Chapter 341 --341
She straightened. Adjusted her court dress. Took inventory of herself with the same systematic attention she gave to everything else — the fatigue was profound, the kind that had moved past the muscles and into the bones and from the bones into something deeper, the accumulated weight of fifteen days during which sleep had been a brief and irregular visitor and food had been whatever was placed on her desk at intervals that she didn’t always track. Her hands were steady, which was what mattered. Her head was clear enough, which was also what mattered.
She was not weak. She needed to be precise about that distinction, at least to herself, in the privacy of a dark passage with nobody watching who counted as watching. She was not weak. She was running a body at a deficit that would eventually require settlement, and the body was beginning to present the bill. Those were different things.
What had happened in the room — the composed, controlled hour of sitting across from two beast knights who were physically capable of ending her in the time it took to blink, maintaining the posture and the voice and the specific quality of authority that kept that capability theoretical rather than actual — that had cost something. It always cost something. The part of the body that maintained that kind of sustained composure under that kind of sustained pressure was not an infinite resource, and she had been withdrawing from it for fifteen days without making any deposits.
She began walking.
Slower than her usual pace, but she was walking, and the shadow guard had fallen back into his proper position, and the passage was quiet and dim and she let herself use the quiet for what it was good for.
She thought about what had just happened in the room.
Mahir and Ken had been honest. She was reasonably confident of this — not certain, because she was never certain about people until she had more evidence than a single conversation, but reasonably confident. The specific things they had told her, the names and the assessments of the partial recoveries, those were verifiable. She would verify them. That was the point of the shadow guards — not ceremony, not protection, but information, the ability to check what people told her against what was actually true, quietly and without the people in question knowing they were being checked.
She would send the shadow guards to find each of the eleven names Mahir and Ken had given her. Cross-reference the assessments. Look for the places where the descriptions were too flattering or too unflattering, where the emphasis had been placed in ways that served an agenda she hadn’t yet identified. If the information checked out — if Reva was genuinely at sixty percent with intermittent clarity, if Brennan was genuinely stable and static, if the young one whose name was Sela was genuinely oscillating — then she would know that Mahir and Ken’s honesty in that room had not been a performance.
And then she would decide what to do with honesty that wasn’t a performance.
She emerged from the passage into the lower corridor of the palace’s east wing, and the air changed — warmer, less damp, the smell of stone giving way to the smell of wood polish and candle wax and the faint, specific scent of a building that housed many people going about their business. The torches here were proper torches, well-maintained, and the light was a significant improvement over the dungeon passage.