— Seraphine POV —
Her father summoned her on Monday.
Not a letter. Not a polite request through Nessa. A summons, delivered by his personal secretary, written in the clipped formal tone Duke Valdros used when he was displeased and had decided to be architectural about it.
Seraphine read it, set it down, and went to get dressed in the specific outfit she wore when her father wanted to have A Conversation. High collar. House colors. The kind of presentation that said I am taking this seriously without saying I am worried, because showing worry to her father was like showing a crack in a wall — he would put a finger in it and push.
Duke Edren Valdros was not a bad man. Seraphine had spent two years watching him and had come to this conclusion carefully and without much warmth. He was intelligent, patient, genuinely devoted to the house's survival, and completely unable to understand that his daughter was a separate person from the house's interests. To him, Seraphine was the house's most valuable asset. The fact that she was also his daughter made him more protective of the asset, not less calculating about it.
He was standing at his study window when she arrived. Looking at the Valdros courtyard below with the expression of a man who had been thinking for a while and had organized his thoughts into something he considered unanswerable.
She had answered unanswerable arguments before. She sat down without being invited and waited.
"The clerk boy," he said, still looking out the window. "Ashveil."
"Yes."
"He was in our library for six hours on Saturday."
"Four and a half," she said. "He left before dinner."
Her father turned. He had her coloring — dark hair, pale, the Valdros bone structure that read as distinguished in men and severe in women. He looked at her with the expression he used when he was deciding how to start.
"Seraphine." Just her name. A pause. "He's a clerk."
"He's a consultant. There's a difference."
"He has no family. No magic. No rank. He is—"
"Extraordinarily perceptive, strategically gifted, and currently in possession of more useful analysis on the Solenne-Halst connection than anyone on your actual staff." She said it calmly. Let it sit. "I hired him because he's useful, Father. Not because I have poor taste in furniture."
Her father was quiet for a moment. Not because she had convinced him. Because he was recalibrating.
"The Solenne matter is not your concern," he said.
"You made it my concern when you put those records in the library I have access to."
"Those records are not—"
"He found them in two hours," she said. "Without being directed to them. If he can do that as a consultant, what do you think someone working against us could do with the same access?" She leaned forward slightly. "I'm not introducing a liability, Father. I'm closing one."
That landed. She watched it land — the slight shift in his expression, the pause that meant he was testing the argument for holes. She had learned to argue with her father by learning exactly how he thought, which was methodical and logical and had no room for things like I just think he's interesting or there's something about the way he sat down when the information got heavy.
She kept those things in a separate drawer.
"He stays on a consulting basis only," her father said finally. "He does not attend house functions. He does not accompany you in public. And if he becomes a complication—"
"I'll handle it," she said.
"I mean if he becomes a complication for the house—"
"I understand what you mean," she said. "I'll handle it."
She left before he could say anything else.
In the hallway she exhaled once, quietly. That had gone better than expected. It had also gone worse in one specific way — her father had accepted the argument about closing a liability, which meant he now thought of Caelum as a security measure rather than a problem. That was useful.
It also meant that if Caelum stopped being useful to the house's security and started being useful to Seraphine personally, her father would notice the difference.
She walked back to her study.
She was going to need to be more careful.
She thought about the thank you to the folder.
She was going to need to be significantly more careful.
— Caelum POV —
He cracked the cipher in eleven minutes, which he was not going to tell her.
He spent four more minutes pretending to still be working on it so the number that got back to her was at least fifteen. This was, he was aware, completely ridiculous behavior. He did it anyway.
The correspondence was worse than expected.
Not dramatic. That was the thing about evidence — it was never dramatic. It was administrative. Dry. Two men writing to each other about land surveys and resource projections and the logistical challenges of removing obstacles to a profitable arrangement.
Obstacles.
That was the word Halst used. Three times across fourteen letters. Obstacles to be managed. One letter mentioned a specific obstacle in the northern survey records that needed to be addressed before the agreement could be finalized.
The letter was dated six weeks before his parents' carriage accident.
He sat with this for a while.
He had known, at some level, for four years. Not known-known. But suspected in the way of someone who has stood at the edge of a cliff in the dark and can feel the drop without seeing it. The accident had never sat right. The timing had never sat right. He had filed it away as something he couldn't prove and couldn't do anything about with no resources and no backing.
Now he had backing.
Now he had a letter that used the word obstacles.
He folded it very carefully, put it back in the folder, and sat in the Valdros library looking at the far wall for a while.
He thought about his mother, who had been a terrible cook and had known it and continued anyway with great confidence. He thought about his father, who had driven that road twice a week for six years because he believed in doing things consistently.
He thought: okay.
He thought: when.
— Aldric POV —
He heard about the library visit from Mira, who heard it from someone in the east wing, who had apparently seen the clerk going in through the Valdros manor's servants' entrance on Saturday morning.
He sat with this information through an entire combat training session, which meant he was distracted enough that Mira landed a hit she shouldn't have and looked extremely pleased about it.
"You're thinking about the clerk," she said, because Mira had the social subtlety of a battering ram and had never apologized for it.
"I'm thinking about Lady Valdros."
"Same thing lately, apparently." She lowered her practice sword. "Aldric. Why do you care? He's nobody."
"Seraphine doesn't spend time with nobody."
"She doesn't spend time with anyone," Mira said. "That's the whole thing about her. She's—" she searched for words, "—present but not. Like a very beautiful lamp that doesn't actually light the room." A pause. "That came out wrong."
"She's interested in him," Aldric said. He didn't like how it sounded when he said it out loud. It sounded true in a way that he preferred it not be. "She's been watching him for weeks. And now he's in her house."
Mira was quiet for a moment. She was, under the battering ram quality, occasionally perceptive.
"You can't bind-spell him again," she said. "That was — Aldric, that was already too far. He hadn't done anything to you."
"He was disrespectful—"
"He was correct," Mira said flatly. "He filed an accurate report and you took Bors's side because Bors was convenient and the clerk was easy. I was there." She looked at him steadily. "I've been thinking about it and it wasn't good. You should know that."
Silence.
Aldric did not enjoy being told things like that by people he respected. He enjoyed it considerably less when the people were right.
"The clerk embarrassed Bors," he said, which was a weaker position and he knew it.
"Bors embarrassed himself. The clerk just documented it." Mira picked up her sword again. "Leave him alone. If Seraphine finds him useful that's her business."
She walked off to practice footwork.
Aldric stood in the training hall and thought about the clerk's grey eyes looking at him after the binding spell. The thing in them that hadn't been fear.
He thought about Seraphine sitting on the roof. The way she had turned away from the library corridor, repeatedly, for months. The way she had never done that before — had always gone exactly where the plot expected her to go.
He thought: she changed.
He thought: he changed her.
He thought: I need to do something about this.
He was aware, distantly, that this thought was the wrong shape. That it was the shape of something he should let go of.
He was not, at this particular moment, in the business of letting things go.
— Lirien POV —
She found Caelum Ashveil in the east corridor on Tuesday afternoon, which was an accident, or at least started as one.
She had been coming from the healing wing — she volunteered there twice a week, had since first year, because the saintess's blessing manifested as healing magic and using it felt like the right thing to do. She turned a corner and nearly walked into a boy who was standing in the middle of the corridor reading a document and apparently had no awareness that corridors had other people in them.
"Oh — I'm sorry!" she said, which she always said when she nearly walked into someone, even when it wasn't her fault.
He stepped aside, looked up from the document, and gave her the brief neutral nod she had seen him give Lady Valdros in the corridor a week ago. Then he went back to reading.
She should have kept walking. She had places to be. Aldric was expecting her at the afternoon study group.
Instead she said: "Are you alright?"
He looked up again. His expression said: why are you still here.
"You look tired," she said, which was true. He had the specific look of someone who had not slept enough because they had been thinking too hard about something.
"I'm fine," he said.
"I'm Lirien. Lirien Ashfeld." She smiled because smiling was what she did, reflexively, the way other people breathed. "I know who you are. I just thought — you looked like you needed—" she wasn't sure what she had been going to say. "Never mind. Sorry for nearly walking into you."
She started past him.
"Why did you apologize for that," he said behind her. "You were walking in a straight line. I was standing in the middle of the corridor."
She turned back. He was looking at her with what she was starting to recognize as genuine curiosity, which was a different quality from most people's curiosity. Most people's curiosity wanted a reaction. His just wanted information.
"Habit," she said honestly.
He considered this. Then: "That's a bad habit."
She laughed. She hadn't expected to.
He looked faintly alarmed by the laugh, like it was a variable he hadn't accounted for. Then his expression settled back to neutral.
"Lirien Ashfeld," he said slowly. "You're Aldric's—"
"Friend," she said. Then, because she was constitutionally incapable of being dishonest: "And more than that, probably. It's complicated." She paused. "He mentioned you. After the alcove."
Something in his expression went very carefully flat. Not blank. Flat, like a surface being smoothed over.
"I imagine he did," he said.
"He was wrong to do what he did," she said quietly. "I want you to know I think that. The spell. It wasn't right."
He looked at her for a moment.
"You're telling me this why," he said. Not hostile. Just genuinely asking.
She thought about it. "Because it's true and it should be said. And because—" She hesitated. "I've been watching you lately. After the alcove. And I don't think you're who Aldric says you are."
Another pause. Longer.
"He talks about me," Caelum said.
"More than he should, probably." She smiled, a little wry. "That's also true and should be said." She shifted her books. "I have to go. Study group."
She walked away. Then, from a few steps down the corridor:
"Get some sleep, Ashveil. The documents will still be there tomorrow."
She didn't look back. But she heard him, faintly, before she turned the corner:
"Unlikely."
She was smiling when she reached the study group. Aldric noticed and asked what had happened.
She said nothing interesting, and believed it less than she expected to.
* * *
End of Chapter Five