It was the third time in an hour that Julian Albright had taken off his glasses, cleaned lenses that were already spotless, and put them back on. This was the only way he saw fit to control himself from not finding and berating his colleague, the Arcana Witch.
"You've done that three times," said the girl currently organizing the tea tray into a configuration that only she found pleasant. She looked, to anyone who didn't know better, or never thought to look, like an ordinary maid — brown hair pinned back into a loose bun, a plain gray uniform, and an expression that always sat on the cusp of polite and mocking. Sable had never once, in the decade she'd been bound to him, called Julian anything but his name, and made her opinion clear early on that "Lord Second Seat" and "Demon of the Order" were, respectively, stupid titles. "Cleaning glasses that aren't dirty. It's how I know you're losing patience."
"You could simply not watch me do it," Julian said. "Insufferable maid."
"I could. However, I find it more enjoyable to catalogue your habits and use them against you later." She set a teacup down at his elbow, unasked, and went back to torturing the tray into whatever shape currently pleased her most. "You've been at that letter for precisely eleven minutes and thirty-two seconds and rising. Should I be concerned or is this ordinary business?"
"Ordinary business."
She made a sound, entirely unconvinced and made no effort to sound convinced, which Julian came to recognize over the years as her default communication style.
Down the hall, his daughter was crying again. She had been crying, on and off, for most of the last three hours, with the tireless commitment of a creature who did not yet understand that normal people required sleep to function. Julian did not resent her for it. He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was largely incapable of resenting her for anything at all, a discovery that had unsettled him far more than any battlefield he's walked. The Demon of the Order, entirely undone by seven pounds of crying.
"That would be the young lady's opinion of the household's current productivity levels," Sable said, without looking up from the tray.
He turned back to the letter.
J — I heard about the birth of your daughter, congratulations! I'll be sure to send one of my favorite physics textbooks over as a present for the little one.
He read that line three times. Aurora Ashcroft did not, to his knowledge, own a single object that wasn't a book or a weapon, and had apparently concluded that the proper gift for an infant three weeks old was the former. He set the letter down, placing it squarely centered on the desk.
"A physics textbook," Sable said, reading upside down from across the desk with the shameless liberty of someone who never once cared for the concept of privacy. "For an infant. That girl has never once met a baby in her life, has she."
"She means well."
"She means precisely what's written on the page. But go on. Defend your favorite." Something in her tone suggested this was an old argument.
Julian picked the letter back up and did his actual job.
Isaria continues without incident. Our Heritage Instructor had us say some folktales, I couldn't find any to say. The Princess certainly had an interesting one. No further movement to report as of tonight.
Julian's letters to Aurora had always contained precise instructions on format. Date, location, subject assessment, threat assessment, action taken, action recommended. Five lines, no more, structured so that a courier who lost the letter to weather or worse would lose nothing that couldn't be reconstructed from the next report. Aurora had read those instructions exactly once, as far as he could tell, and had spent every letter since actively defying them with the specific stubbornness of a girl who had decided, early and permanently, that she would keep exactly one thing for herself in every arrangement she was blackmailed into. In this case, apparently, that thing was writing to him however she pleased.
He had never told her to stop. He found he did not particularly want to examine the why.
He read the rest slowly. R's son did not appear anywhere in the letter — she'd buried it instead in the throwaway lines about folktales, three sentences doing the work of one, which he recognized, with a tad bit of irritation, as a habit she'd picked up directly from him and then improved on considerably without telling him. I couldn't find any to say. He turned that phrase over twice, searching for whatever hidden meanings she had woven into it — an admission dressed as an aside, the kind of thing he'd spent years teaching field agents to bury in exactly this manner. It did not occur to him, and would not occur to him for some while, that she had simply meant it. That the sentence wasn't some secret code, only a girl who had panicked in front of a classroom and had nothing rehearsed to offer them.
The Princess certainly had an interesting one. He knew, because he made it his business to know, that Isaria's Heritage curriculum this term included regional legend as a first assignment. He knew, because it was the sort of thing the Bureau's inner circle knew without discussion, exactly which legend belonged to House Cayne and got told at academy icebreakers by princesses who liked the sound of their own narration voice.
No further movement to report as of tonight. Further. Something had moved recently enough that Aurora considered the distinction worth making. He turned the page over; in case she'd continued on the back out of habit. She hadn't. Whatever this was, she'd decided it wasn't important enough to act upon yet. He trusted her judgement on that more than he generally admitted to trusting anyone's, which was precisely why the omission bothered him.
It did not occur to him — same as the previous four lines — that Aurora Ashcroft had meant every word. That nothing had moved. Julian had spent the better part of a decade teaching field agents to bury meaning inside ordinary lines until even he could no longer read a grocery list without hunting for a second or even third layer, and it had apparently never once crossed his mind that the girl who actively defied his instructions might just be the one person left in his life who simply meant what she wrote.
Lord Antonio, son of Rosaria's Prime Minister, had arrived at Isaria roughly around the same time as Aurora, which he doubted was coincidence and doubted even more that anyone at the academy had thought twice about it. Rosaria. One of Dravenmoor's three absorbed border states, its government hollowed out and repainted to look real, its Prime Minister answering to Caelmere's least favorite neighbor in every sense except the paperwork. A Prime Minister's son did not simply get sent to study at the crown jewel academy of the kingdom his father's masters had spent four centuries failing to conquer. Not without someone deciding it was worth the exposure.
Julian did not know what Dravenmoor wanted from Isaria. He had a working theory, and the working theory had a name attached to it that he was not currently willing to write down even in his private notes, and Antonio's arrival fit that theory far too closely for his comfort. He would not order Aurora to move against him. Not yet. A boy that carefully placed was worth far more watched than removed, and Aurora — whatever her opinion on her own conversational skills — had never once failed to notice something worth noticing.
The study door opened without a knock — the second person all evening apparently exempt from showing courtesy — and Cordelia stepped in with their daughter finally, blessedly asleep against her shoulder, wearing the expression of a woman who had opinions of how long her husband had been hiding in here.
"She's down," Cordelia said, and did not bother lowering her voice, on the theory, oft repeated among mothers, that a child who could not sleep through her mother's normal speaking voice could not sleep through anything. "You, however, are still in here pretending to be terrifying at a piece of paper."
"I'm working."
"You're avoiding." She crossed to him anyway, unbothered by his correction, and Julian felt — as he always felt and had never once managed to prevent himself from feeling — something in his chest simply stop bracing. Sable, with the tact of a woman who had survived a decade in this household, collected the tea tray and made herself scarce without being asked. "Sit up straight and hold your arms out. She won't settle properly until you've held her, and I am not doing this every day for the rest of my natural life."
He set the letter down — squared, precisely to the edge of the desk — and did as he was told, because there was exactly one person in the Kingdom of Astoria whose instructions Julian Albright followed without first calculating the cost of disobedience, and she was currently placing their daughter into his arms.
"There," Cordelia said, watching something in his face go soft and unguarded in a way it never did for anyone else, anywhere, under any circumstances. "Was that so difficult, Mr. Demon of the Order?"
"Don't call me that in the house."
"I'll call you whatever I please. It's very good for my ego, being married to something so fearsome." She perched on the edge of the desk, entirely too close to his careful stack of correspondence for his peace of mind and tilted her head at the letter near his elbow. "Ordinary business?"
"Ordinary business."
She did not press, which was somehow more unsettling than if she had. Cordelia was never one to demand the information that she wanted; she simply waited until people gave it to her because the silence became unbearable first. Julian had watched her extract confessions from hardened Council members this way over dinner, smiling the entire time. He loved her, he suspected, roughly in proportion to how thoroughly she frightened him, which was considerably.
"Don't you have a meeting with the King later today?" She said at last, lifting their daughter carefully back from his arms before he could protest. "Please be home by dinner this time."
It was not, strictly speaking, a request. Julian had built a career on recognizing when something wasn't a request. He watched the door close behind her with rather more consideration than it had opened, and permitted himself, for the second time that day, something that may have been a smile.
Doting," Sable observed, reappearing in the doorway precisely long enough to deliver the word and nothing else. "Genuinely repulsive. The Order would be scandalized."
"The Order will hear nothing about it."
"The Order will hear exactly as much as I decide they want to hear," she said, already withdrawing, "which is currently nothing, because I find your happiness marginally more entertaining than crushing your reputation. Prepare for your meeting, Demon."
The carriage was waiting when he stepped outside, exactly where it was always waiting, driven by the man who had driven for the Albright household for the better part of two decades and had not once, in all that time, asked Julian a single question he hadn't wanted asked.
"Palace, then, my lord?" Garrick said the moment Julian climbed in — not really a question, more confirmation of something he'd have already read off the formal coat.
"The Palace."
Garrick had a talent Julian valued rather more than he'd ever admit: An instinct for which silences wanted filling and which didn't. This one, apparently, wanted filling.
"Young miss keeping you up again?"
"Considerably."
"She'll grow out of it." Garrick said, experience dripping from his voice. It was the confidence of a man who'd raised four of his own and buried none of them, which was the closest thing to a blessing for men of Garrick's station. "Give it a year. You'll miss the crying, once it stops."
Julian doubted that very much, but lacked the energy to argue properly, and let the carriage rock him the rest of the way to the Palace gates in something adjacent to sleep.
The gates rose ahead as they always did — too tall to be practical, built by people more interested in the fashion of it than function. Two Royal Army guardsmen flanked the entrance, spears crossed until recognition dawned, the way it did the moment his crest came into view through the carriage window.
"Lord Albright." The younger of the two straightened first as Julian stepped off the carriage, eager to be seen doing the correct thing before the older one beside him managed it. "You're expected, my lord. Shall I send word ahead?"
"That won't be necessary. I know the way."
The gate opened. Julian had never once, in eleven years of Bureau service, needed to raise his voice for the gate to open.
The private study lay two turns and a locked door removed from anywhere a petitioner or foreign dignitary was ever permitted to see, and Julian had always thought it was the most serene space in the entire Palace — no throne, no banners, just a modest hearth, shelves crowded with books, and a desk buried under the chaotic paperwork of a man who still did his own affairs rather than delegating it.
King Aldous Cayne looked up from that paperwork when the door opened, and something in his face — tired, older than his years by a decade at least, though never quite defeated — eased slightly at the sight of the man before him.
"Julian." He set his pen down. "Sit. You look like a man who hasn't slept."
"Who can say."
"Ah. Little Lady Audrey." Aldous's mouth curved slightly, genuine warmth breaking through the weariness. "Isolde asked of her last week. We'll arrange something, once she's old enough to survive an afternoon at court without being traumatized by it."
"I'd prefer she never be traumatized by court at all, if it's within my power to prevent it."
"A fine ambition. Entirely unachievable, but fine." Aldous gestured toward the chair opposite the desk and waited until Julian had settled into it before continuing. "Speaking of daughters, how is mine enjoying Isaria with her new company."
"Thriving, by all reports. She's made herself thoroughly at home among the other students, which I understand from her mother is exactly what we should have expected and precisely what worries the Bureau." Julian allowed himself a small curve of the lips. "Aside from Miss Ashcroft, her friendship with Lady Vandenberg is as strong as ever, and she has become quite close to a Rosarian transfer, which I have my own thoughts about."
He had specifically kept out the words smitten and Rosarian boy for fear of the King's overprotectiveness towards his daughter.
At that, Aldous went still in the particular way of a man deciding how much of a question he actually wanted answered. "And how is our Arcana Witch finding student life?"
"Adequate, by her own account."
"Adequate." Aldous repeated as though the word was venom.
"Julian. I have read the reports. I have read her reports — the ones you let me see — and I have met the girl exactly once without the cloak, and I came away with the distinct impression I'd been speaking to someone who would rather have been anywhere else on the continent. Timid. Anxious. She could barely respond to any question asked of her." He leaned back, and there was something plaintive beneath his careful phrasing — the sound of father who had entrusted his daughter's life to a stranger, let alone a teenage girl, and badly wanted to be reassured he'd been right to. "Tell me honestly, is she truly what the Bureau claims she is? Or have we built an entire strategy around a girl who happens to be very good at cowering?"
"She is the Arcana Witch," Julian said, without hesitation, because on this single point he had never once permitted himself doubt. "I have read every theoretical claim in that manuscript against what she is actually capable of producing, Your Majesty, and I assure you, she understates herself in print considerably more than most practitioners attempt to inflate themselves."
"And her power. Truly." Aldous's gaze sharpened, his weariness a fairytale long forgotten. "Do you believe she is more capable than you are, Julian?"
It was not an idle question, and Julian dared not treat it like one. He considered it properly, the way he considered any question that might one day matter in a room with worse lighting and less time to think.
"I don't know," he said finally. "I have fought beside her exactly twice, and both times I came away with the impression that I had only seen the portion of her she'd decided was necessary to show. What I do know is this: She is not merely powerful. Power, Your Majesty, I can measure. I have spent my career measuring it. But that girl, she is something else entirely. She is a monster among monsters, and I mean that as the highest compliment my profession is capable of paying someone."
Aldous held his gaze for a moment, then nodded slowly, as though Julian had just confirmed something he'd already suspected and merely needed to hear said aloud by someone whose judgement he trusted more than his own.
Good," he said. "Good. That's more comfort than I expected to take from an answer that opens with 'I don't know.'"
"You did ask an unanswerable question."
"I ask at least several of those a day. Most go considerably worse than this one." Aldous rose, crossed to the sideboard, and poured two glasses of something amber without asking whether Julian wanted one. He set one glass in front of his friend and did not sit back down.
"I didn't call you here to discuss my daughter or her new roommate, Julian, however pleasant the discussion's been."
"I assumed not."
"I need another favor. The same matter as before." Aldous did not elaborate on what the matter was and did not need to — this was not the first such conversation the two had shared in this room, and Julian had long stopped requiring the King to explain himself on this particular subject before agreeing to whatever came next. "I've heard word, through channels I'd rather not describe even to you, that there's a broker operating in the Undertoll who claims to hold genuine fragments of Regent Gestalt's own hand. Journal entries. Correspondence. Possibly more."
Julian's expression did not change. "The Undertoll is not a market one simply walks into."
"Which is precisely why I'm asking you and not one of my clerks. "Aldous drank, finally, and some of the weight he carried went down with the liquor. "You'll need a second. The crossing requires it — I'm told the threshold won't hold for one signature alone, not even yours, and I won't have you attempting something clever men have died attempting alone."
"I'm aware of the requirement."
"Then you're aware that I already have a suggestion." Aldous's mouth twitched, but not quite a smile. "Take Albert."
Julian considered this for exactly one moment and shook his head lightly. "Albert is a butler, Your Majesty."
"Albert is considerably more reliable than what his title suggests and has been for longer than either of us have been alive to notice it." Aldous said this lightly, the way a man says something he has long since decided not to think too hard about. "He'll go with you gladly, if you ask him yourself rather than through me — I find he prefers to be asked. And he'll hold his half of whatever the crossing requires without complaint, which is more than I can say for most people."
Julian filed the phrasing away — considerably more reliable than his title suggests — in the same mental drawer as every other secret this Palace kept that he knew about. Some doors, in his experience, were better left as locked as their owners preferred them to be.
"I'll speak with him tonight," Julian said.
"Good." Aldous set his glass down, and with it, set down the last of whatever softness had been in the room since the mention of Alara. "Find what's there, Julian. Whatever it costs. I'll square it away with the Treasury after, the same as always."
"And if there's nothing there? If the broker's lying, or the fragments are forgeries?"
"Then you'll have wasted a very unpleasant afternoon in a very unpleasant place, and I'll owe you considerably more than I already do." Something moved in the King's eyes, brief and tired in a way that had nothing to do with governance and everything to do with being a father. "But I don't think you believe that. And neither, if I'm honest, do I."
Julian rose, recognizing when he should leave even if the tone was something gentler than usual. "I'll send word once we've made contact."
"See that you do."
Aldous did not sit back down until the study door had clicked shut behind him. Julian, walking back through the corridor toward the Accord Bridge and the carriage waiting beyond it, found himself turning over a single unanswered question with rather more attention than he would have preferred.
Reliable outside of being a butler.
He would ask Albert tonight, exactly as promised.