"How did your mother die," Kael asked, though some part of him had already guessed the shape of the answer before he finished asking it.
"Murdered," Elandrie said, flat and certain, no hedging in it at all. "She told me so herself, the very first time I was old enough to properly hear her. She doesn't know who did it exactly, or she knows and the knowing didn't survive whatever crossing brought her voice to me, I've never fully understood which. She only knows it wasn't an accident, and that there's proof of it somewhere, buried in something she left behind, something the current Queen has reason to want kept buried alongside her." Her hands, folded in her lap, tightened fractionally. "I have asked you to help me find that proof because you are the only person in this palace with a reason not to run straight to my father with what I've just told you, given how thoroughly it would cost you your own secret to do so. That's not a flattering reason to trust someone. It's an honest one, and I find I would rather give you an honest reason than a flattering lie."
"That's a colder calculation than most people would admit to out loud."
"Most people are too busy pretending they trust with their whole heart to notice they're actually trusting with their whole ledger," Elandrie said, the corner of her mouth lifting despite everything she'd just admitted. "I'm not most people, and I'd rather you know exactly how little blind faith is involved before you agree to anything. Don't mistake this for devotion, Kael. It's arithmetic that happens to have a face I don't entirely mind looking at. I still intend to have you looked into properly, whatever you decide tonight."
Kael sat with that a long moment, the room's silence pooling around them both, and found, turning the offer over with the same care he'd once given a damaged papyrus fragment, that he believed her more for the ungenerous honesty of the reasoning than he would have believed any warmer version of the same request. "I have my own reasons for wanting Duke Maravent exposed," he said slowly, choosing the words the way he chose the phrasing of a corrected chant, precise, aware of exactly how much weight each one carried. "More reasons than I've told anyone in this palace yet. If your mother's proof points where I suspect it points, helping you and helping myself might turn out to be the same task wearing two different names."
Something shifted in Elandrie's face at that, relief arriving faster than she seemed to want it to, and she let out a breath that had clearly been held longer than the conversation alone accounted for. "Then you'll help me."
"I'll help you," Kael said. "Tell me where to look."
"The Queen's private chambers," Elandrie said. "I've never been permitted inside them alone, not once in my whole life, which I've always found considerably more suspicious than anyone else in this palace apparently has. If there's a confession or a record of any kind, it's there, or it's nowhere at all."
She led him through corridors she clearly knew by feel rather than by torchlight, past sleeping wings and shuttered galleries, her hand finding his without any particular ceremony when the passage narrowed and the dark deepened past what either of their eyes could comfortably manage alone, and Kael found himself, walking half blind through a palace he'd known for less than a full day, trusting a stranger's grip more completely than he'd trusted almost anyone in the three months since Blackmere.
"Here," Elandrie whispered, stopping at a heavy door flanked by two guards standing at the loose, half-drowsy attention of men who had stood this exact post too many uneventful nights running to still believe anything would ever happen on it. "I can't go further. If she wakes and finds me standing outside her door at this hour, there'll be questions neither of us wants asked tonight."
"Wait here," Kael murmured, and felt the old chant settle into his chest with the same cold, familiar shudder it always brought, the corrected Persian grammar Jo had handed him a lifetime and a continent ago folding sight and sound both away from the guards' notice. He watched Elandrie's hand fly to her own mouth, stifling whatever sound had nearly escaped her at watching a man simply cease to exist in front of her, and felt, even through his own concentration, a small, private satisfaction at having startled a princess who so plainly prided herself on never being caught off guard by anything.
He slipped past the guards close enough to have brushed either one's sleeve, their spears held loose and their eyes fixed on a corridor that offered nothing at all to watch, and eased the chamber door open onto a room lit only by the low, banked coals of a dying hearth.
Queen Solara slept on her side, one arm thrown across a pillow, her face in sleep considerably softer than the cold, appraising boredom Kael remembered from the throne room that morning, and he crossed the room with his boots placed heel first the way Doss's Patience Form had drilled into him, working through drawers and cabinets with hands gone careful and precise from a season of exactly this kind of searching. He found jewelry first, a case of it laid out with the obsessive order of a woman who counted every piece before sleeping, then a stack of correspondence about trade tariffs that told him considerably more about the Queen's genuine boredom than about her guilt, then a wardrobe he searched methodically shelf by shelf, running his fingers along seams and linings the way three months of Order training had taught him a frightened woman might choose to hide something small and damning. A locked box beneath the bed itself took him three full minutes and a small, whispered lightning working to persuade open, the drain of it spreading thin and cold behind his ribs, and inside it he found nothing but old letters between the Queen and a sister in the Duchy of Blackmere discussing nothing more sinister than a disputed inheritance and, twice, a mother's complaint about a daughter's poor choice of suitor that had plainly never once involved Ignacius at all. He crouched there a long moment afterward, listening to his own pulse and the Queen's slow, even breathing both, and felt the specific, familiar frustration of a man watching an hour's careful search return nothing but the ordinary, unglamorous clutter of somebody else's private life.