— Seraphine POV —
Her father summoned her again on Friday.
Not a letter this time either. Her father had two modes of communication — letters for things he considered manageable, and his personal secretary appearing at her door for things he had already decided were not. The secretary was a small precise man named Aldous who had been with the house for thirty years and had the expression of someone who had delivered enough bad news to have made peace with it.
Aldous was at her door at seven in the morning.
Seraphine looked at him. He looked at her. They had a brief silent conversation that went: this is bad. I assumed. He's waiting. I'll be five minutes.
She got dressed in the serious clothes.
Her father was at his desk this time, not the window. The window was for thoughts he was still organizing. The desk was for conclusions he had already reached and was prepared to enforce.
This was the desk.
He had a report in front of him. She recognized the paper stock — internal house intelligence, the kind that came from the people her father paid to watch things and report back without being asked. She had known those people existed. She had not known they were watching her specifically.
She sat down and arranged her face into the expression that said: I am listening carefully and I have nothing to be defensive about.
She had everything to be defensive about. The expression was the point.
"The boy was in the manor overnight," her father said.
Not: the clerk. Not: your consultant. The boy. She noted the downgrade.
"We fell asleep in the library," she said. "Working. Nothing happened."
"I know nothing happened." He looked at her with the expression of a man who found the definition of nothing to be doing a lot of work. "That's not the point."
"Then what is the point."
"The point," he said, carefully, "is that you have been spending significant time with this boy. Daily. You've been providing him access to restricted house records. You had him in the manor overnight." He folded his hands on the desk. "And three people have now asked me whether my daughter is involved with a scholarship clerk."
Three people.
She thought about who those three people were. One was probably someone on the Valdros staff — Aldous, maybe, or one of the footmen who'd been carrying enrollment forms across the academy. One was almost certainly from Aldric's social circle. The third—
"Who is the third," she said.
Her father paused. Just slightly.
"Lord Vasek," he said.
Seraphine went still.
Lord Vasek was not a man who asked questions out of social curiosity. Lord Vasek was her father's primary ally in the anti-royal coalition, a cold practical man who viewed every person in his orbit as either an asset or a liability and had very efficient ways of dealing with the second category.
He had asked about Caelum.
Specifically. By name, probably. Because Lord Vasek did not ask vague questions.
"He's asking because he's curious about the clerk's access to our records," she said. Controlled. "Not because of me."
"It doesn't matter why he's asking," her father said. "It matters that he is." He leaned forward. "Seraphine. I have been patient about this. I accepted the consulting arrangement. I accepted the library access. But if Vasek is paying attention to this boy then the boy is no longer just a useful tool — he's a variable. A variable attached to you specifically." He held her gaze. "That is a problem."
"I can manage Vasek."
"You are seventeen—"
"I am aware of my age, Father."
"—and you are getting attached," he said. Quiet. Final. Like he was sorry to say it and was saying it anyway. "I can see it. Which means Vasek can see it. Which means it is now a lever that someone could use against this house."
She said nothing.
Because he wasn't wrong about Vasek. He wasn't wrong about the lever. He was absolutely correct on both counts and she knew it and he knew she knew it.
He was wrong about one thing but she was not going to say that part out loud.
"The consulting arrangement ends," he said. "I'll have Aldous deliver the termination notice—"
"No."
Her father stopped.
She had said it quietly. Flat. The tone she used when she had already decided something and the decision was not available for revision.
He looked at her.
She looked back.
"The arrangement does not end," she said. "Caelum has the Solenne-Helvast case. If we pull him now, three months of work dissolves and we lose the timing advantage you've been building toward for two years." She kept her voice even. "I understand Vasek is watching. I'll manage the optics. But the arrangement stays."
"Seraphine—"
"I'll be more careful," she said. "No overnight visits. More formal meeting structure. Aldous can sit in if it helps." She paused. "But the arrangement stays, Father. I need him for the case."
The last sentence was true.
It was not the whole truth.
Her father looked at her for a long moment with the expression of a man reading a document and finding something in the margins he hadn't expected.
"More careful," he said finally.
"Yes."
"Aldous attends twice weekly."
"Fine."
"And Seraphine." He held her eyes. "When this case is finished — we have a conversation. A real one."
She nodded.
She left.
In the hallway she breathed once, slowly.
Vasek was watching.
That was bad. That was genuinely, specifically bad in a way that required thinking about carefully and soon. Vasek didn't watch things that weren't problems and he didn't leave problems sitting for long.
She walked quickly to her study.
She needed to warn Caelum.
She also needed, privately, to think about the fact that she had just fought for his consulting arrangement with zero hesitation and zero ambiguity and the reason she had given her father was true but was roughly forty percent of the actual reason.
She was going to think about that sixty percent later.
Later was absolutely going to collapse under the weight of everything she kept putting there.
— Caelum POV —
She found him at the office at eight bells, which was an hour before her usual time.
He looked up from the enrollment corrections — he had been making his way through the backlog since six, which was technically not his shift but the backlog did not care about shifts — and immediately knew something had happened. She had the expression she got when she was being very calm about something that required effort.
He put his pen down.
"What happened," he said.
"Lord Vasek is asking about you."
He sat with that for a second.
Vasek. He knew the name — had come across it in the house records, in the coalition correspondence, in three separate intelligence documents he had been building his picture from. Cold man. Efficient. The kind of political operator who had survived four different administrations by being useful and invisible and willing to do things that other people found distasteful.
The kind of man who did not ask idle questions.
"How specific was his inquiry," Caelum said.
"Specific enough that my father called me to his desk at seven in the morning."
"What does he want to know."
"Probably what you have access to," she said. "And how attached I am to keeping you." She said the second part evenly. Like it was just information.
He looked at her.
She looked back. Same even expression. Waiting to see what he did with it.
He filed the how attached I am to keeping you in a place he was going to take out and examine later. Much later. When he had less important things to deal with.
"He's testing the arrangement," Caelum said. "Seeing if I'm a liability you'll protect or a tool you'll drop when it gets complicated."
"Yes."
"Which means he already suspects I have something. The records." He thought fast. "He'll move on the Solenne information if he thinks we're close to using it. He'd want to control the timing."
"That's what I thought too."
"We need to move faster," he said. "Or make him think we're moving slower. One or the other."
"Which do you want."
He looked at his desk. Thought about the letters. The obstacles. His father driving a road twice a week for fifteen years.
"Faster," he said.
She nodded. Sat down in the visitor chair — moved the equipment returns to the floor without looking at them, same as always — and pulled out her own folder.
"Aldous is going to be present at some of our meetings," she said, opening it. "My father's condition. He's harmless but he reports back."
"I'll behave."
"That's not what I'm worried about."
He looked at her. She was already reading her documents, expression neutral, but there was something in the set of her shoulders — tension she hadn't quite put down yet.
He thought about Vasek. About how attached I am to keeping you. About her fighting for the arrangement at seven in the morning.
He thought: she did that for me. She fought her father for me and then came straight here to warn me.
He thought: stop noticing things like that, it's not helpful.
He picked up his pen.
"Seraphine," he said.
"Mm."
"Thank you. For keeping the arrangement."
She didn't look up. But something in her shoulders settled slightly.
"I needed you for the case," she said.
"I know."
Pause.
"Caelum."
"Mm."
"Stop being gracious about it. It's unsettling."
He almost smiled.
"Sorry," he said, not sorry at all.
She made a sound that was not quite exasperation and went back to her documents.
He went back to the enrollment corrections.
Outside the window it was a completely ordinary Friday morning and absolutely nothing felt ordinary at all.
— Vasek POV —
Lord Edren Vasek had not gotten to where he was by ignoring small things.
Small things were how big things started. Small things were how empires ended. Small things were the entire point, if you were paying attention, which he always was.
The clerk boy was a small thing.
An orphan. A scholarship student. Physically unremarkable, magically nonexistent, currently employed as a clerk at an age when most boys of his background would have already accepted their ceiling.
And yet.
And yet the Duke's daughter had rearranged her schedule around him. Had given him access to restricted house records. Had fought to keep his consulting arrangement when her father tried to end it. Had slept in the same room as him — innocently, yes, but proximity was proximity and proximity meant trust and trust was the most dangerous thing one person could extend to another.
He had looked into the boy's background.
Parents dead. Accident, official record. Father had been a surveyor with some involvement in provincial land disputes. Nothing remarkable. Nothing that should have produced a boy who cracked provincial political deadlocks from a clerk's desk and somehow ended up in the inner circle of the most carefully guarded noble daughter in the coalition.
Nothing remarkable.
Vasek did not believe in nothing remarkable.
He believed in small things that weren't small yet.
He wrote a letter to a man he knew in the provincial records office. Polite. Brief. Asking about a surveyor named Ashveil and a particular land dispute from four years ago.
He sent it.
He waited.
He was very good at waiting.
* * *
End of Chapter Fourteen