Like most things in Ilvan-Trai, the officer’s dining hall had not been designed to host anyone of status. It was long and narrow, built with the same utilitarian austerity that defined late Ashadi military architecture.

  Still, the Feln household staff had done a tremendous job of making it presentable in the few hours since his invitation. They had scrubbed every surface and polished every sconce, throwing fresh white linens and household banners over every imperfection they could not easily eliminate. They’d done such a good job, in fact, that apart from the slight smell of polish and cleaning solution—a scent nearly masked by the appetizing aroma of roasted meat—one might have thought the room had been pre-prepared for an Imperator and his entourage.

  Instead, it was only the three of them seated at a table just long enough to be awkward. Syrus had taken the head, obviously, with Alarion opposite and Lily wedged firmly between.

  An hour of dining had convinced Alarion of two things. Syrus Feln was a snake, and he had tremendous taste.

  For one thing, he had good wine. And not Bergman’s ‘good wine’ that Lily had politely endured and Alarion had left half finished. If nothing else came of the meeting, Alarion hoped that Lily would remember the vintage.

  Not that he’d ever be able to afford it.

  The food was just as good, if not better, courtesy of a rank II [Chef] that Syrus had brought with him from Ashad-Vitri. It was important to ‘sample the local cuisine’ as Syrus had put it. As if fresh herb-roasted meats, exotic spices, and delectable chocolates were anywhere near common in Ashad.

  But that was the problem with the man. When he spoke, you wanted to believe him, even if the things he said were outlandish. Lily had warned him as much during their brief tête-à-tête before they were summoned, but it wasn’t a System skill. Syrus Feln was rank II, most of it in some archivist class, and while he certainly had a high rarity variant of [Speechcraft] along with who knew what else, the System alone could not account for his meteoric rise through Vitrian politics.

  Or the way he left you guessing.

  “I must say, Two-thirty…. Orphan,” Syrus winced at the slip, though, like everything he did, it was impossible to tell if the embarrassment was genuine or an act. “Forgiveness, old habits. As I was saying, I must admit that was quite the spectacle. Not at all what I had in mind when I arrived here this morning… though I am glad as well. I can see her in you. Sierra, I mean. She is all over the way you fight.”

  On the surface, a simple statement. But broken down, it could mean so much more.

  It started with an insult or a mistake. Was Syrus taking a jab at the man who’d murdered his daughter? Or was he genuinely trying to overcome years of using a more familiar name?

  He talked about expectations, which left Alarion wondering how much he knew. Was he behind the brothers and their foolhardy scheme? Had he been aware of it and let it play out? Or had he been caught fully by surprise?

  And then there was Sierra. Alarion didn’t fight like her, and he doubted an academic would recognize the similarities even as a jab. Read cynically, it was a chance to bring up his daughter, to remind Alarion what he’d done. Read generously, it was a father trying to find some meaning in the death of his child.

  Or all of it could be read plainly, and Alarion was losing his damn mind.

  “It was not quite what we had in mind,” Lily said diplomatically. “But it was something that we always anticipated. I think Governor Williams’ absence made them believe that this was an opportune time.”

  “Ah, the folly of youth,” Syrus said ruefully, before taking another sip of his wine. “But these things happen. Too many houses put their own well-being above the good of the Empire, and they inevitably pay the price.”

  “They are not the only ones,” Alarion added.

  “So true!” Syrus continued, clearly taking it as permission to monologue. “Like this Bones nonsense. Selling bodies straight from the mortuaries, as if it would not come back on them.”

  “Did they catch them?” Lily inquired. The theft of Vitrian dead had been nearly as much of a scandal as the attacks themselves.

  “Shortly before I departed,” Syrus confirmed. “I have always opposed capital punishment on principle, but even my silver tongue feels dull trying to defend such barbarity.”

  “Even after?” Lily asked. One slender finger worried at the rim of her wineglass, avoiding eye contact with either man as she pressed a delicate subject. “It seems almost a certainty that the Bones are in league with extremists who killed your daughter, if not the outright cause.”

  It took most of what Alarion had left after such an exhausting day not to swear into his glass.

  The official story of the Trinity Massacre held that an Ashadi resistance group was responsible. While some of Alarion’s closest allies knew better, Lily was not among them. As far as she knew, Alarion had survived either by luck or through his major flaw. In either case, it was an open secret that Syrus had held Alarion responsible, even if neither he nor his House had ever pointed the finger directly.

  Bless her heart, Lily was trying to mend fences.

  “Even still,” Syrus replied softly, the energetic spark in his eyes dimming in a way that Alarion could not help but read as genuine. “We do not hold our principles for when they are easy; we hold them for when they are hard.”

  Alarion stared into his glass, watching the wine ripple with the shaking of his hands. He steadied them the best he could, then asked, “And what do you think should be done with the one responsible?”

  Syrus set his fork down and leaned back in his chair, his cheek resting on his knuckles as he sought out Alarion’s eyes. The man looked tired, not at all the monster Alarion had made him out to be in his head in the months after Sierra’s death. He’d ordered Sierra to bring him in, ordered Ruin to add his body to the pile if she couldn’t.

  But would Dar have done anything different if put in his shoes? Alarion doubted it.

  Would Elena?

  “I blamed you, you know,” Syrus said at last.

  “I know.”

  “I thought so,” Syrus said, almost sadly. “I met my wife-to-be, Marigold, when I was far younger than you are now, and fell in love with her the day we met. She was beautiful and kind, but life was not kind to her. Low Aptitude, always ill. We married against the advice of my family, and I stayed with her against that advice through five stillbirths.”

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  Alarion sat forward ever so slightly, his head craned somewhat to the side as if Syrus’ voice needed to be louder for things to make sense.

  “With the toll it took on her, I told her the fifth was to be our last. Adoption is common enough in Vitria, and I had plenty of cousins, even after my sister left us.” Syrus allowed himself the slight hint of a smile at a fond memory as he continued. “Marigold had other ideas, willful woman that she was. Nine months later, Sierra was born. And she was perfect.”

  Syrus swallowed hard, then pushed away from the table, thumb and forefinger brushing at the bridge of his nose as he fought with his emotions.

  “You knew her. So, like her mother. Stubborn. Impulsive. Kind and generous. She was the best of us. And I hated you.” Syrus spat the words like a curse, his hand clenching and relaxing in a self-soothing gesture. “If Ruin had not saved you, I would have…”

  “Councillor Feln-” Lily interjected.

  “Please,” he held up an apologetic hand, took a breath, and continued. “For as much as the man is an oaf, he stopped me from doing something I would have regretted. And I am glad for it. Her death was not your fault. It was mine.”

  “Yours?” Alarion asked. His eyes flicked instinctively to Lily, then back to Syrus.

  “I believed Ashad was safe. Safe enough for my daughter to come here. And even after…. Even then, I assumed that it was a tragedy, a fluke.” Syrus stalked back toward his chair, but did not take a seat quite yet. “But the tragedy you suffered through was not the first shot of this conflict any more than the horrors in the last few months are the second. The Curia has failed… I have failed Ashad. Failed the continent in our single most vital task. Providing security.”

  He met Alarion’s eyes once again and held them tight as he finished his thought.

  “You asked what I thought should happen to the ones responsible? I give you the same answer I have spoken on at length in the Curia. They should have to live with what they have done.”

  Alarion’s blood ran cold even as Syrus forced an unconvincing smile onto his lips.

  “I am sorry, truly, for the way that I have behaved toward you. Sierra spoke highly of you in her letters to me, even the last one I received, in fact. She was fond of you, and I tarnished that memory by blaming you for surviving when she did not. It was not until the interview that I saw in you the same sense of loss. Only then did I understand the error of my ways.”

  Syrus dug into a small satchel he had hidden beneath the table and produced a large envelope. He crossed the hall and held it out to Alarion, who eyed it hesitantly.

  “I know that apologies without actions ring hollow, so I have been preparing this. Sadly, we are meeting earlier than I anticipated.” He turned his attention to Lily. “I reached an arrangement with your mother after the interview and had my staff pick up where she left off. This contains all the documents we have located thus far.”

  “You are looking for my family?” Alarion’s voice quivered with anger as he looked up from the envelope to see Syrus smiling down at him.

  “Of course,” he replied, as though it were obvious. “Until just recently, we were stuck at the same dead end as Ms. Hart, but a recent tip may have opened a path. Tell me, Alarion. Is your mother a woman named Nessa?”

  Alarion snatched the envelope hard enough to tear it clear through, causing an assortment of documents to scatter across the table.

  “That seems like a yes.”

  “Nessa?” Lily repeated. The words were directed at Alarion, but he barely heard them as he frantically searched through the documents in front of him.

  “That would make your sister, Atra,” Syrus continued. “Six years ago, they travelled from Port Livest to the Principalities on forged documents. No surprise there, given what you have said publicly. Your mother was indentured for several months, then the two of them travelled north to Al-Raeve.”

  “Where are they?!” Alarion demanded, somewhere between fear and rage.

  Syrus winced in the face of Alarion’s rage. “We have yet to locate your sister.”

  “And my mother?”

  Rather than answer, Syrus reached into the pile and pushed a single document to the forefront.

  It was a fuzzy copy of a simple rectangular document. Written in two languages, it took Alarion a moment to parse the structure, and then another to confirm what he was seeing.

  A death certificate.

  “Sick?” Alarion frowned. That was impossible. “This cannot be her. My mother was an Awakened.”

  “Was she?” Syrus tilted his head curiously, filing that information away for later. Then he dashed Alarion’s burgeoning hope. “This was not a normal disease. A plague caster infected hundreds in Al-Raeve. Magical diseases make no distinction between those with power and those without. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

  Alarion’s shoulders drooped, even as his mind scrambled for alternatives. It could still be wrong. A misidentification, or another woman with the same name. It didn’t have any other information about her, and Vitrian or not, Syrus certainly wasn’t above lying if it suited him.

  “For what little it is worth, I am told it was quick,” Syrus said gently. “The disease killed in hours, not days or weeks.”

  It was worth nothing. The worst parts of Alarion’s mind were whirling, filling his head with visions of his mother writhing in a bed, her insides aflame as she bled out her life, or struggling to bleed as she called for her son.

  “Atra?” he whispered.

  “Taken in by a state orphanage,” Syrus slid a long paper alongside the death certificate. “After that, she goes missing. Apparently, the headmistress has been forging her documents for the last several years, claiming a stipend despite her absence. It is possible that she passed away as well, but the staff we interrogated all claim that she stayed a few weeks, then vanished. Such runaways are not uncommon.”

  She was alive. She had to be. He’d survived desperate squalor, divine challenges, and years of service, and Atra was so much smarter than he was. She’d always been the clever one. The thoughtful one. Perhaps she had the same level of Aptitude as he did. Perhaps she’d been hidden away to protect her from the Vitrians or was kept secret among them? Maybe she’d fled the continent entirely, gone overseas to the Godlands, or to Aleph or the Bizarre.

  Atra was still alive. And she was safe.

  She had to be.

  “We will keep looking for her,” Syrus reassured him. “And when we find her, I promise, you will be the first to know.”

  “That is terribly kind of you, Councilor Feln,” Lily said, placing a hand on Alarion’s shoulder. He hadn’t realized she’d moved. He couldn’t even take his eyes away from the paper in front of him; from that headstone of finality that recorded his mother’s last day. “But clearly a sensitive topic. Mayhap it is best we call this an evening?”

  “Yes, that would be wise, I think,” Syrus agreed. “He was lucky to have such a competent assistant.”

  “Was?” Lily asked, a bit taken aback.

  “The arrangement I mentioned,” Syrus explained, his tone sickeningly apologetic. “Your mother shares my… concerns about the ongoing disturbances in Ashad. She agreed to connect my team with her sources, but only on the condition that I buy out your contract.”

  “You cannot-“

  “But I have,” Syrus replied, guiltily. “My office requires a new speaker, and your pedigree is outstanding—that business with your Aptitude notwithstanding. Had I realized that you were fond of your posting, I would have sent someone to inquire, but I never considered-“

  “Counsellor, I must refuse,” she told him firmly. “I will speak to my mother as soon as possible and come to an alternative arrangement. This task is too important to…”

  Something must have clicked. Lily must have realized some scheme or plan, for Alarion saw her eyes moving in thought even as her words trailed off to nothing.

  “Lily?”

  “I am sorry, my dear girl. You are welcome to try but-”

  The sudden keening of a bell drowned out Syrus’ empty platitude. It struck four times in quick succession, its magically enhanced vibrations loud enough to be heard for miles without deafening the fortress’s occupants. It struck four times, paused, then repeated. A call to arms, pending deployment.

  The 238th were going to war.

  “T-This cannot be happening…? How?” Lily asked, her eyes staring blankly at Syrus. All the fight had gone out of her in an instant, her normally ashen face somehow even paler than usual. “How is this possible?”

  “Again, I am sorry,” Syrus told her again, almost as an afterthought. Then he looked at Alarion and held his straight face just long enough to prove he could, before smirking. “Well, the flaw is revealed, as they say—no harm telling you now. One of the corpse thieves gave up his handler, a seventh seat, if you can believe such a thing. She was much less talkative, but a search of her records provided everything we were looking for.”

  To Syrus’ obvious disappointment, neither of them asked the obvious question. Alarion refused to give him the satisfaction, and Lily seemed… distant. Not defeated, but as though the clever, defiant girl had lost her ability to speak.

  Eventually, Syrus’s patience overcame Alarion’s curiosity as the young man asked, “Which is?”

  “What else? The location of the man they call Centre.”