Marks and Unpickings

Corin had built a small fortification of books on the library table, atlases at the base and sermons on top, and he was sitting behind it with the patience of a man waiting out a siege.

"Something," he said, when Wren dropped into the chair opposite. "You promised me something."

"I promised nothing. You asked."

"And you came back. That's a kind of promise." He pushed a book of northern hymns aside to see her properly. "Well?"

Wren pulled off her gloves finger by finger and laid them on the table. She wanted her hands free for this, which was foolish. Nobody here was going to make her forge anything.

"Someone has been paying for reports on your rooms," she said. "Who visits. What you burn. What you write. When you stay out."

"Since the wedding."

"Since the week you arrived."

He did not move, and she had learned already that this was worse than movement. A clerk went past the end of the stacks pushing a trolley with one squealing wheel. When the squeal had faded, Corin reached for the nearest book, a thin grey treatise on river tolls, and turned it face-down on the table. Slowly. Squaring its corners with the edge of the wood.

"Six years," he said.

"Six years."

"And your source has been doing the reporting."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. You came back from the laundry with lye on your hem and your face shut like a strongbox." He turned a second book over, a sermon this time. "Give me the name."

"No."

"Wren."

"Corin." She matched his tone exactly. "You knew I had a source before you knew my birthday. You let me keep her then."

"Her," he said.

Wren swore inwardly. Her left hand had drifted to the edge of the table. She put it in her lap.

"I'm not working half-blind," Corin said. "Not with my house as the stake. Someone in this palace has watched me sleep for six years, and you're protecting the eyes."

"I'm protecting a woman who took a purse from a stranger because purses are hard to come by in the lower city. The eyes aren't the point. The hand that pays is the point." She leaned in. "And I've got something better than her name."

"I doubt it."

"A gentleman's shirt in the laundry copper. Fine lawn. A cuff stained with Kesset wax that lye didn't lift."

The third book stopped halfway to being turned. Corin set it down the right way up.

"Someone in the palace is working seals," he said.

"Someone in the palace is working seals badly enough to drip on his sleeve. Which means fast, or at night, or both." She tapped the table. "That's my price for keeping her name. A real lead, now, tonight. Take it or go and find a cheaper wife."

He looked at her for a long moment, one blue eye and one grey, and she could see him adding up what it cost him to say yes. Pride, mostly. A man who'd spent six years being watched did not enjoy agreeing not to look.

"Loyal," he said at last. "To the wrong people, possibly. But loyal." He stood and pulled his coat from the chair. "Show me the shirt."

* * *

They went down after the bell for lamps, when the corridors filled with pages carrying tapers and nobody looked at anyone not carrying one. The service stair was slick with condensation. Wren kept a hand on the wall and felt the warmth of the coppers rising through the stone, damp as breath.

The laundry had emptied for the night. One lamp burned by the stair. The vats steamed under their wooden lids, and the paddles leaned in a row like tired soldiers.

Tamsin's copper had been drained. Wren lifted the lid anyway and looked at the bare wet metal, scoured bright.

"Gone," Corin said.

"Moved." She crossed to a wire cage by the far wall, heaped with grey stuff: torn sheets, shirts with scorch marks, a stocking worn to lace at the heel. A tin plate hung from the cage. Someone had chalked on it in a laundress's square hand: Rags. Burn at first light.

She dug through the heap with both arms. Corin held the lamp and did not offer advice, which she noticed and was grateful for. Linen, linen, wool, linen. Then fine lawn, and a cuff, and the red.

The shirt had been cut. A neat square was missing from the inside of the collar, where a household's mark-tag would be stitched.

"They took the tag," Wren said.

"Who would?"

"Everyone. It's the rule." She sat back on her heels. "Anything condemned to the burning gets its tag snipped and sent up to the steward, so he can strike it off the household's linen count. Otherwise the laundry gets accused of stealing shirts. Tamsin used to complain about it."

"So the tag goes to the steward's office." Corin lowered the lamp. "With a ledger."

"Every household's mark, every condemned piece, every day." She stood and wiped her palms on her cloak. "If we want a name, we want it before he comes in tomorrow and files the tray."

"And the shirt?"

Wren looked at the chalked plate. First light. The shirt would be ash by breakfast, along with the stain and anything else it could tell them.

"The shirt's a dead man," she said. "The tag might still talk."

* * *

The steward's linen office lay at the end of a corridor behind the second kitchen, where the smell of tomorrow's bread was already starting. The door was oak with an iron lock older than the queen.

Wren ran her thumb along the inside seam of her left glove, found the stiff little sliver Tamsin had sewn there on her wedding morning, and worked it free.

"You've had that all along," Corin said.

"I've had it since before you knew my birthday."

"I still don't know your birthday."

"Then you're losing." The lock gave on the fourth touch. She went in first.

It was a narrow room, colder than the kitchens. Ledgers bound in green cloth filled one wall. A brazier sat empty and grey in the corner. On the steward's desk was a wooden tray of mark-tags, each a scrap of linen the size of a thumbnail with a household's sign worked on it in coloured thread, each tied with a paper slip.

Corin lit a candle from the lamp and set it on the desk. Wren went through the tray. A blue anchor for the Admiral's house. A green trefoil. A plain black bar for the wardens' barracks.

The tag she wanted was near the bottom. Its slip read, in the same square hand: Shirt, gent's. Copper three. Ruined, wax.

The mark was a key in gold thread, crossed with a single stroke of crimson.

Corin pulled a ledger from the wall without asking which, as if he had read the shelf marks on his way in, and flipped to the front, where the households' signs were painted in a careful row. He laid his finger beside one. A gold key, a crimson stroke.

Chancellor of the Realm, household of.

He shut the ledger very quietly.

"There," he said, and was already moving.

Wren reached the door before him. She put her back to it and her palms flat on the wood behind her, and he stopped a hand's width away because the alternative was walking through her.

"Move," he said.

"Where are you going?"

"To ask Lord Voss why he's dripping Kesset wax on his shirts."

"It's past the lamp bell. You're a hostage. You'll knock on the chancellor's door at night with a stolen laundry tag and a wife who picks locks, and by morning you'll be in a cell and I'll be standing in front of the queen explaining why I didn't stop you."

"Then come and explain it to Voss instead."

"Corin." She did not move. "You've wanted it to be him since the feast. Since before the feast. You want it so badly you didn't even look at the thing."

"I looked at it."

"You looked at the colour. Give me the candle."

For a moment she thought he wouldn't. His jaw was set, and there was something under it she had only glimpsed once, over the briar sprig at the wedding table, the thing that made him careless. Then he took one step back and held out the candle.

Wren peeled off her gloves and pushed them into her pocket. She held the tag close to the flame and turned it so the light came across the threads, not onto them. Gold silk, a good grade. The crimson stroke, neat. She tilted it further.

There. Along the shaft of the key, tiny pricks in the linen that the gold didn't fill. Old holes, where thread had been and was no longer.

"It's been unpicked," she said. "Someone cut out the first mark and stitched this one over it."

"You can't know that from a scrap of cloth."

"Watch." She laid it on the desk and brought the candle down almost to the surface, so the light raked sideways. The empty holes threw small shadows. They ran in pairs, slanting, each pair crossed at the back where a dent remained in the weave. "See how they sit? Two holes and a loop behind, every stitch crossed twice. Southern sewing doesn't do that. It's a Fell River stitch. Northern women use it so the thread holds in the cold."

Corin was very still. "My mother sewed like that."

"Then somebody in this palace sews like your mother, and they made this shirt read as Voss's."

"Or Voss's household has a northern seamstress and you're inventing a plot out of pinholes."

It was a fair point. She hated that it was a fair point. She hated more that she knew how to answer it, and what the answer would cost.

Wren set the candle down. Her hands, bare in the yellow light, looked like what they were: stained at the tips, the ink worked into the creases past any scrubbing.

"I know what an unpicked mark looks like," she said, "because I've done it. Not with thread. With wax."

He said nothing. He was letting her stop, if she wanted to. That was almost worse.

"The wardens caught me with eleven seals," she said. "Three of them were good enough to fool a keeper. There was a fourth. Better than all of them. I took a real seal, an old one, and shaved the face down and recut it so it said something else. If you hold it slant to a lamp you can still see the first impression underneath, like those holes. Nobody ever held it slant. It's sitting in a reliquary right now, in this city, and the family it belongs to has no idea."

The bread smell was thicker now, warm and yeasty under the cold of the room.

"That's a second hanging," Corin said quietly.

"I know what it is."

"You didn't have to give it to me."

"You wouldn't have believed the holes otherwise." She made herself meet his eyes. "Now you've got the disc in your coat and this. You could hang me twice over before Midwinter. So you'll understand that I'm not making it up to save the chancellor's neck."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he reached past her and set the candle upright, steadier, as though something had to be kept from falling.

"It was cold," he said.

She waited.

"At Greyfold. After. They'd left him on the scree where he fell, and it was snowing, and the ring had frozen to his finger. I had to hold his hand in both of mine until it would come off." His voice stayed level. Only the words were not. "I was twenty-one. I kept thinking someone would stop me. Nobody did."

"Corin."

"I've wanted it to be Voss for six years," he said. "Because he smiles at me across the table. Because he wears four rings and offers people gratitude. Because if it's Voss, it's someone I can hate without having to look at anyone else." He let out a short breath that wasn't a laugh. "That's not evidence. That's comfort."

Neither of them had anything clever to say. Wren found she did not want anything clever. She stood with her back against the door and her hands bare and felt as though she had taken off a great deal more than gloves.

He looked down at the tag on the desk. "May I keep it?"

She picked it up and held it out on her open palm. He didn't take it by the edge. His fingers came down onto her skin, ink and all, and lifted the scrap away, and the touch lasted a moment longer than lifting needed.

"Thank you," he said.

Then they both heard it. Footsteps in the corridor, unhurried, and a line of lamplight sliding under the door.

Wren snatched the ledger page beneath the tray, the day's condemned linen list, and tore it from its binding without thinking. Corin pinched out the candle. The room went black except for that gold line under the door, swelling.

"Press," she breathed.

There was a linen press against the inner wall, tall as a wardrobe and smelling of cedar. Corin got the door open. They went in together and he pulled it shut on them, and there was no room at all. Shelves of folded sheets at her back. His coat against her front. The torn page crushed between them and his hand closed over hers to keep it from rustling.

His breath was warm at her temple. She could feel his heart through the wool, going fast, which was satisfying, because hers was too.

Outside, the office door creaked. Light came through the crack of the press, a thin vertical blade across his jaw.

"Wren," he murmured, so low it was hardly sound, and it was her name, the public one, the one anyone could say, except he was saying it as if it were something he had been handed and meant to keep. "Wren, I..."

His breath stopped against her hair.

The press door opened.

Lamplight flooded in. Tamsin stood there with a lamp in one hand and the other already reaching for the shelf where the ledgers had been, her silver thimble glinting. Her eyes went to the page crumpled in their joined hands, and her face drained white.