A map of chalk on the wall showed directions in a code worn thin by hands and words.
There were rooms off the main corridor, doors with iron rings and little peepholes that were mostly decorative.
The horsewoman's fingers brushed one, and the small sound of a bone tapping was like the heartbeat of the underground.
When the final door opened into the chamber she knew it for the place it was: a council room beneath the city, with a single, long table and chairs for those who believed they directed history.
The air inside was cooler and sharp with the smell of ink and pine.
A woman sat at the far end of the table with a map spread before her, cuttings and pins marking egresses and entrances.
She looked up, and for the first time in many hours there was a reflection of recognition in someone's eyes.
"Welcome," the woman at the table said, her voice worn like a well-used tool.
It was an odd hospitable word for the subterranean place where secret policies were hatched. She gestured to a chair, but the cloaked figure only stood, the veil masking her face.
"Is the council assembled?" she asked.
"Not yet," the woman answered. "We will come at the noon bell. You are early."
She let out a small, almost inaudible breath. Early was safer. Early had time to test the air before the game began.
She walked to the windowless wall and leaned, feeling the weight of stone as if it were a kind of counsel.
Above them the city moved in its usual blindness: pomp and sermon and petition; below, a different rhythm held.
The court's engine was a thousand small pistons: marriages, debts, the placement of a child at a bench.
She had been taught to see them all, like threads in a web, and then to sense which pull would hold.
"You come with a face full of rumors," the woman at the table said after a while.
She spoke like someone who had been listening for years to the world and could read from the inflection of a coin the direction of a storm.
"Rumors of the Regent's illness. Rumors of a new alliance. Rumors of brigands at the northern pass hoarding grain. Rumors spread like seeds.
Which do you bring here?"
She smiled under the veil. It was an old smile, the kind one gives to those who expect payment in kind.
"I bring a question," she said. "And the means to answer it."
The woman at the table's eyes narrowed, sharpening into the predatory look of those who managed bargains. "You have money?"
"Sometimes," the other answered. "Sometimes favors. Sometimes the knowledge of a door that few know exists."
"Knowledge is dangerous," the woman said. "Knowledge makes men hasty.
Tell me plainly: do you intend to place a figure on the throne, or do you intend to remove one?"
She thought of the market and the old matron's hand, the silver held like a secret star.
She thought of the guard and his faithful back. She thought of the horsewoman who waited outside the hatch, whose hands had been callused by roads and whose eyes had never looked away from a true danger.
She also thought of history, of the way it bent toward certain shapes because someone had forced it, patiently and cleverly, onto them.
"There are three kinds of danger," she said at last.
"There is the danger of a king who is ignorant.
There is the danger of a king who is cruel.
And there is the danger of a throne left empty while the world around it learns how to survive without it."
The woman at the table considered that.
The stone around them seemed to breathe as if in agreement. "You speak as someone who understands the craft," she murmured.
"The queen-maker is a title that requires more than coin."
"A title I do not claim," the other said, with a small, ironed edge to her voice. "Names are for the world above. Below, we do our work with hands."
"You are cautious," the woman said. "But caution is a clever way to die in the slow politics of the court. You must choose. Will you make or unmake?"
She closed her eyes for a breath and felt the city like a palm beneath hers. Hands fit together there often badly, sometimes with surprise. "I will make an opening," she said. "I will not force a crown nor spurn one. I will see which man or woman steps through and whether that person can be trusted to bear more than the desire for self."
The woman at the table laughed once, a dry sound like twigs struck together. "Prudence and art," she said. "You are either very young for such contrivance or very old."
"You call it contrivance; I call it apprenticeship," the woman replied. In her mind's eye she could already see the strings tied and the knots to be loosened: an old lord whose heir drank too deep of wine, a widow whose son had the face of an honest man, a commander in the north with a lean to cruelty.