Crown of Ashes

The Unforgiven

The visitor was Devrin Holt.

She stopped in the doorway of the small meeting room they had put him in and looked at him for a long moment before he looked up and saw her.

He had not changed. That was the first thing. Same broad shoulders, same jaw that looked like it had been assembled with the specific purpose of being unpleasant to argue with, same way of occupying space like he had calculated exactly how much of it he was entitled to and decided to take slightly more. He was wearing civilian clothes, which meant he had not come officially. He had come as himself, which was somehow worse.

He looked up.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"You look terrible," he said.

"You're not supposed to be here," she said.

"No." He didn't seem troubled by that. "Sit down."

"I'll stand."

He looked at her for a moment with an expression she recognised from years of watching him be wrong about things and refuse to acknowledge it. Then he leaned back in his chair and spread his hands on the table and said, "Fine."

She stayed in the doorway. She was aware that standing in the doorway rather than entering the room was the kind of thing that could be read as uncertainty rather than strategy, but she did not particularly want to be in an enclosed space with Devrin Holt right now. She had a list of people she was not ready to be in enclosed spaces with and he was on it for specific reasons she had not finished processing yet.

"Who let you in," she said.

"I have my methods."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. He looked at her steadily. "The syndicate is being dissolved."

She said nothing.

"Your brother Caelan has been making decisions for three months that have cost the family four territories, two senior members, and every alliance your father spent fifteen years building. Rhen is letting him. Nobody is stopping it because nobody left in that building has the standing to stop it and keep their position." He paused. "The people who stayed loyal to your father are leaving. The ones who are staying are the ones who saw an opportunity."

Sera looked at the wall past his shoulder.

"You didn't come here to give me a status report," she said.

"No."

"Then what do you want."

He was quiet for a moment. Devrin Holt, who had argued with her in every meeting she had ever attended, who had called her reckless to her face on four separate occasions in front of her father's entire council, who had never once in fifteen years of knowing each other said a single word on her behalf when it might have cost him something.

"I didn't speak up," he said. "When they brought the charges. I want you to know that I know that."

The room was very quiet.

"Is that an apology," she said, and she kept her voice flat because the alternative was something she could not afford right now.

"It's an acknowledgement." His jaw moved slightly. "I don't do apologies. You know that."

"I know."

"What I do," he said, "is fix things that are broken. And what is happening to that syndicate right now is the most broken thing I have watched in twenty years of this work." He looked at her directly. "You would not let it happen. Whatever else you are or are not, you would not let it happen."

Sera looked at him for a long time.

Something in her chest was doing something complicated that she did not have the energy to examine right now.

"I'm in a locked room in someone else's building, Devrin," she said. "What exactly do you think I can do from here."

"I think," he said carefully, "that you have never in your life let a locked room be the end of something."

She had no response to that.

She looked at the table. She looked at the wall. She looked at the way the torchlight moved across the floor.

"Go home," she said finally. "Don't come back here. It's not safe for you."

She turned to leave.

"Sera."

She stopped.

"The night your father died," Devrin said, "the coroner's report listed the time of death as the eleventh hour."

She did not turn around.

"I know," she said.

"Your father's personal physician," he said, very quietly, "filed a separate report. Privately. Not through official channels. He listed something else in his notes. Something he saw that did not match the official findings." A pause. "That report disappeared within twenty-four hours. I only know it existed because I was there when he wrote it."

The torchlight moved.

Sera's hand was on the doorframe.

"What did it say," she said. Her voice came out very steady. She was very far away from how steady her voice sounded.

"I don't know," Devrin said. "I only saw the cover page. But Sera." Another pause. Heavier than the ones before it. "There was a second entry. A notation. Time-stamped three hours before the official time of death."

She stood very still.

"He was already showing symptoms," Devrin said. "Before the stabbing."

The doorframe was solid under her hand.

She needed it to be solid.

"Go home," she said. "I'll be in touch."

She walked back into the corridor and kept walking and did not stop until she reached the eastern courtyard where the air was cold and open and she could stand with her face tipped up toward the grey sky and breathe for a moment without anyone watching.

Three hours before the stabbing.

Symptoms.

The thing she had done that she had been so certain had not worked.

She pressed two fingers hard to the inside of her wrist and felt her pulse and told herself she did not know what that meant yet. She told herself there were too many variables. She told herself not to build conclusions out of incomplete information.

She told herself all of that very firmly.

Her hands were shaking.