Wylan had not slept, but in fairness, neither had Divina, and she had considerably more glitter in her beard to show for it.
The workshop occupied its usual state of collaborative catastrophe. Wylan’s side: vials, sketches, a labyrinthine series of notes connected by string and optimism. Divina’s side: half-assembled contraptions, a soldering iron still warm, and a sequined shoulder piece that had no obvious relationship to anything else on the bench but which she would, if pressed, insist was load bearing.
Between them, on a cleared space that represented the only organised surface in the room, sat the third iteration of Persuasion.
“The spring housing is still too tight,” Divina said, squinting through a jeweller’s loupe that she wore on a chain alongside three pendants of varying provenance. “If you want consistent propulsion, you need to give the mechanism room to breathe. Like a corset. Supportive, not suffocating.”
“It’s a dart launcher, Divina.”
“Everything is a corset if you think about it structurally.” She adjusted something inside the housing with a tool so fine it was essentially a weaponised needle. “There. Try it now.”
Wylan loaded a practice dart filled with blue liquid, steadied his aim at the wooden target across the workshop, and squeezed the release.
The dart shot forward with a satisfying thwip and embedded itself dead centre, leaving a bright splash that was, he felt, a minor work of art.
“That’s more like it,” he said.
Divina tilted her head, examining the impact. “Tighter grouping. Cleaner release. The stabilisation fins were my idea, I’ll remind you.”
“Noted. Extensively and repeatedly noted.”
“As long as we’re clear.” She picked up the soldering iron and turned back to something on her bench that might have been a smoke machine or a device for summoning minor spirits. With Divina, the distinction was often academic. “So. Field-ready?”
“Field-ready testing required.” Wylan reached for his notes and scrawled the line, then added beneath it: Stabilisation fins: Divina. Do not let her forget she said ‘supportive, not suffocating’ about a dart launcher.
? Luminaries are not, by design, afraid of failure. Many delight in things going wrong, particularly when the results are spectacular and egregiously wrong. More is learned in the explosion and the correction than in a thousand successful repetitions.
He set the prototype down and let himself look at it properly. It was sleek, even elegant, a thing that worked because they had made it work through eleven failures and a twelfth that had left blue dye on Divina’s ceiling for a week. She had not forgiven him, but she had incorporated the stain into a mural, which Wylan chose to interpret as progress.
“Max should see this,” Wylan said, already reaching for his satchel.
Divina looked at him over the soldering iron. “It is before the eighth bell, Wylan.”
“He’ll be up. He’s always up.”
“He’ll be up and he’ll be Max about it.” She waved the iron in a gesture that encompassed the concept of ducal scepticism in its entirety. “Go on, then. I’ll clean up.”
“You’re a treasure.”
“I am aware.” She was already collecting vials, having long since accepted that Wylan’s enthusiasm and his tidiness were mutually exclusive. “If he doesn’t appreciate it, tell him I’ll come and explain it personally. In full costume.”
Wylan slung the prototype over his shoulder and left the workshop in a hurry. His was the energy of a man who has solved a problem and needs someone to witness it.
The house held its sounds close before dawn, hoarding creaks and settlings like a miser counting small change. Frost had colonised the inside of the windows where the heating hadn’t reached, and Wylan’s footsteps echoed on the stone with an enthusiasm he did not share. He tried to walk quietly, remembered he had never been good at walking quietly, and gave it up as a bad job.
Max’s study door was ajar.
Wylan slowed. Voices, low and close, hummed through the gap.
“—cannot let this affect the preparations.” Max’s voice. The ducal register, the one that expected compliance as a matter of course. But softer than usual. Almost careful.
“It won’t.” Percival. Clipped, professional, but with a familiarity underneath that didn’t belong between duke and valet.
Wylan edged closer. The hour was early even for Maximilian’s standards, and Percival’s presence in the study rather than the dressing room struck him as odd.
“You say that.” A pause. “You always say that.”
“And I’m always right.” Percival’s professional veneer shifted, opened deliberately, the way one opens a door for someone expected. “Trust my discretion. You have before.”
“I know.” Two words, and Max’s voice carried something Wylan had never heard in it before: vulnerability. The duke, for a moment, had forgotten his station.
Wylan leaned against the wall. The pieces were clicking into place with the horrible inevitability of a well-designed mechanism. Max and Percival. The carefully maintained distance in public. The “Your Grace” that Percival pronounced like a private language, and the performance dropping entirely when he stopped using it, leaving something underneath that was simply a man talking to someone he trusted completely.
“We’ve been careful,” Percival said, quieter now.
“Careful isn’t enough. Not with this family. Not anymore.” Max’s voice strained somewhere between command and plea. “Everything unravels, Percy. Everything in this house unravels eventually.”
“Then we’ll be the exception.”
A silence. The kind that holds its breath.
“Always,” Max said. And the word carried weight it had no business carrying between a duke and the man who pressed his shirts.
The voices stopped.
Wylan smiled faintly. No point pretending now. He shifted into his best approximation of innocent curiosity and rounded the corner.
The study was a portrait of manufactured normality. Max stood near the window, adjusting his cuffs. Percival stood by the desk, organising papers that did not need organising. They had just stepped apart, their positions too casual, the distance between them carefully negotiated.
“Ah, Wylan.” Max’s tone could have greased machinery. “Up early, I see.”
“Haven’t been to bed, Max.” The name felt different in his mouth now, carrying an echo of how Percival said it, the same careful intimacy disguised as casual. Wylan tilted his head. “I had some thoughts about Persuasion that couldn’t wait.”
“A discussion for later, perhaps.” The faint smile betrayed nothing. “As you can see, I am in the throes of mundanity.”
Wylan’s gaze flicked to Percival. The valet’s performed neutrality was immaculate, so perfect it practically radiated the message nothing whatsoever is happening here.
“Good morning, Percival.”
“Good morning, Master Wylan.” His tone could have been distilled into a chemical solution and labelled Neutral, Absolute.
Max huffed, an affectation so faintly annoyed it bordered on affectionate. “What brings you here at this hour? It’s unlike you to surface before the eighth bell.”
“I told you. Persuasion.” He held up the prototype. “New iteration. Divina rebuilt the spring housing and I stabilised the propulsion. Safety latch to prevent another unfortunate field mishap.” He paused. “I thought you’d want to see it.”
“I’m sure it’s very impressive.” Max’s eyes barely glanced at the device. “Later, Wylan.”
Later. Always later. Wylan looked at his brother and saw not the duke, not the eldest son performing the role, but a man standing in his study at an hour when he should have been asleep, wearing an expression that Wylan recognised because he’d seen it in his own mirror on mornings when the alchemy wasn’t working and nothing made sense.
“Right,” Wylan said. “Later.”
He left and closed the door behind him and stood in the corridor for a moment with the prototype in his hand and something shifting quietly behind his ribs.
He thought about courtship. He had always found it boring, the rituals and performances and elaborate social machinery of desire that everyone else seemed to navigate by instinct. He’d assumed it was because he was focused on more interesting things, because alchemy and mechanisms and problems with testable solutions held his attention in a way that romance never had.
But that wasn’t what he’d heard through the door. That hadn’t been courtship. That had been something without performance. Two people, in a room, being exactly who they were with each other, and the whole weight of the world outside the door making it dangerous.
He couldn’t name what shifted. He wasn’t sure he needed to. But the word boring sat differently in his mind now, like a mechanism he’d been using wrong, and for the first time he wondered if the problem had never been courtship at all.
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Wylan walked back to his workshop. Divina had cleaned up, as promised, and left a note on his bench: If His Grace doesn’t appreciate our work, remind him that I know where he keeps his good wine.
Lambert walked toward the spires.
The saints carved into the facades watched him pass. They had been dead long enough to stop having opinions, which Lambert increasingly envied. He had walked these streets as a novice, as an ordinand, as a chaplain, as an Inquisitor. He had walked them believing the institution they served was humanity’s highest achievement: Reason made manifest, inquiry made sacred.
He still believed in the inquiry. It was the institution he’d lost faith in. The stones hadn’t changed. He had.
He entered the Basilica’s administrative wing through the east cloister, nodded to a deacon he recognised. The nod came easily. It always did. That was the unsettling part.
Calderon’s office smelled of ink, old paper, and the particular staleness that accrues when a room has given up hope of ever being aired. The Legate himself sat behind a desk buried in correspondence, his expression that of a man who had been expecting this visit the way one expects a toothache: with resignation and a faint hope that it might somehow not happen.
“Ah,” Calderon said, looking up. “My favourite Inquisitor. I was beginning to hope you’d forgotten about me.”
“Legate.” Lambert closed the door behind him and did not sit. “How does Prelate Vaziri fare in the heights of the Church?”
“Must we?” Calderon’s scowl deepened. “You not only put me in an undignified state, you put me in a dangerous one. If anyone suspects I’m feeding intelligence to the family’s pet Inquisitor—”
“Then I suggest you keep your voice down.” Lambert’s tone was light, but the edge beneath it was unmistakable. “Consider it a necessary indignity. What confessions would you impart today?”
Calderon thrust a sealed packet across the desk with the air of a man handing over a prized possession to an untrustworthy cousin. “Her reputation among the people is spotless. They practically bow at the mere mention of her name. Charisma of a saint, strategic mind of a chess grandmaster.” He paused. “With a grudge.”
“A curated cult of personality?” Lambert’s eyebrow arched with precision.
“Not quite. It’s not entirely smoke and mirrors. The woman is genuinely skilled. A healer of no small talent, and she’s done more for the city’s downtrodden than most of the Church put together.” “But her charity does not operate in a vacuum.” He let that settle. “Her ambition is the steel in her crook.”
The steel in her crook. A healer with ambition and a grudge. Lambert had met people like that in the Inquisition. They were the ones you never saw coming, because they were too busy being indispensable.
“And the Church’s role in all this?”
“A weather vane.” Calderon leaned back in his chair. “The Pontifarchy has been delegating more duties of the seat to her. Quietly, but noticeably if you’re paying attention. They can sense that providence, or at least massive public sentiment, favours her in these dying days of the current Pontifex. Too many are seeking her favour before she ascends to the seat. Every good deed magnified. Every misstep swept under the proverbial rug.”
“And what of Esteban?”
Calderon’s shoulders sagged under the weight of the name. “A decade cold, Lambert. You ask me every time, and every time I tell you the same thing: no letters, no trail, no witnesses. If there’s evidence linking his disappearance to Vaziri, it’s buried deeper than I can dig.”
“Keep digging.”
“With what? A man can only ask so many careful questions before the questions themselves become suspicious.”
Lambert nodded. He took the packet, broke the seal, scanned the contents. Names. Appointments. Movements. The quiet machinery of succession, in Calderon’s surprisingly meticulous hand.
“There’s something else,” Calderon said. His tone shifted, the habitual resentment giving way to something close to concern. “Whispers about your conduct have been making the rounds in certain upper circles. Unhumble, lacking in piety, that sort of thing.”
“And who has been whispering?”
“What should concern you most is that these whispers have reached Prelate Vaziri’s ears. The more people recall that you are her great-nephew, the more within the Church have turned to her to bring you to heel.” He met Lambert’s eyes. “And let’s not forget. Vaziri is very good at soliciting compliance.”
He was already mapping it: Vaziri’s position, the whisper networks, the institutional pressure that would build once his schism moved from declaration to action. The Church didn’t know yet what he intended. But the Church knew he was a problem, and the Church had been solving problems since before his grandmother was born.
Who holds what. Who owes whom. Where the fractures are.
The same words he’d said to Laila that morning. But here, in this office, with Calderon’s packet in his hand and the Basilica’s bells marking the hour outside, they felt less like a plan and more like a habit. The habit of a man who had grown up watching Alexios de Vaillant navigate institutional power and had absorbed the methodology without noticing.
“Keep me appraised of Prelate Vaziri’s activities,” Lambert said. “Particularly as they concern the Pontifarchy. And keep your ear to the ground for anything regarding Esteban. Anything at all.”
“And what do I get for my continued service?” Calderon asked, with the weary sarcasm of a man who already knew the answer.
“My continued discretion regarding Delilah.”
“Charming.”
“I thought so.” Lambert tucked the packet inside his cassock. “Good day, Legate.”
He left through the east cloister. The deacon nodded. Lambert nodded back.
The nod came easily. It always did.
She did not touch herself with Umber. Not today. Her coat was plain wool, her boots practical, nothing that announced station. But eyes lingered as she passed, and she could never quite tell whether it was recognition or simply that even serviceable clothes marked her as an outsider on streets beset with poverty. She had stopped caring which.
The streets changed as she moved south. Timber frames instead of stone, frost thicker where the buildings crowded close. At the corner of the Rue des Tanneurs, two servants in de Vaillant livery were distributing bread from a handcart, the ducal crest visible on their cloaks.
Good.
Charity without attribution was generosity. Charity in livery was governance.
A nod from the woman who sold firewood. A wave from the old halfling who minded the brazier outside the chandler’s shop. A boy of perhaps eight who fell into step beside her for half a block, said nothing, and then peeled away toward an alley with the efficiency of someone delivering a message by proximity alone.
The cloister of St. Dreven occupied the same converted warehouse it always had, its stone walls darkened by years of determined use and indifferent maintenance.
? St. Dreven’s had been converted from a warehouse, a tannery, and briefly a theatre before finding its current purpose. The smell of all three persisted.
The symbol above the door had been repainted since her last visit, she noticed. Still a halfling’s hand extended in offering, but sharper now. Someone had taken care.
Inside, the operation was running.
She counted heads while removing her gloves. Forty-seven, and it was not yet mid-morning.
“You’re early.” Carina materialised from the steam with the unerring instinct of a woman who could sense an inspection through solid masonry. Her silver-streaked hair was tied back with the same ruthless practicality Laila remembered, and she carried a ledger the way other women carried handbags: as an extension of her personality.
“I wanted to see the morning rush,” Laila said.
“You wanted to count heads.” Carina’s gaze flicked toward the door, toward the street where the de Vaillant servants were still distributing bread in their crested cloaks. It came back to Laila carefully neutral.
“Forty-seven today. Up from thirty-two this time last year. The Tanneurs quarter is worse, and the dock families are coming in early, which means harbour work has dried up ahead of schedule.”
She didn’t open the ledger. She didn’t need to. “Coal allocation is behind by two shipments. The guild sent apologies, which don’t burn well.”
“I wrote to the Marchfords. Suggested that more could be done for the people of Pharelle, and that the de Vaillant household would be delighted to coordinate.” She adjusted her gloves. “Has anything arrived?”
“Half of what was promised. The other half is ‘pending review,’ which is a polite way of saying someone with a title is sitting on it because charity to the poor is fashionable in autumn and inconvenient in winter.” Carina’s expression suggested she had opinions about this that the ledger could not contain. “I’ll need it resolved before midwinter or we start making choices about who freezes.”
“I’ll make a visit.”
“Good. A visit from the Duchess tends to unstick things that letters can’t.” She turned on her heel. “Come. I’ll walk you through what’s changed.”
They moved through the cloister together. Laila let Carina’s voice wash over her: supplies, gaps, numbers, names. Carina ran her operation the way a general ran a campaign, and she reported the same way, with the expectation that her commanding officer would act on what she heard. It was, Laila reflected, the most honest professional relationship she had.
At the serving line, Carina stopped. She watched the queue for a moment. Soup into bowl. Bowl to hands. Next.
“Forty-seven is the number who came,” she said. “It’s not the number who need to.”
Laila waited.
“There’s a cooper in the Tanneurs quarter. Journeyman. Lost his position last month when the cooperage closed. Three children. He won’t come here because he still thinks his situation is temporary.” Carina wasn’t looking at Laila. She was looking at the queue. “There’s a widow two streets over rationing her firewood, so her children eat. She won’t come because she came once and someone she knew saw her in the queue, and pride is the last thing poverty takes from you.”
She moved to the bread station, checked the loaves with an automatic hand, kept talking.
“There’s a spriggan family in the grotto off the Bassin who’ve been living under a tarpaulin since Blotember. The children have coughs that sound like they’re settling in for winter. There’s an old man on the Quai des Brumes who hasn’t been seen in four days and nobody’s checked because nobody’s been asked to check. There’s a woman who used to work the dye houses who lost three fingers to the vats and can’t find new work because nobody hires dyers with missing fingers, because the missing fingers are how you know the dyes got them.”
“Give me the names,” Laila said. “All of them.”
“Those are five. I can give you fifty. I can give you a hundred.” Carina looked at her steadily. “And you’ll help them, because you’re here and you mean it and you have the means. And next week there will be another hundred.”
Something shifted in Laila’s face. Carina had seen it before; the moment a person who cares suddenly understands the scale of what they’re caring about.
Carina took her arm and steered her through a side door, into the small room behind the kitchen that served as office, storeroom, and confessional for those whose confessions ran more to hunger than to sin. She closed the door.
“Sit down,” Carina said.
“I’m fine.”
“Sit down, Madame.”
Laila sat. Carina did not.
“I am grateful,” Carina said. “Truly. And I am honoured that the most esteemed family in Pharelle has turned its eyes to the problems of the street. Your money feeds people. Your coal keeps them warm. Your servants in their fine cloaks hand out bread with your crest on their backs, and people eat, and that matters.” She paused. “But money is not enough.”
“Then what is?”
“Attention. The kind that doesn’t come with a crest.” Carina pulled a chair from the corner but didn’t sit in it. She leaned on it instead, the way she leaned on everything: because it existed to support her argument. “You care about these deaths because they’re here. Pharelle. Your city. Your people. Gallian faces, Gallian names. That’s human. That’s natural.” She looked at Laila. “But poverty doesn’t care about nationality. It doesn’t care about allegiance. And death cares even less.”
The room was very quiet. Through the closed door, Laila could hear the clink of bowls, the murmur of the queue.
“Do you know how many people have died in the last year from food shortages?” Carina asked. “Not here. Across Gallia. The harvests have been failing for three years running. The grain stores are down to nothing in the provinces. The price of bread has doubled since summer, and in the south it’s tripled.”
“How many?”
“I keep count,” Carina said. “It’s a habit of mine. Counting.” She straightened. “I lost count at ten thousand.”
The number sat in the room.
“Ten thousand,” Laila said.
“That was in the autumn. Before winter. Before this.” Carina gestured at the frost on the window. “The coldest Frostember in living memory, and the granaries are empty, and the King is at the winter palace in L’Orsienne, and his court is discussing the spring hunt.” She paused. “Your forty-seven, Madame. My hundred. They’re the ones close enough to count. But the ones dying in the provinces, the ones freezing on roads between towns that can’t feed them, the ones whose names nobody in Pharelle will ever learn? Those are numbers. And numbers don’t get soup.”
“So what do I do?” Laila asked.
Carina was quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure there is anything you can do. Not yet. Throwing money will help the symptoms. But the treatment requires deeper medicine than a ducal purse.”
The silence filled the room the way truth does when no one has an answer for it.
The door opened. Sadriel stood in the frame, flour on his robes, his expression careful, not quite alarm. He looked at Carina, then at Laila, and read the room as monks do: quickly, and without unnecessary questions.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. He wasn’t sorry. He was deliberate. “Laila, there is something I think we need to talk about.”