THE INSIDE MAN

THE SCAR AND THE SERPENT The guard with the scar was gone. Lian saw it. Then he vanished into the crowd. “Caelan,” she said. Low. “Find him.” --- Search started immediately. Every gate. Every barracks. Every alley. Name: Unknown. Description: Male. 20s. Scar on left cheek. By nightfall, nothing. “He’s not in the guard roster,” Varek said. “Which means he was never officially hired.” Lian’s jaw tightened. “Inside man. As expected.” --- That night, Lian didn’t sleep. Again. She walked the palace halls. Alone. Gold eyes watching every shadow. Every servant who bowed too low. Every guard who looked away too fast. Paranoia. But necessary. --- Day 2. Another letter arrived. Not to Lian. To Lady Selene. On her desk. Your family in Valen is alive. Your brother still eats twice a day. Your mother still keeps the house on Ammar Street. Keep it that way. The chain across the harbor mouth is lifted for the grain barges. We want the hours it stands open, and the name of the man who turns the wheel. Same brick. Same hour. No signature. Only a serpent, pressed into black wax. --- Selene did not burn it. That was the thing that saved her life, and she knew it, and she brought it anyway. She came to the study at dawn in yesterday’s gown, hair unpinned, the letter held out flat on both palms like something she had already been sentenced for. Lian read it twice. Then she set it down and did not speak for a long time. “How long,” she said at last. “Seven months, Your Majesty.” “Say what you did.” Selene’s voice did not shake. That was almost worse. “I keep the seal register. I made a second stamp from the register wax and I signed the Kessel Bay warehouse papers with it. I copied the port ledgers every third week and left them behind the shrine in the fish market. I did not know about the chest.” Her chin came up for the first time. “I would have let them cut my hands off before I signed that chest through, and I will say so under any question you care to put me to. But everything before it, I did.” Caelan had gone very still by the window. Varek’s hand was on his sword. “Why,” Lian said. “They took my brother in the spring. He is nineteen. He was studying law in Valen because I sent him there.” Selene’s mouth moved. “I told myself it was only numbers. Grain counts. Nobody dies of a grain count. Then the harbor road went hungry, and I kept sending them anyway.” Silence. “Majesty,” Varek said. “The law is not complicated here.” “No,” Lian said. “It is not.” She stood. She walked around the desk until she was close enough for Selene to see her eyes properly. Gold, and steady, and entirely without warmth. “You stole from people who cannot afford to be stolen from,” Lian said. “You held a door open for a man who put poison in my house. If I hang you this morning, not one person in this kingdom would call it unjust.” “I know.” “Look at me.” Selene looked. “Your life is worth almost nothing to me today,” Lian said quietly. “Your handwriting is worth a war.” --- Caelan waited until the room emptied. “You are going to use her.” “Yes.” “And afterwards?” “Afterwards I will decide what she is,” Lian said. “Traitor, or the only thing standing between Dorian and a hundred people at a midwinter feast. I do not have to know today.” Caelan rubbed his jaw. “Varek will want a rope.” “Varek can want.” She pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward her. “A traitor who confesses before you catch her is a weapon. A traitor you hang is only a corpse with good timing.” --- Day 3. The reply went behind the loose brick at the fish market shrine at the sixth hour, in Selene’s own hand, on Selene’s own paper. Every word of it a lie, and every lie built to be believed. The chain lifts at first light on the twelfth. Four hours. The wheel man is called Corvin, a drunk, and he can be bought for forty silver. Lian had chosen it carefully. There was no barge on the twelfth. There was no wheel man called Corvin. Anyone who acted on that letter would be holding a paper with only one possible author. Then they waited. Varek put eleven men in the market. A fishwife who was not a fishwife. Two beggars. A boy mending nets who had killed three men in the eastern campaign. Lian watched from the loft of the salt store with the shutters cracked two fingers wide. Caelan tried once to send her back to the palace. She did not even answer him. He stayed. The scarred man came at the eleventh hour of the night. No hood. No hurry. He walked the way a man walks when he belongs somewhere, which is the only disguise that has ever worked. He crouched at the shrine as though to pray. His hand went behind the brick. “Now,” Varek said. It was not clean. The scarred man was fast, and he had a blade in his sleeve, and he opened the net boy’s forearm to the bone before four of them got him down on the wet stones. He nearly reached the water. Two feet from the edge, Varek’s knee went into his back and the knife skidded away into the dark. They took him alive. That had been the whole point. --- They stripped him in the guardhouse. Under the left collarbone, burned into the skin, old and shiny: a serpent, coiled once. The same serpent that was carved on the lid of the chest. He laughed when Lian came in. Blood on his teeth, wrists chained to the ring in the floor, laughing. “The Dragon Empress,” he said. “In person. He said you would come yourself. He said you can never leave a thing to other people.” “Name.” “You will not get one.” “Who paid you.” “You are asking the wrong question, Majesty.” He spat, and grinned, and looked genuinely delighted. “You think you have caught the inside man. I am the legs. I carry paper from a brick to a boat. I have never once been told a name, because there is no need to tell a horse where the grain came from.” Lian crouched in front of him the way she had crouched in front of the merchant. “Then tell me something you do know.” He thought about it. He was still smiling. “Ask who taught your chamberlain to lift a seal out of the register,” he said. “She did not work that out of her own head. Somebody sat her down and showed her the trick, months before Valen ever went near her brother. Ask her that. Then look around your table and count how many of you know how to do it.” Then he shut his mouth, and nothing they did that night opened it again. --- Before dawn, Lian stood on the wall. Caelan brought her cloak and did not offer it, only put it round her shoulders. “Five names,” he said. “That is what you counted, that night in the hall.” “Five.” “Selene was one of them.” “Selene was one of them,” Lian agreed. “Which leaves four. And a man in a cell telling me that somebody sat her down and taught her the trick.” Down in the harbor, the chain lay black across the water, holding nothing back that mattered. Somewhere beyond it, Valen was hungry, and getting hungrier, and had just lost its legs in her capital. “He will answer this,” Caelan said. “I know.” “Lian.” “I know.” She watched the sky go gray. “Send for Selene’s brother. Quietly. Whatever it costs. I want that boy out of Valen before Dorian works out that his messenger never came home.”