On the fourth day of the investigation, Harrow took me to the Ashveil Convent.
The Convent of the Ashen Well sat at the city's eastern edge, pressed against the base of the old wall where the stonework was darkened by centuries of weather. It was a working convent — the kind that takes in the sick and the difficult rather than simply contemplating holiness — and it smelled of medicinal herbs and stone-cold air. The sisters who passed us in the corridors looked at Harrow with the expression common to people of genuine faith when they encounter representatives of secular power: tolerance, tinged with the confidence that God has a longer memory.
We were taken to a private room where Sister Brynn was waiting.
She was perhaps fifty. The kind of face that had been attractive once and was now interesting — strong bones, tired eyes, the particular stillness of someone who has spent decades managing other people's distress without losing themselves in it. She had been the Convent's chief healer for five years, and before that, she had been something else.
Harrow had done the work of finding out what else.
"Before you entered orders," he said, without preamble, as we sat down, "you were in service to House Caell."
"For seven years," she said. "I left when I took my vows. It is not a secret."
"Your role in the Caell household was — "
"I was Lady Seraphine's personal attendant." She said it calmly. "From the time of her marriage until the year I entered the Convent. Seven years, as I said."
I watched her hands. They were folded in her lap. Still, but not entirely comfortable.
"You have not visited Lady Caell since her husband's death," Harrow said.
"I was not asked."
"Have you attempted to visit her?"
A pause. "No."
"Why not?"
Sister Brynn looked at him steadily. "Because whatever she is protecting herself from, my presence would not help. There are people watching her visitors, Inquisitor. I am sure you know that. If I visited — if it became known that I had spoken with her — it would suggest to certain parties that she had passed information to me. It would put her in more danger, not less."
"Which parties?" Harrow asked.
"I think you know which parties."
I had been quiet up to this point, watching and listening. I said, "You knew about the interior passage."
Both of them looked at me.
"You were her personal attendant for seven years," I said to Sister Brynn. "You knew every part of the Citadel. Including the secondary staircase." I paused. "Did you tell her about the passage, or did she discover it herself?"
Sister Brynn looked at me with the expression of someone reassessing a piece of furniture that has unexpectedly moved. "I told her," she said. "In the second year of her marriage. She had — " She stopped.
"She had need of a way out," I said.
Something settled in Sister Brynn's face. The decision to stop performing ignorance. "Yes," she said.
"Tell me about the second year of her marriage," Harrow said.
She did.
*********
It was not a dramatic account. That was the worst of it, in some ways — how ordinary the cruelty was. The Duke had not been violent, not in the visible ways.
He had been, according to Sister Brynn's careful and clearly long-carried testimony, the kind of husband who managed his wife the way he managed his estate: efficiently, impersonally, and with a complete disregard for whether the thing being managed had any inner life of its own.
She had been, in the first years, isolated. Family visits discouraged — the roads were long, after all, and House Aldrath's financial difficulties made travel expensive. Correspondence monitored — not obviously, not crudely, but Sister Brynn had seen letters resealed, had seen the Duke read certain things before they arrived in Seraphine's hands.
"She adapted," Sister Brynn said. "She was — is — extraordinarily intelligent, and she learned quickly that open resistance was useless. So she became very still, and very quiet, and very capable, and she waited."
"Waited for what?" Harrow asked.
"I am not sure she knew," Sister Brynn said. "For something to change. For leverage. For a moment when the calculation shifted." She paused. "I think the calculation shifted in the thirtieth year. She changed. Very subtly — she was always subtle — but she became more careful, more deliberate. She asked me, when I visited, different questions than she had before."
"What questions?"
"About law," Sister Brynn said. "About what a noblewomen could and could not do without her husband's consent. About what constitutes legal grounds for separation in Vaelthorn. About how evidence of financial crime is assessed." She looked at her hands. "I am a healer. I did not know the answers. But she was asking someone, because several months later she seemed to have found them."
I thought of the letter on the Duke's desk. She knows. She has known for longer than you think.
"Who else knew she had been investigating?" I asked.
Sister Brynn looked at me. "That," she said quietly, "is the question that frightens me."