Agatha came back before the crowd had even finished chanting Renn's name, her face arranged into the same unreadable calm she wore for negotiations, though Emma had learned by now to read the tension underneath it.
"Walk with me," she said, and didn't wait to see if Emma and Selene followed.
They found a quiet stretch of corridor behind the Capitol section, empty except for a single guard who took one look at Agatha's expression and found somewhere else to be. Agatha set a thin folder down on a stone ledge and opened it without ceremony.
"Halveth's death," she said. "What the archives actually have, once you strip away twenty years of rumor."
Emma leaned in. The first page was a coroner's report, the ink faded but still legible, the handwriting cramped and hurried in a way that suggested whoever wrote it hadn't wanted to linger over the work.
"No wound," Agatha said, before Emma could finish reading it herself. "No poison the physicians of the time could identify. No sign of a struggle in the room where he was found. His own guards swore the door had been locked from the inside." She turned the page. "And within a month, every person who examined that body was dead or gone. Two guards reassigned to the far coast. The physician found drowned in a well he had no reason to be near. The scribe who wrote this report disappeared from the record entirely, no death notice, no reassignment, nothing."
"Just like the correspondents," Emma said quietly.
"Just like the correspondents." Agatha closed the folder. "Same signature. Twenty years apart. Whatever did this to Halveth never stopped operating in this city. It simply went quiet, and it's not quiet anymore."
Selene, who had been reading over Emma's shoulder, spoke without looking up. "That changes the shape of the problem. This isn't a fresh threat that appeared with Renn's ascension. It's something old that decided to act again."
"Or something old that Renn's ascension finally provoked," Agatha said. "I don't know which yet. I'm not sure it matters, in the end. Either way, the same hand is on both events, twenty years apart, and we still don't know whose hand it is."
There was a second document beneath the coroner's report, thinner, its edges gone soft with handling. Agatha didn't offer it right away.
"There's one more thing," she said. "A private letter, found among the scribe's belongings before he vanished. Never delivered. He'd addressed it to the Senate, to us, and never found the nerve, or the time, to send it." She held it out. "Read the last line. Not the rest. The rest is just a frightened man restating what you've already seen."
Emma took it carefully. The final line was written in a different hand than the rest, smaller, pressed hard enough into the page that it had nearly torn through.
They did not kill him for what he was. They killed him for what he was about to become.
Emma read it twice before looking up. "Become what?"
"That's the part he never got to write." Agatha took the letter back, folding it away with the same care she'd handled everything else. "Twenty years is a long time to wonder what a man might have become, if someone hadn't decided he shouldn't."
Emma looked down at the coroner's report again, at the cramped, frightened handwriting of a man who had disappeared for having seen too much. "Could it be Renn himself? He as good as admitted, in his own oath, that he knows what this cost."
"Knowing what something cost isn't the same as having spent the price yourself." Agatha's tone stayed even, but something behind her eyes had sharpened. "A man doesn't usually announce, in front of an entire continent, that he murdered his own predecessor. But a man who inherited a throne someone else built through murder, and who intends to use it anyway, might announce exactly that, if he wanted the right people to understand he knows the rules of the game he's now playing."
"So he's not the killer. He's just not afraid of the killer either."
"That's my read of it, for now." Agatha slid the folder back into her coat. "Which makes him either very brave, very foolish, or very protected. I intend to find out which before we leave this city."
A servant found them a few minutes later, out of breath, informing them that the Sceau himself was receiving guests in the western hall, that attendance was, as he put it, warmly expected of every delegation present.
The western hall turned out to be smaller than Emma had pictured, given everything else about this city's appetite for spectacle, a long room lit by the same amber braziers that had filled the arena, its walls hung with tapestries too new to have faded yet. Renn stood near the far end, still wearing his crown, speaking to a cluster of regional delegates with the easy, practiced warmth of someone who had clearly rehearsed this exact performance many times before tonight, even if tonight was supposedly his first night wearing it.
He noticed Agatha the moment she entered. Of course he did.
"Lady Agatha." He crossed the room to meet her rather than making her wait, which Emma suspected was its own kind of message. "I was beginning to think the Capitol had sent its president all this way only to hide from me for three days."
"I had matters to attend to," Agatha said. "Congratulations on your title."
"You don't sound congratulatory." Renn's smile didn't waver, but his eyes moved briefly to Emma, taking her in with an attention that felt more clinical than curious. "And this must be the young Relic everyone in this hall has been whispering about since this afternoon."
Emma said nothing, unsure whether silence or an answer would tell him less about her.
"I heard about the arena," Renn went on, still looking at her. "Not you. The other one. Whatever came out of that first fight." He turned back to Agatha before Emma could decide how to respond to that. "You have interesting company, for a diplomatic visit."
"We have interesting timing, for a coronation," Agatha said. "No delegation from the South. Not one letter of apology. You'd think a man about to swear loyalty to the Capitol would have noticed an entire quarter of the continent going silent."
Something flickered across Renn's face, there and gone fast enough that Emma almost missed it. Not surprise. Something closer to recognition, as if Agatha had finally asked the question he'd been waiting three days for someone to ask.
"I noticed," he said. "I have people looking into it. As, I imagine, do you."
"We do." Agatha held his gaze. "I'd be curious to compare notes, Sceau Renn. Perhaps somewhere with fewer ears."
"Perhaps." Renn's smile returned, thinner now, more careful. "Tomorrow, maybe. Tonight, I have a city to keep smiling at me." He inclined his head, first to Agatha, then, longer, to Emma. "Relic. I hope Tra has been informative, if nothing else."
He moved off before either of them could answer, already turning his warmth toward the next cluster of guests waiting for their moment with him.
Emma let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
"He knows something," she said.
"He knows a great many somethings," Agatha said, watching him go. "The question is which ones he's willing to trade, and to whom. Men like that rarely give anything away for free, not even the truth." She glanced at Emma, something almost approving in the look. "You did well, saying nothing. Silence tells a man like Renn less than words do, and he clearly wanted words."
"Agatha." Paul's voice arrived before he did, drifting toward them from somewhere near the wine table, unhurried as always. "You look like a woman who's just been handed a puzzle with half the pieces missing."
"Paul." Agatha didn't turn immediately. "I didn't realize coronations were your kind of entertainment."
"They're not." He came to stand beside them, a cup in hand that he didn't seem particularly interested in drinking from. "But interesting deaths are. I hear this city's collected quite a few of those lately." His eyes drifted, briefly, to the folder still tucked against Agatha's side, and something in his expression suggested he already knew more about its contents than either of them would have liked. "You should be careful who else in this room already knows what you just learned."
"Is that a warning or a threat?" Emma asked, before she could stop herself.
Paul's gaze settled on her, delighted, as if she'd finally said something worth his attention. "With me, little Relic, it's rarely just one or the other." He inclined his head to Agatha. "Enjoy your evening. I have my own puzzle to finish."
He drifted off toward the far end of the hall, unbothered, and Agatha watched him go with an expression Emma couldn't quite read.
"He knew," Emma said. "About the letter."
"He always knows," Agatha said. "That's what makes him dangerous. Not what he does with it. What he lets you see that he already has it."
Selene, still scanning the room out of habit, went suddenly still beside them.
"Emma," she said, very quietly. "Don't look now."
Emma looked anyway, the impulse faster than her own restraint, and felt it again before she even found what she was searching for, that same dense, layered presence she'd felt twice now from the stands, closer this time, somewhere in this very hall, folded in among the crowd of guests filing in from the arena.
She scanned the room without turning her head too obviously, the way Selene had drilled into her over weeks of practice, letting her eyes move slowly across faces she didn't recognize, delegates in unfamiliar colors, servants weaving between clusters of guests, none of them matching anything she could have named even if she'd found the right one. The sensation didn't behave like a person standing still, waiting to be found. It moved, faint and then sharp again, as if whoever carried it was crossing the hall without any idea they were being searched for.
She never got the chance to find a face to put to it. A cluster of servants crossed the room just then, carrying trays of wine toward the delegates, and by the time they'd passed, the sensation had already thinned back into the ordinary noise of the crowd, gone as quickly as it had come.
"Nothing," Emma said, before Selene could ask.
But this time, she wasn't entirely sure that was true. Whatever it was, it felt less like something she'd stumbled across, and more like something that had, for one brief moment, stumbled across her in return.