like candle wax and boiled herbs, and Lancelot had been standing in the back of the healing hall for the better part of an hour, dressed in a plain brown coat with no house colors at all, watching Serenya Veyrion work a line of the sick and the poor with the patient, unhurried grace of a woman who had genuinely never once in her life been rushed anywhere.
Nobody here recognized him, which was the entire point of coming without an escort, without a single mark of rank, folded into the crowd of petitioners the way he folded into everything, and it gave him nearly two hours to simply watch his sister do the thing the entire Empire believed defined her, and to decide, with the particular cold clarity he brought to most problems worth solving properly, exactly how much of it was real.
Some of it, infuriatingly, was.
He’d expected performance, and there was performance, the careful attention she gave each petitioner, the way she matched her voice to their fear, gentle for the frightened children, steady for the old men trying not to show pain, warm for the mothers holding babies too sick to cry properly anymore. But underneath the performance there was also, unmistakably, actual skill, the kind that didn’t fake itself. He watched her lay both hands against an old woman’s chest, watched the woman’s ragged, wet breathing ease within seconds, watched color return to a face that had been the particular gray of someone a day or two from dying, and felt something shift in his assessment that had nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with the plain, uncomfortable fact that healing magic at that speed and that precision did not belong to someone with no real power at all.
"She’s good," said the woman beside him in line, an older petitioner with a bandaged hand, following his gaze. "Best there’s ever been, they say. Better than the temple healers, and they train their whole lives for it."
"So I’ve heard."
"You here for someone, or yourself?" The woman glanced at him, not unkindly, the way people down here sometimes did when a face didn’t match the part it was trying to play.
"Just watching, mostly."
"Funny thing to spend an afternoon on."
"I contain multitudes," Lancelot said, which earned him a confused look and nothing further, and he let the conversation die there and returned his attention to the front of the hall, where Serenya had moved on to a young man with a wound that had clearly gone bad, the skin around it an angry, spreading red that made even Lancelot’s untrained eye wince.
She worked longer on this one, her expression settling into something more focused, less performed, the mask slipping slightly under the actual demand of the task, and Lancelot watched her hands and thought, not for the first time that day, that whoever had decided the Fifth Heir was the weakest of the six had likely never watched her do this, had simply looked at a woman with no army and no blade and no forbidden books and assumed the absence of those specific things meant an absence of any real threat at all.
’That’s the mistake everyone keeps making with people like us,’ he thought, and the us in that thought landed strangely, an uncomfortable kinship with the sister he intended to kill, and he set the discomfort aside the way he set most inconvenient feelings aside, filed for later examination that would probably never actually happen.
The healing hall began to empty as the hour grew late, temple attendants moving through with quiet efficiency to close the doors, and Lancelot lingered near the back long enough to watch the two guards who’d been stationed unobtrusively near the entrance the entire time, close enough to matter, far enough to preserve the image of a saint who needed no protection at all. Real guards. Competent ones, judging by the way they held themselves, the way their eyes swept the thinning crowd without ever quite settling anywhere long enough to look like watching.
So: no personal combat ability worth naming, by every account he’d ever heard and nothing he’d seen today contradicted that. Genuine, formidable healing magic, fast enough and precise enough to matter in a fight if she ever turned it toward something other than mending. Real protection, quiet and professional, dressed up to look like nothing at all. And underneath all of it, a public devotion so wide and so deep that killing her cleanly, in a way that didn’t immediately implicate the killer in the eyes of half the Empire, was going to require considerably more care than simply being the strongest person in the room.
He left before the doors closed, blending back into the evening crowds of the temple quarter, and was three streets from the palace gates before a familiar voice caught up with him from behind, slightly out of breath.
"You’ve been gone since morning." Wren fell into step beside him, a basket balanced on one hip, empty now, the excuse for her own absence apparently already spent. "Garran said you left before dawn and didn’t say where."
"I had things to see."
"In the temple quarter."
He glanced at her sideways. "How do you know where I was."
"I didn’t, until you just confirmed it, which was considerably easier than actually following you, so thank you for that." Her mouth curved, not quite a smile, the particular dry amusement she wore when she’d caught him at something and wanted him to know it without making a production of the fact. "You smell like candle wax and boiled herbs. That’s not a smell you pick up wandering the market."
"You’re disturbingly observant for a laundry maid."
"Someone has to be, in a household where the man in charge of it spends his days pretending he doesn’t notice anything either." She shifted the basket to her other hip, and for a moment her expression flattened into something more careful, more deliberate, the tone she used, he’d noticed, whenever a question actually mattered to her rather than simply passing the time. "What were you doing there, Lancelot. Really."
He considered, for a long moment, how much of the truth a question like that could safely hold, and decided, the way he usually did with Wren, that the answer was some, but not all, because some was closer to trust than he could currently afford and all was closer to a death sentence than either of them needed tonight.
"Watching my sister work," he said finally. "I wanted to see for myself whether the stories were true."
"And?"
"They’re mostly true. Which is inconvenient, because I’d rather they weren’t." He said it lightly, the way he said most things, but something in his face must have shown more than he meant it to, because Wren’s careful expression sharpened, watching him now with the particular attention of someone recalculating a problem she’d thought she already understood.
"You’re planning something."
"I’m always planning something. You’ve told me that yourself, several times, usually while implying I should stop."
"This feels different." She said it quietly, almost to herself, and for a moment Lancelot had the distinct, uncomfortable sensation of being read by someone considerably better at it than he generally gave her credit for, a servant girl who noticed things a servant girl had no obvious reason to notice, who asked questions with a precision that felt, now that he was actually paying attention to it, less like idle curiosity and more like the shape of someone gathering information on purpose. He filed that away too, the way he filed everything, a small cold thread pulling taut somewhere under his ribs that had nothing to do with Serenya at all.
"You worry too much," he said instead, and let the conversation drift somewhere safer, toward the state of the stables and Garran’s ongoing feud with the newest groom and whether the west roof repairs had actually held through last week’s rain, and Wren let him steer it there without argument, which was itself, in its own quiet way, a piece of information worth keeping.
Later, alone in his room with the candle burned down to a stub and the palace gone mostly silent around him, Lancelot lay in the dark and turned the day over in his mind the way he turned every problem over, sorting it into pieces that fit and pieces that didn’t yet.
Serenya was not, as everyone assumed, a woman with nothing behind her gentleness. But she was, for all her genuine skill, still the only one of his siblings whose entire strength depended on people believing in her rather than fearing her, which meant she was also the only one of them whose strength could be taken away without a single blade ever being drawn, if a man was patient enough, and cruel enough, and clever enough to find the right lie to tell about a saint.
’Strip the crowd first,’ he thought, watching the candle gutter toward its final inch. ’Then she’s just a woman with very good hands and nobody left in the room who’ll care what happens to them.’