Chapter 3: The Hall of Records

The second morning she was at court, she went to the Fallow Wing's small reception room with Lady Fenn's breakfast tray and watched three conversations happen simultaneously.

Two minor lords discussing a hunting party that was going to be organized for the following week — but the hunting party was clearly a pretext; they were discussing something about the Sethe faction's recent movement on a trading route license, using the hunting party as a cover vocabulary that only worked if you already knew what they were actually talking about. Mira did not yet have the full vocabulary but she caught enough to note that there was a trading route license currently in dispute.

A young woman, probably a guest like Lady Fenn, speaking to her own attendant in a low voice about a letter she had received — her body language suggested distress rather than excitement, which meant the letter was either unwelcome news or an unwelcome demand. Mira filed this away as potentially useful. People with unwelcome demands on them were often either sources of information or vulnerabilities to be avoided.

And, most interestingly: one of the stewards, the one who had examined Mira's hands on their arrival, standing near the corridor entrance and speaking with someone Mira couldn't quite see around Lady Fenn's shoulder. The steward was smiling with his mouth and not his eyes, which meant the person he was speaking to had authority over him and he was performing comfort rather than experiencing it.

Lady Fenn set down her fork. "Liris."

Mira turned her attention back. "My lady."

"I've been told the morning presentation at the Hall of Records opens to all guests. I should like to attend. Lord Harren mentioned that Councillor Sethe occasionally presides."

"I'll have your gray visiting dress pressed," Mira said.

Lady Fenn looked pleased and went back to her breakfast, and Mira continued to watch the steward in the corridor entrance. The person he was speaking to had moved — she caught only a profile now, a dark jacket, a particular way of standing, before the figure turned and was gone.

The same young man from the Long Amber Hall.

She had not yet determined who he was. She would.

---

At the Hall of Records, she stood with the other attendants along the east wall and studied ashcraft for the first time in close concentrated proximity.

The Hall of Records was where the Imperial Registry maintained its public displays — rank declarations, family histories, the famous Lineage Map that traced ashcraft inheritance across four centuries of imperial nobility in a web of red and gold thread that covered the entire north wall. Petitioners came here to file documentation. Newly assessed children were brought here to be registered. And every morning, a reading of recent rank adjustments was read aloud, which served no administrative purpose that Mira could determine but which functioned as a kind of court news service, broadcasting whose family had produced an unexpected high-rank child, whose assessment had been revised, whose line was strengthening or weakening.

Councillor Sethe was not present, as it turned out. A junior Registrar presided instead, an older man with the careful vowels of someone who had studied court speech after growing up somewhere else. But the crowd in the hall was substantial, and in that crowd were three or four people whose ashcraft was high enough rank to be visible.

Visible was not quite the right word. She did not see anything with her eyes. But the sensation she had learned to identify — that pressure behind the skull, that faint hum at the base of her spine — came in waves when she was near them, and she had to work consciously to keep her breathing even and her containment stable.

The strongest of them was a woman in the green and silver of a Registrar's formal staff, standing near the Lineage Map. She was writing something in a ledger and not paying attention to anyone around her, but the hum she produced was significant. Rank Prima, Mira thought. And old — the older the training, the more settled it was, the less it broadcast noise. This woman had been using her power for decades.

Mira positioned herself at the far end of the east wall and focused on mapping the room.

The Lineage Map was actually more interesting to her than she had expected. She had known of it but had never seen it. Forty-two family lines in red — currently active — and another sixty in pale gold, lines that had died out or been absorbed. She found House Solen in the gold within the first few minutes, because she knew where to look: eastern branch, mid-tier placement, a line that had shown consistent Tertia rank across three generations before her brother's Prima designation, which was recorded here in a small red starburst that had never been updated to account for the fact that there was no one left to carry the line forward.

There was her family, in thread on a wall, catalogued and categorized and declared extinct.

She looked at it for exactly as long as was useful and then looked away.

She spent the rest of the morning learning which families were currently gaining rank in their assessment results, which were losing it, which were making strategic marriages to reinforce their ashcraft inheritance, and which were notable for their absence from a public record where most nobles displayed their assessments prominently and with pride.

Suppressed ashcraft was not common. She was not the only person who had reason to hide what she was. And whoever else in this court was hiding might, eventually, be either useful or dangerous.

She had not yet determined which applied to the young man who kept appearing at the edges of her vision — never close, always somewhere that might be coincidence, watching with that mild, assessing calm.

By the time she returned to the Fallow Wing with Lady Fenn, she had learned his name.

Cassian Vael. Second son of Councillor Vael, whose faction controlled the empire's intelligence operations, whose reach extended into every corner of this court, whose particular skill was knowing what people were hiding.

The son of the man who had signed the order that ended her family watched her from across rooms and said nothing.

She did not know yet whether that should frighten her.

It did not, she discovered. It made her want to understand.

That, she thought, was the more dangerous thing.