The week that follows is the most effective political operation I've run in twenty years, and I run it with Mireya at the table for every piece of it.
She is terrifying. I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to give. She moves through court intelligence the way she moved through noble accounting systems — finding the places where the numbers don't add up, identifying the people who know more than they're meant to, applying exactly the right pressure at exactly the right moment to extract exactly what we need. The coalition starts making mistakes. Small ones at first, then compounding, each error the consequence of responding to a move we designed specifically to produce that response.
Lord Fenrath Aldrath corners her at a crown social function on the fourth day to deliver what he clearly believes is a devastating piece of social pressure about the impropriety of a human woman advising on crown financial matters. She listens to all of it with her head tilted slightly and her expression one of polite professional interest — the same expression she uses when she's waiting for someone to finish making a mistake so she can address it — and then she says, "Lord Aldrath, the third-quarter shipping records from your eastern accounts show a seventeen percent discrepancy from the declared volume. I've been meaning to ask you about that."
He turns a very specific color.
"It's probably nothing," she adds pleasantly. "These things usually are. But I do find it's best to name them early, before they become embarrassing for everyone involved."
He retreats inside two minutes. I watch the exchange from across the room and I become aware that I've been watching her for the better part of the last hour and that this is no longer something I bother trying to stop. I've stopped pretending the watching is strategic observation. It isn't. It's simply that she isthe most interesting thing in any room she enters and I have given up acting like that's a conclusion I reached reluctantly.
Draevik appears at my shoulder. He doesn't say anything. His silence says it for him.
"I know," I tell him.
"Do you," he says. Not a question.
It's the evening of the fifth day when Lord Corvel's nephew — the same one who accidentally confirmed Vel'eth's shipping scheme at the reception — approaches Mireya at a public gathering. He's clearly been sent. He's also clearly been told to be charming about it, which he is, in the practiced way of men who have been charming their way out of problems since birth.
I am on the other side of the room.
I am not on the other side of the room for very long.
I do not examine the speed at which I move or what's driving it. I arrive at Mireya's side and put my hand at the small of her back, and the nephew looks up at me and reassesses his evening plans immediately.
"Lord Vhol'ir." He bows. "I was just?—"
"I can see what you were just doing," I say. "Lord Corvel sends his social overtures at an interesting time. Tell him I noticed."
The nephew exits. Mireya waits until he's out of earshot and then says, without turning her head: "I had that."
"I know."
"I don't need you to appear every time a man speaks to me."
"I know that too."
"Then why?—"
"Because I wanted to," I say. Quiet. Not angry. Just honest, which is harder. "I am aware it's not rational. I am aware you don't require it. I wanted to be there regardless."
She's quiet. Her expression does the thing it does when she's deciding whether to argue and concludes the argumenthas already been had. "Fine," she says. "But if you do it during an actual negotiation I will make your life difficult in ways you haven't imagined yet."
"Noted."
We stand side by side watching the room. Her shoulder is against mine. Neither of us moves away from it.
Later, back at the estate, I sit at my desk and go through the marriage contract. I've barely thought about it since I drafted it. One year. I wrote one year because one year was what the political operation required and because I did not then believe I would want anything beyond it.
Then I put it in the drawer and close it and do not open it again that night.
15
MIREYA
Ifind the full records on a Thursday, in a locked compartment inside the locked lower archive, behind a false panel I locate because I've been spending enough time in that room to notice that the east wall is four inches shallower than the building's exterior suggests.
The document inside is not old. It's thirty years old, which for Sevareth is recent. It is written in the same pressured, frightened handwriting as the earlier records, except worse — the pen has torn the paper in two places where the hand holding it shook.
