A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

WHAT HE IS LOOKING FOR

I went back to the archive the next morning determined to watch him instead of avoid him, which is a harder thing to do than it sounds when the person you're watching is trained to notice being watched.

He was already there when I arrived — earlier than me, again, though this time I'd made a point of coming before the sun was properly up, which meant he'd either not slept or hadn't bothered pretending to. He had three ledgers open across my desk and a fourth in his hands, and he didn't look up when I came in, which told me he'd heard the door and simply decided I wasn't worth acknowledging yet.

"You're rearranging my filing system," I said.

"I'm reading it."

"You're doing both. I can tell by which ledgers are open. You've pulled every record from the last thirty years that mentions bloodlines, lineage, or inheritance disputes, and you've set aside the ones that don't."

That got me a look — quick, assessing, the same weighing look he'd given me the first day, except this time there was something underneath it that hadn't been there before. Not quite respect. Closer to recalculation, the particular expression of a man realizing he'd underestimated how carefully he was being watched in return.

"You're observant," he said.

"It's my entire job."

"It's more than your job. Most record keepers file things. You notice things. There's a difference, and it's not one most people your age have learned yet." He set the ledger down and looked at me directly, the winter-grey of his eyes doing something I couldn't name. "Who taught you to look at things the way you do?"

"Nobody taught me. I've always done it."

Something flickered behind his face at that — gone as fast as it came, the way it always was with him, but I was starting to learn the shape of it. It looked like recognition. It looked like a man hearing an answer he'd already guessed and hoped, for reasons of his own, that he'd guessed wrong.

"What are you looking for," I asked, before he could close the door on his own face the way he always did. "Not the audit. The actual thing. You've been here two days and you haven't once asked me about grain yields or tax discrepancies, which is what an audit is actually for. You're looking for a name."

"I'm looking for several names."

"Whose."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer at all, and then he said, carefully, in the voice of a man choosing exactly how much rope to hand someone he hadn't yet decided whether to trust:

"Old bloodlines. Ones the crown has an interest in tracking. It's not unusual work — half of what I do is genealogy dressed up as security."

"That's not an answer. That's a very well-constructed sentence shaped like an answer."

The corner of his mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "You really do notice everything."

"I notice when someone's being careful with me. You've been careful with me since you rode through that gate. Everyone in this village has been careful with me the last two days, actually, and I'd very much like someone to explain why, because I am extremely tired of being the only person in Caldenmere who doesn't understand what everyone else seems to already know."

I hadn't meant to say that much. It came out of me sharper than I intended, two days of Maeve's evasions and Ronan's swallowed sentences and Caspian's careful non-answers finally cracking the surface of my patience, and for a moment after I said it the archive was completely silent except for the small tick of the old clock on the far wall.

Caspian looked at me for a long time.

"I don't fully know yet either," he said, and it was the first thing he'd said to me since he arrived that sounded entirely, uncomplicatedly true. "That's the honest answer. I have a name I'm looking for. I have a suspicion about where that name leads. I don't yet have certainty, and I don't deal in anything less than certainty when the cost of being wrong is what it is here."

"What is the cost of being wrong?"

He didn't answer that one. He picked the ledger back up instead, and the door closed behind his eyes again, and I understood that I'd gotten as much truth out of him as I was going to get for one morning.

But I'd gotten something, at least. A shape, if not a name. A suspicion he hadn't confirmed, about a bloodline he hadn't named, with a cost attached to being wrong that he wouldn't describe.

I went back to my own side of the desk and pretended to work, and for the rest of the morning I watched him from the corner of my eye every time he thought I wasn't looking, and twice — twice — I caught him doing exactly the same thing to me, and neither of us said a single word about it either time.