The chamber was empty.
This was the first problem.
Mel had entered at the second bell of the night — the palace's quiet hour, the specific dead-calm of a building that had finished its last official business and had not yet begun its earliest morning functions, the hour that belonged to no category of activity and which was therefore, in her experience, the most useful.
She had entered through the service corridor, as she always entered rooms she was not supposed to be in, with the specific, practiced quietness of someone who had been doing this for thirty years and had long since stopped thinking about the mechanics of it.
The chamber was the guest accommodation assigned to the Veldrathi delegation's advisory staff — the east corridor rooms, the ones with the better mattresses and the view of the inner garden rather than the service yard.
Advisory Consultant Voss's room was the third one.
She had opened the door.
The bed was empty.
Not in the recently-vacated way — not warm, not arranged with the specific disorder of someone who had gotten up for water or a necessary interval. Empty in the way of a bed that had not been slept in, the covers smooth in the formal housekeeping style rather than the lived-in style.
She looked at the bed.
She looked at the room.
She thought: he is not here, where is he?
She was still thinking this when the arm came around her throat from behind.
— — —
She did not freeze.
Freezing was the response of people who were surprised by this kind of thing, and Mel had not been surprised by this kind of thing in approximately twenty years.
She dropped her weight.
Not dramatically — the specific, practiced weight-shift of someone who had been taught that the most effective response to a chokehold from behind was not to fight the arm but to remove the geometry that made it work, which meant removing the upright stance and dropping the center of gravity below the arm's operational level.
She dropped.
The arm followed — not releasing, but following, which was what arms did when the body attached to them was still trying to maintain the hold, and following meant the person attached to the arm was now bent forward over her, which was a different geometry entirely and one that had a counter.
She found the wrist.
She turned it.
The hold broke.
She moved sideways — fast, the fast that came from the specific, sustained practice of a woman who had understood, from early in her time in the palace, that being small in a large building full of powerful people required either powerful allies or personal capability, and that personal capability was more reliable.
She turned.
She found the person who had been behind her.
He was already moving — had not stumbled when the hold broke, had used the break to reset, was coming back toward her with the focused, unhurried quality of someone who was not alarmed by the counter but was reassessing.
He was fast.
She had not expected him to be this fast.
She ducked the first swing — not entirely, catching a portion of it on the shoulder that communicated very clearly what the full version would have been — and got her elbow into the space beneath his ribs in the specific, targeted way that bodies had a strong opinion about.
He made a sound.
He did not stop.
They moved through the room.
The room was not large enough for this kind of movement to be comfortable — the furniture was in the way, the bed on the left and the desk on the right and the narrow corridor between them, and they moved through it with the specific, improvised quality of two people who were both trying to use the space and were finding that the space had strong opinions about how many people could use it simultaneously.
He got her against the wall.
Not the full force of it — she turned at the last moment so the impact was the shoulder rather than the face, which was the difference between a bruise and something more consequential — and used the wall as a surface to push off from, redirected, came back at him from an angle he hadn't prepared for.
The lamp went off the desk.
Neither of them acknowledged this.
She got his arm.
He got her coat.
They stood in the middle of the dark room with the lamp on the floor and the covers of the unmade bed somewhere in the peripheral geography and both of them breathing at the elevated rate of people who have been doing something physical for the past sixty seconds.
"All right," he said.
His voice was not strained.
She found this irritating.
"All right," she said.
They disengaged.
Mel straightened her coat.
She looked at the young man who was looking back at her in the room's residual light — the light from the window, the specific pale quality of a clear night in a city that never fully went dark.
He was breathing harder than his voice had suggested.
Small victory.
"You were not in your bed," she said.
"I don't sleep well in unfamiliar rooms," Styrmir said. He picked up the lamp from the floor and set it back on the desk. "I was at the window. You walked past me."
"You were at the window?" she said.
"Standing. Looking at the garden."
"In the dark."
"I find it clarifying."
Mel looked at him.
She said: "You attacked me."
"Someone came into my room at the second bell of the night through the service corridor," he said pleasantly. "I had no information about the intent. Attacking first was the reasonable position."
"I could have been palace staff."
"Palace staff use the door and knock."
"I could have been—"
"Miss Mel," he said, and the use of her name — simply, directly, without the formal register — had the quality of someone who had been waiting to use it and had found the moment. "I know who you are. I know what you look like. I could see you from the window before you came through the door." He looked at her. "I wanted to know how you'd handle it."
She stared at him.
"You," she said, "attacked me to test me."
"I wanted to see what thirty years of the queen's service had produced," he said.
"And?"
He tilted his head.
"Impressive," he said. "The elbow in the ribs was particularly — instructive."
"My ribs," she said, pressing her shoulder where the wall had been, "would like to note that the assessment was mutual."
He almost smiled.
They sat on the floor.
This was not a planned sitting — it was the specific, mutual subsidence of two people who had been moving at speed for sixty seconds and who found that the floor was closer than any of the available chairs and was, in that moment, entirely sufficient.
They sat on the floor of the guest room at the second bell of the night with the lamp back on the desk and the bed still unmade and the covers somewhere in the middle distance.
"To what," Styrmir said, "do I owe the visit?"
"Information," she said.
"At the second bell?"
"Information has its own timing."
"Most people use letters."
"Most people," Mel said, "do not have the specific communication requirements that our arrangement has. Letters leave evidence. Evidence is not available to me right now."
He looked at her.
"You are a child of Zenos," she said, "and yet you have a very unusual way of greeting visitors."
"What can I say," he said, pushing his hair back from his face with the specific, habitual gesture that had become familiar to Mel over the months of watching him across dinner tables and session rooms, "it's the Veldrathi style."
"Barbarian," she muttered.
He looked at her.
The winter-pale eyes had a quality in the room's low light that was different from their quality in the formal sessions — more present, less managed, the specific quality of a face that had removed its professional surface and was simply itself.
"This barbarian," he said, pleasantly, "is going to be the one sitting on the throne."
"You are confident, aren't you?" she said.
"I have reasons."
"Confidence and reasons are different things."
"Mine tend to be related." He looked at her. "Are you considering changing teams? In the middle of the arrangement?"
The question was casual.
It was casual in the specific, practiced way of a question that was not casual at all.
Mel looked at him.
She said: "What would you do if I were?"
He was quiet for a moment.
He said: "Then your atonement remains incomplete. The things you have been doing, the things you have been building toward, the specific, long road of making right what you spent thirty years helping make wrong — all of that stops, unfinished, which is its own kind of consequence."
He held her gaze.
"And," he said, "if I were to pass information about your two-timing to the queen — the queen who has managed threats to her position for thirty years with a very specific and very reliable methodology — she would find you considerably before you found any exit from the situation."
Mel was quiet.
"You chose correctly," Styrmir said, and his voice had moved from the pleasant register into the actual one — the one that was underneath all the others, that had been built in a dungeon and in a village and in three years of a foreign court, the voice of someone who had looked at the world directly for a very long time and had arrived at something. "Not because I am the safe option. I am not. But because what you are doing matters. The things you have been building matter. And they require a conclusion."
Mel looked at her hands.
She thought about Yetta.
She thought about her brother.
She thought about the drawer.
"I chose correctly," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She reached into her coat.
She produced a folded piece of paper — small, the kind that had been folded tightly rather than casually, the kind that had been prepared for transfer rather than reading.
She held it out.
"What you wanted to know," she said, "is in there. The physician Corvel's location — confirmed, not estimated. The specific testimony he is prepared to give and the documentation he has retained." She paused. "Also the specific contents of a certain drawer that were confirmed three nights ago."
He took the paper.
He looked at it without opening it.
"Read it on the way to the Wadee estate," she said. "Not here. Not in the palace."
He nodded.
"From here," she said, "we communicate through the palace observer. The one sent to check on the delegates every two weeks. He will carry what needs to be carried."
"Is he reliable?"
"He has been in my pocket for four years," she said. "He is entirely reliable."
Styrmir looked at her.
He said: "The elbow. Where did you learn that?"
She looked at him.
She said: "Thirty years in the right rooms means thirty years of watching the wrong people. Eventually you learn from them."
He considered this.
"Fair," he said.
She stood.
She straightened her coat.
She looked at the room — the lamp on the desk, the unmade bed, the window with its pale garden light.
"Get some sleep," she said. "You are moving to the Wadee estate in three days. You will need to be at your best."
"Why?"
"Because," she said, and the specific quality of her voice when she said it was the quality of someone who had been watching a situation develop for a long time and had arrived at a position, "the Wadee estate is going to be the most complicated room you have entered since you arrived in this empire."
She went to the door.
"Miss Mel," he said.
She paused.
"You should know," he said, "that I do not keep people around me who I find unreliable. The arrangement we have is not a convenience. It is a decision."
She looked at him over her shoulder.
She said: "I know."
She went out.
The door closed.
Styrmir sat on the floor for a while longer.
He looked at the folded paper.
He put it in his coat pocket.
He went to the window.
The garden below was very still in the second bell's pale light.
He stood at it for a long time.