Crownless Tyrant

Alistair did not sleep.

He had not expected to, since the lamp on the table was the only honest thing left in the room, and he let it burn through the night.

Partly, he wanted the inn keeper to wonder why the east corner room on the third floor kept a flame going at three in the morning, and partly he had nothing to gain from lying in the dark thinking about Aldous Blackwood.

So he sat in the chair, and he looked at the lamp for a long time.

Aldous Blackwood was the High Justicar. He stood at the top of the Upholders of Law and Justice, the man who set the audits, the man Alistair had spoken to twice in his life and walked out on the day he abandoned them entirely.

By the Upholders’ own records, Aldous never left Constance for anything less than a continental matter. He had not been seen east of Constance in eleven years.

And yet, he was three weeks away.

That was what the Sovereign Record had said. That was what Due’s people had said, and what Sable’s people had confirmed.

’They were wrong,’ Alistair thought. ’Or someone fed them a lie they were glad to carry east.’

Because Aldous was not three weeks away. Silas’s note had made that much clear, and the rest filled itself in. Aldous had set the audit personally, which meant he had read the Tobian Marrow cover himself and decided it was worth the trouble.

’He has known since the border,’ Alistair thought. ’He has probably known since before I crossed it.’

The thought did not arrive as fear. It arrived as something colder, closer to respect, since Aldous had not become High Justicar by being slow, nor by waiting to be surprised. He had spent forty years building a system whose entire purpose was making sure nothing reached Caelmar that he had not already accounted for.

And Tobian Marrow had reached Caelmar.

So the only question left was what, exactly, the man had accounted for. The audit was the test, the place where Alistair would learn whether Aldous had counted on a forged paper that did not match the Halversen archive, or on Alistair Thorne himself, walking through the eastern gate under a borrowed name on a quiet afternoon.

One of those he could survive. The other was the end of everything.

Alistair stood at first light, washed his face at the basin, and dressed slowly, the way a man dresses for a meeting that is not supposed to happen for another full day.

Following that, he left the inn at the seventh hour and walked the city the way Tobian Marrow would on a free morning, a slow loop through the second district, a stop at a bakery for bread he did not want, a pause at a stationer’s window to admire a writing set he could never afford.

Eventually, he came to the wanted boards.

He stopped at one, the way a young noble with nothing better to do might stop, and read the notices slowly.

Most were ordinary. Three were warrants the Upholders had issued in the past year for faction leaders in other regions, two of whom were already dead. The parchment was clean, the typesetting crisp, and the red seal at the bottom of each had not yet aged.

He saw no names he knew to be Sun Harvest.

Then, lower on the board, he nearly missed a smaller notice.

It was a request for information about a man whose description fit no one in particular, whose alleged crime was vague enough to mean nothing at all. It was the kind of notice the Upholders posted when they wanted something without admitting they wanted it.

The notice was vague in every line but one, since it named the color of the man’s hair, pale gold, the shade every child of Thorne carried from birth.

Alistair read the line once, and kept his face exactly as Tobian Marrow’s would be on a morning when he had read three warrants and one notice about a stranger. The cover did not need him to react, only to keep walking, so he kept walking.

He returned to the Sealed Step at the eleventh hour. The keeper sat at her desk and did not look up from her ledger as he passed.

He climbed the three flights and opened the door of his room.

The lamp on the table was unlit, and there was no note beneath it.

Alistair stood in the doorway for a moment, then crossed to the bed, sat on its edge, and allowed himself ten full seconds, eyes shut and hands flat on his knees, to be honestly afraid.

He counted every one of them, and when he opened his eyes, the fear was folded away where it belonged.

After that, he went back down to the keeper.

"Lunch, if the kitchen can still manage it," he said pleasantly. "I lost the hour wandering your streets, and I am told a guest who skips two meals is how rumors start."

The keeper finally looked up, the corner of her mouth moving without quite becoming a smile. "Verissan does love a rumor, young Marrow. I will have something sent to your table."

"You are kind," Alistair replied. "And, if you can spare them, a pen and a sheet of paper. My mother writes faithfully, and she frets when a month passes without an answer."

"A devoted son." She drew both from a drawer beneath the desk, though she did not hand them over at once. "We see fewer of those pass through than you would think, Ser. Most who write home only do it when they want something sent back."

Alistair let himself smile at that, the way Tobian Marrow would. "Then let me be the rare one who only wants to say the weather is mild."

She gave him the pen and paper, and she did not ask which mother. She did not look at him a moment longer than was polite.

Alistair carried the paper to the small table in the empty common room and wrote to a woman who did not exist, in the formal register a Halversen son would use, reporting that Verissan was lovely, the weather had been mild, the residency oath was proceeding on schedule, and that the family of an old friend of his late father’s had welcomed him warmly.

He sealed it with the false Halversen seal he had set out the night before, and addressed it to a town that appeared on no map of the Halversen estate.

The keeper accepted the letter without surprise, and she did not say which courier would carry it.

After that, he returned to his room.

The lamp on the table was lit.

Beneath it lay a folded square of paper.

Alistair crossed the room slowly and picked it up.

The hand was one he had never seen, not Crane’s, not Silas’s, not the keeper’s, written fast and pressed hard, the way a person writes when she has no time to write it well.

He read the four words once, then again, and felt his jaw tighten.

He knows about Elara.