Chapter 342 --342
She came closer and looked at the maps. He had marked them — small, precise notations in a handwriting that was already more disciplined than most adults she knew, identifying the changes in border delineation, the shifts in road infrastructure, the places where towns had grown or shrunk. She looked at the notations for a moment.
"What’s your conclusion?" she said.
"Three of the border changes are administrative," he said, pointing. "They moved the line on paper but nothing changed on the ground. Two of them are real — the town here expanded into previously disputed territory and the border adjusted to reflect that, and this section here contracted because the population left after the flooding eight years ago." He paused. "The flooding that was also when my mother—" He stopped. Restarted cleanly. "The flooding eight years ago."
She looked at the map and not at him, which she judged was what was needed. "The road changes?"
"Three new roads, two of which don’t connect to anything useful," he said, and there was a faint quality in his voice — dry, precise — that she recognized because she had heard it in her own voice sometimes. "Which means they were built to serve specific estates rather than actual transportation needs. Which means whoever authorized them was doing a favor for someone."
"Can you tell who?"
-
He had already looked. She could tell from the way he reached for the book without hesitation, had it open to the right page. "The estates on both roads belong to families in the Meridian nobility cluster. The construction was authorized in the fourteenth year of my father’s reign, countersigned by the Deputy Minister of Infrastructure, who was — " he ran his finger down the page " — the younger brother of the senior Meridian house lord."
She looked at him.
He looked back at her with those clear grey eyes, waiting, not performing the wait.