— Seraphine POV —
It started with a cipher she couldn't crack.
Not because it was hard. She was good at ciphers — she had cracked eleven of them in the Halst correspondence and three in the supplementary Solenne files and had felt appropriately smug about all of them. This one was different. Layered. Whoever wrote it had used a base substitution and then shifted it on a secondary key she couldn't locate.
She had been staring at it for two hours.
Two hours.
She had once memorized a fourteen-page kill order in forty minutes. She had learned to read three dead languages for a single job. She had perfect recall and exceptional pattern recognition and this stupid letter was defeating her and she was not going to ask for help—
"You're glaring at the paper," Caelum said from across the table, without looking up from his own work.
"The paper deserves it."
"What is it."
"Nothing."
He looked up. Looked at the paper. Looked at her.
"Seraphine," he said, with the patience of someone who had exactly none left. "What is it."
She slid it across the table.
He picked it up. She watched his eyes move across it — quick, then slower, then a small pause at the third line.
"Double-keyed," he said.
"I know it's double-keyed."
"The secondary key is a date. See here—" he put it back on the table between them and pointed, "—the spacing pattern clusters every seven symbols. That's either a week or a month marker. If it's a month—"
He reached across her for the secondary documents. His arm crossed her line of vision. He was pointing at the reference dates, explaining something about symbol frequency, and he was close — not dramatically close, just — close, in the way of someone who had forgotten that proximity was a thing that required management.
She looked at the side of his face.
She thought: stop that.
She looked at the documents.
"—so if you align it to the third month of the administrative calendar," he was saying, "the substitution resolves into—" he grabbed her pen without asking, which she normally would have noted, and started writing quickly on a spare sheet. "There. The first word is province. Which means the whole first line is probably about the land transfer."
She looked at it.
He was right. Obviously he was right. She could see it now — the whole structure falling into place like something that had been waiting for someone to find the right angle.
"Hm," she said.
"You're welcome," he said, and went back to his side of the table.
She looked at him.
"I didn't say thank you."
"You were going to."
"I was considering it."
"Seraphine."
"Fine. Thank you."
"See." He turned a page. "Not hard."
She looked at the decoded first line. Then at him. Then at the first line again.
She thought: I have been doing this job alone for two years. Two years of carrying the whole picture, knowing everything, trusting no one because trusting people in an assassination career was how you became a cautionary tale. Two years in this world on top of that, following a story she had already read, keeping everyone at the careful distance that kept the plot moving smoothly.
And then this person had come along and reached across her for a document and cracked her cipher in four minutes and gone back to his own work like it was nothing.
Like helping her was just — a thing that happened. Natural. Easy.
She was not going to survive this person.
That was her conclusion. She was going to be completely fine and then she was not going to survive this person.
Excellent. Great. Perfect.
"Caelum," she said.
"Mm."
"How are you doing on sleep."
He paused. Looked up. The expression said: why are you asking that, that is a strange thing to suddenly ask.
"Reasonably," he said carefully.
"Reasonably meaning—"
"Enough." A pause. "Why."
"You had shadows under your eyes when you came in. You've had them for a week."
He stared at her.
"You're monitoring my eye shadows," he said slowly.
"I'm observant." She said it without blinking. Same thing she'd said about the schedule. "Are you sleeping."
"I'm fine—"
"That's not what I asked."
He closed his folder. Opened it again. Closed it.
"The Helvast letters," he said finally. "I keep — reading them. At night. Looking for something I missed."
"You haven't missed anything."
"I might have."
"Caelum." She said it the same way he said her name — not soft, just direct. Level. The way you talk to someone when you want them to actually hear it. "You haven't missed anything. The case is solid. You built it."
He looked at the table.
"I know," he said. Quiet. "I know it's solid. It's just—" He stopped.
"It's not about the case," she said.
A pause. He didn't answer which was also an answer.
"No," he said eventually. "It's not about the case."
The library was very quiet.
Outside the window the academy grounds had gone dark. Neither of them had noticed the time pass.
She made a decision.
She got up and moved her chair — not dramatically, just around the corner of the table, close enough that they were sitting at the same side now with the documents between them. Normal working arrangement. People did this all the time.
She picked up her half of the decoded letter and kept working.
He watched her move the chair. Watched her pick up the letter.
He didn't say anything.
After a moment he opened his folder again and kept working too.
They worked like that for an hour. Quiet. Close. Passing documents back and forth without announcing it, the way people do when they have been sharing a space long enough that the logistics have become automatic.
At some point his elbow was on the table and her arm was near it and neither of them moved away.
She was very aware of that.
She suspected he was too.
"My mother used to stay up with me," he said suddenly. Quietly. Out of nowhere, the way things come out when it's late and dark and your guard has been sitting for a long time. "When I had bad nights. She'd just — sit there. Read something. She didn't talk about it." He looked at the document in his hand. "She said being alone with something was the worst part. Not the thing itself."
Seraphine said nothing.
She passed him the next page of the decoded letter.
His hand closed over it. Stayed there for a second.
"Yeah," he said. Soft. "Okay."
— Nessa POV —
She went to collect Lady Seraphine at nine bells and found the library dark except for one lamp.
Both of them were asleep.
In their chairs. At the table. Lady Seraphine's head tilted slightly toward the boy who was slumped over his folded arms with a decoded letter still in one hand. Between them the documents were spread in the organized chaos of people who had been working seriously and then stopped mid-thought.
They were not touching. There was a respectable distance of approximately four inches.
Nessa stood in the doorway.
She thought: four inches.
She thought: two months ago she was following a schedule.
She thought: I need more pages for this contingency plan.
She went and got a blanket from the hall cabinet. She put it over Lady Seraphine's shoulders without waking her. She considered the boy for a moment. He was in his academy jacket. He'd be fine.
She got a second blanket.
She put it over his shoulders too.
She stood back and looked at the two of them sleeping at either side of a table full of political documents and thought about the disaster contingency plan's fourth branching scenario.
Already Too Late, she had written.
She had crossed it out.
She was starting to think she should cross it back in.
* * *
End of Chapter Twelve