Chapter 100: Seventh Heir
The steward from the granary found Lancelot two days later in the outer corridor near the eastern kitchens, which was itself a small miracle, since Lancelot had spent considerable effort over the years making sure nobody from the granary office ever had reason to look for him anywhere at all.
"A word, if the Seventh Heir has a moment."
"I have several. Try me."
The steward glanced up and down the corridor before lowering his voice, the way men did when they’d convinced themselves they were being discreet and had, in fact, only made themselves more obvious. "The numbers from the eastern granary. I ran them again last night, twice, because the first time didn’t sit right with me. There’s a gap I can’t account for."
"Roofs leak. Grain rots. I believe we discussed this."
"Four hundred pounds of rot is a number that comes from a bad winter. It doesn’t come from a roof." The steward’s eyes flicked toward the pockets of Lancelot’s coat, as if two hundred pounds of grain might still be visibly bulging out of them a fortnight later. "I’m not accusing the Seventh Heir of anything."
"Good. That would be a strange thing to accuse someone of, in a hallway, with no evidence, several days after the fact." Lancelot let the silence stretch just long enough to be uncomfortable before he continued, his tone shifting into something warmer, more conspiratorial, the tone of a man offering a favor rather than admitting a crime. "But if a number like that keeps not sitting right with you, and you’d rather it stopped bothering you entirely, I imagine there are ways to make a discrepancy disappear from a ledger a good deal more permanently than it disappeared from a granary."
The steward’s mouth opened, then closed. Whatever he’d expected walking into this conversation, an offer to help him falsify the very records he was worried about hadn’t been it, and Lancelot watched the man’s face cycle through outrage, calculation, and something closer to relief, in that order, before he finally spoke again.
"That would be. That would require compensation."
"It would require a fraction of what the discrepancy is currently worth to me, which makes it an excellent trade for both of us." Lancelot smiled, the easy, harmless smile he’d spent years perfecting specifically for moments like this one. "Think it over. You know where to find me. Or rather, you didn’t, until today, and I’d genuinely prefer we kept it that way going forward."
He left the steward standing in the corridor working through the arithmetic of his own conscience, and continued toward the outer hall, where the quarterly reading of the Emperor’s proclamations was due to begin within the hour and attendance was, as always, technically mandatory for all seven heirs and genuinely observed by perhaps three of them.
The hall was already filling by the time he arrived, and he took his usual place near the back, behind a pillar wide enough to make his presence a formality rather than a fact anyone needed to engage with. Aldrik stood at the front as always, arms crossed, radiating the particular boredom of a man who considered himself above the entire exercise but attended anyway because being seen attending was its own kind of statement. Roderic stood beside him, actually listening, a page at his elbow taking notes on a wax tablet with the brisk efficiency of a man who’d clearly done this a thousand times before.
Serenya stood nearer the front than either of them, hands folded, back straight, her expression arranged into the particular gentle solemnity she wore whenever more than three people were watching, which in this hall was always. A pair of temple attendants flanked her, close enough to suggest devotion, far enough to suggest she’d calculated the exact distance that read as humble rather than surrounded. Lancelot watched her incline her head toward an elderly noblewoman who approached to pay respects, watched the noblewoman’s face brighten at whatever small kindness Serenya offered her, and thought, not unkindly, that it was genuinely impressive work, the kind of performance that took years to build and constant maintenance to sustain, and wondered, the way he sometimes did, whether Serenya herself still remembered which parts of it were real.
Isolde stood apart near a side door, as she usually did, arms folded into her sleeves, watching the proceedings with the flat, unbothered patience of someone waiting for something more interesting to happen elsewhere. Her eyes swept the hall once, briefly, and passed over Lancelot without pausing, the way they always did, and he let out the small breath he always let out when that happened, the one that meant still nothing, still invisible, still fine.
The herald began reading, and Lancelot let most of it wash past him, tax adjustments and border garrison rotations and a formal notice of mourning for some minor noble house he’d never heard of, until a name caught, briefly, somewhere near the end of the list, mentioned only in passing as part of a longer report on provincial land disputes.
House Ashendel.
He didn’t recognize it. He filed it away anyway, because filing things away for no clear reason was another habit that had kept him alive this long, and because something about the way the herald’s voice moved past the name, quickly, without elaboration, the way a man moves past something he’s been told not to linger on, made the small cold thread in his chest pull taut again.
The reading ended. The hall began to empty in its usual uneven currents, groups peeling away toward their own corners of the palace, and Lancelot waited for the crowd to thin before making his own way toward the door, because leaving in a clump of other people was the only way to leave without being noticed leaving at all.
He nearly made it.
"Seventh."
Aldrik’s voice, pitched to carry without being loud, the voice of a man who’d never once in his life had to raise it to be heard. Lancelot stopped, turned, found the First Heir studying him with an expression that managed to combine mild curiosity and total disinterest in roughly equal measure, the specific look of a man glancing at furniture he’d forgotten he owned.
"Still coming to these."
"Attendance is required."
"So it is." Aldrik’s gaze moved over him, plain coat, no house colors beyond the legal minimum, no blade worth the name at his hip, and whatever conclusion he drew from the inventory didn’t seem to interest him enough to voice aloud. "I hear the granary’s short on grain again this winter."
Something in Lancelot’s chest went very still and very calm, the particular calm that came right before he said something he probably shouldn’t. "Roofs leak."
"So they do." Aldrik’s mouth curved, not quite a smile, more the shape a smile makes when a man is testing whether it will land. "You should have someone look at that. Wouldn’t want people getting the wrong idea about where all that grain keeps going."
"I’ll mention it to the steward. I’m sure he’ll be relieved someone finally noticed the roof."
For a moment, just a moment, something flickered behind Aldrik’s eyes that might have been genuine amusement, quickly folded away beneath the usual boredom, and then he was moving past without waiting for anything further, Roderic falling into step beside him without so much as a backward glance. Lancelot stood there a beat longer than strictly necessary, turning the exchange over, trying to decide whether he’d just been caught, warned, or entertained, and deciding, on balance, that it was probably some uneven mixture of all three, which was somehow worse than any single option would have been on its own.
Fennick was waiting for him afterward in the library annex, sprawled in his usual chair with his boots up on the table in a way that would have gotten anyone else removed from the palace grounds entirely.
"House Ashendel," Lancelot said, before Fennick could open with whatever line he’d prepared. "Mean anything to you?"
Fennick’s boots came down off the table slowly, which was answer enough on its own. "Where’d you hear that name?"
"Herald mentioned it. Buried in a land dispute report, gone almost before it started."
"That’s because it’s not supposed to mean anything to anyone anymore." Fennick leaned forward, voice dropping to something closer to careful than his usual careless drawl. "Minor branch. Old blood, no real claim, no real land left worth disputing, which is exactly why it’s strange that anyone’s disputing it. I did some digging after our last conversation. Ashendel’s the family Isolde’s people have been pulling records on."
"The same one."
"The same one." Fennick’s grin had gone thin and unconvincing. "And as of two days ago, according to a friend of mine who works the lower archive night shift, somebody in that family turned up dead. Quietly. No formal notice, no inquiry, nothing that should have made it into a proclamation reading at all."
’And yet here we are,’ Lancelot thought, ’listening to a herald skip past it like it was nothing, in a room full of people who all seemed to know exactly how much nothing it wasn’t supposed to be.’