Chapter 5: The Eavesdrop

The opportunity came at the third remove, when the wine servers moved through the hall and the noise level rose enough to cover movement. Lady Fenn needed water; the water was brought from the sideboard; the sideboard happened to be near the first table, and the server who usually covered that route was occupied at the far end of the hall with a spilled carafe.

Mira picked up the pitcher and moved.

She came to the first table from the west side, moving along the natural flow of servants, and refreshed the water at the near end before working her way down. She kept her eyes on the cups and not on the faces, which was how it should be done, and she measured distance by sound — Dorn's voice was low and deliberate, he pronounced his consonants with military precision, she could track him without looking at him.

She was four seats away when she heard him say, clearly: "—the Solen assessment files."

She did not stop moving. She did not change her pace. She filled the cup in front of her and moved to the next one and breathed through the sound of her own blood in her ears.

"—long since archived," said the military aide she'd identified earlier. A woman's voice, dry and even. "The Registry cleared them after the dissolution. Standard procedure."

"Standard procedure doesn't mean accessible." Dorn's voice again. "I want to know who accessed them in the past eighteen months. Specifically."

"Is there a specific concern?"

A pause. The sound of a wine cup being set down.

"Make the request quietly," Dorn said. "Don't route it through Sethe's clerks."

Mira had reached the end of the first table. She turned and walked back to the sideboard at the same unhurried pace she had maintained throughout, replaced the pitcher, and stood in the shadow of the doorway arch for exactly long enough to master her breathing.

The Solen assessment files. Her family's files. He was asking about who had accessed them.

This was either paranoia — a man checking old records out of some unresolved anxiety about the action he had taken five years ago — or it was surveillance. Someone had already been in those files, and Dorn knew it, or suspected it.

She needed to know which.

She needed to know who had been in those files, and why, and whether whoever it was presented a danger to her specifically or a danger to Dorn that she might be able to use.

She also needed to not stand in doorways having revelations, because that was the sort of thing servants noticed about other servants.

She returned to her position along the south wall.

---

Dorn did not look at her once during the rest of the evening.

She had expected this. She was a handmaid in gray against a wall, and he had no reason to look at her, and she had given him no reason either. But she watched him with the careful, practiced attention she had learned to make invisible — eyes not quite focused on her target, body oriented slightly away, expression somewhere between mild interest and mild boredom. She had practiced this in mirrors for months.

She watched him work the table with the mechanical precision of a man who had performed social function for so long that he no longer thought about it. He spoke to the people who needed speaking to and did not speak to the people who did not, and none of it was warm but it was efficient, and he drank two cups of wine and did not seem affected by them, and once he looked across the hall toward the fourth Councillor's place with an expression that Mira could only characterize as calculation.

At the end of the evening, when the Councillors rose to depart, he paused at the door and said something to his aide. The aide nodded. The aide's gaze swept the room — not targeted, not pointed anywhere in particular, just the habitual sweep of someone who dealt in watchfulness professionally.

Mira was looking at Lady Fenn when this happened.

She did not look back.

---

In the corridor afterward, walking Lady Fenn back to the Fallow Wing, she constructed a revised timeline.

The files on her family were being monitored, or at least the access logs were. This meant that whatever investigation — if it could be called that — Dorn had conducted after the burning, he had not entirely closed. Or he had closed it and something had recently made him revisit.

She needed to know what had made him revisit.

She needed to know if the something was her.

If he already suspected there was a survivor, her operational window was shorter than she'd planned. If this was general anxiety, unrelated to anything she had done, she still had time.

She had come to court expecting at least two months of groundwork before she moved on any of her primary objectives. She had built her plan on the assumption of time. Time was the one resource she had no way to generate if it ran short.

She walked Lady Fenn to her rooms, helped her undress, brought her the warm cloth for her face, turned down the coverlet, said good night in the tone of someone whose thoughts had already emptied for the evening.

In her own small room she sat on the edge of the cot and thought about what she had heard.

Then she thought about the fact that Dorn had heard the name Solen tonight, spoken it in a room where she was present, and had felt nothing from her — no recognition, no response, nothing to confirm or deny whatever suspicion he carried.

He had looked right through her.

She was doing this correctly.

It did not feel like a comfort, exactly. It felt like the edge of something. She was standing at the beginning of whatever this was going to become, and the ground beneath her was volcanic stone, as it always was in Cinderwall, and below the stone there was fire, and the fire had been burning for longer than anyone could remember.

She lay down on the cot and stared at the ceiling and let herself think about her brother for exactly thirty seconds.

Then she put that away too.

Tomorrow she would find the file access logs.