~ KAEL ~
Aldric opened the door himself this time. He looked at Kael, then at the hour, then back at Kael.
"It's seven in the morning."
"Olen knows about the ledger," Kael said. "And my name is on a list. Can I come in?"
Aldric stepped back from the door without another word, which Kael was choosing to interpret as hospitality.
The main parlour this time — not the side room. Kael noted the upgrade without commenting on it. Aldric poured two cups of something hot and bitter and sat across from him with the focused expression of a man setting aside everything he'd planned for the day.
"Tell me," he said.
Kael told him. The servant, the courier chain, Olen's slip of paper, the two-day window. Aldric listened without interrupting, which Kael appreciated. When he'd finished, Aldric was quiet for a moment, turning his cup in his hands.
"You're certain about the timeline?"
"My source is reliable."
Aldric glanced at Kael's wrist — at the habit Kael had of pressing two fingers there when he was listening to something no one else could hear — and said nothing about it. Another point in his favour.
"Then we move today," Aldric said. "Before Olen's people do." He set down his cup. "The four names in the ledger. Tell me who they are."
Kael opened his journal to the page he'd filled the night before, Nyxara's voice a quiet current underneath his own notes.
"Lady Sera Mott. She sits on the harbour commission and has been trying to unseat Olen's man there for two years. The ledger shows Olen took a payment from her predecessor to have her audit results buried. She'd want that."
Aldric nodded slowly. "I know Mott. She's cautious but not timid. Next."
"A man called Druven, runs the eastern grain exchange. The ledger has him down as collateral damage — Olen used his name to launder a payment he didn't know about. He's been quietly trying to find out who put his seal on a document he never signed."
"Druven is angry," Aldric said. "Angry men move fast. Good. The others?"
"A former magistrate named Ossian who was removed from his post on Olen's recommendation three years ago. He has nothing left to lose, which makes him either very useful or very dangerous."
"Both," Aldric said. "And the fourth?"
Kael paused. He pressed two fingers to his wrist.
"Careful with this one," Nyxara said. "The fourth name is Councilwoman Thessa Pale. She's the most powerful of them and the most dangerous to approach. She's been playing a long game against Olen for years but she plays alone. She won't like being part of a coalition."
"Thessa Pale," Kael said. "Councilwoman. My source says she's been working against Olen independently and won't welcome company. Approach her last, after the others are committed. She'll want to see momentum before she moves."
Aldric stared at him. "How does your source know Thessa Pale's political disposition?"
"She's very well informed."
"She," Aldric repeated.
Kael met his eyes and said nothing. Aldric looked at the wrist again. Then he picked up his cup and drank from it with the air of a man deciding which questions were worth asking and which were better left as implications.
"Fine," he said. "Mott first. I have a standing invitation to her weekly breakfast that I've never used. I'll use it today." He stood. "You're coming with me."
"Why?"
"Because you have the ledger and I have the connections and neither of us is sufficient alone." He looked at Kael with that expression again — the reluctant-respect one, which Kael was beginning to recognize as Aldric's version of warmth. "Also you're irritatingly good at reading rooms."
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I know. I'm taking it as one anyway."
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
Lady Mott's breakfast was exactly the kind of gathering Nyxara had watched a thousand versions of across a thousand cities: food that was beside the point, conversation that was entirely the point, and a host who listened twice as much as she spoke and remembered everything.
Mott was small, grey-haired, and had the eyes of someone who had been underestimated so many times she'd started using it as a strategy. She looked at Aldric when he arrived, then at Kael, and then her gaze settled on Kael in a way that suggested she was re-evaluating something she'd already decided.
Nyxara approved of her immediately.
Kael let Aldric lead for the first few minutes — the social choreography of reestablishing a lapsed connection, the careful pivot toward purpose. Then Mott looked directly at Kael and said, "And what do you bring to this, exactly?"
"A ledger," Kael said. "With your buried audit results in it. And the name of the man who paid to bury them."
The room went very quiet.
Mott set down her fork. She looked at Kael for a long moment with an expression that was doing several things at once — calculating, cautious, and underneath both of those, the particular brightness of someone who had been waiting a long time for a specific door to open.
"Show me," she said.
He showed her.
Nyxara watched him work — the careful presentation of just enough, the instinct for when to speak and when to let silence do the work, the way he'd learned in a single week to move through this city's politics like someone who had been doing it for years. He hadn't, of course. He'd been doing it for days. But he was the kind of person who paid attention, and paying attention was most of it.
By the end of the breakfast, Mott had agreed to a private meeting with Druven. She had not agreed to anything else, but she hadn't needed to. The door was open.
Walking back down the hill, Aldric said, without preamble: "Your patron. She's with you right now, isn't she."
"She's always with me."
"That's…" Aldric paused, searching for the word. "...not how it works. Patrons answer prayers. They don't — accompany."
"Mine does." Kael glanced sideways at him. "Is that theologically irregular?"
Aldric was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, the aggrievement was gone, replaced by something that sounded, reluctantly, like awe. "In three years of study I have never read of anything like it. A patron who stays. Who… chooses to remain." He shook his head. "What did you do?"
Kael thought about a cold alley and a wall with a symbol on it and four lines he'd made up on the spot because he had nothing else to offer.
"I was honest," he said. "I think that was most of it."
In the space between stars, Nyxara heard him say it and felt something old and carefully maintained shift very slightly out of place.
He was not wrong.
That was almost the worst part