Chapter 295 --295
Elara was quiet for a moment.
"And then you left," she said.
"I had nothing left to do," Tessa said. "Staying meant being found by whoever won. I didn’t know who was going to win and I didn’t know if winning meant they’d be interested in what I knew or interested in making sure I couldn’t tell anyone." She paused. "So I left."
"Through the physician’s corridor," Elara said.
"It was the least watched exit that night," she said. "Everyone was focused on the main corridors."
She had used the same exit as Caius.
A record clerk and a man with a poisoned blade, both choosing the physician’s corridor on the same night, for different reasons, both ending up in the city and surviving the year and being found by the same working list.
The river moved.
"The fourth consort," Elara said. "You were her source."
Tessa looked at her. "She came to me two years before the incursion. She’d noticed the same things I had noticed in the archive — documents being moved, small reorganizations. She asked me carefully, in the way people asked carefully in that palace when they wanted to know something without being seen to want it." She paused. "I told her what I’d observed. She didn’t tell me what she was going to do with it." Another pause. "I didn’t ask."
"She used it in her testimony," Elara said. "The proceedings against the Empress Dowager."
Tessa was quiet.