Alistair read the dispatch twice.

He read it through once and set it down. Then he poured tea he had no intention of drinking, picked the parchment back up, and went over it more slowly this time, because he did not trust what the first read had told him.

The continental section was short. The Sovereign Record had been brief that morning, and in Alistair’s experience, that means one of two things. Either nothing had happened, or something had happened that the Record did not yet know how to phrase.

The first item covered the southern arc. The second was a Sunborne border movement with no cause anyone could name, which was the line Alistair had been watching for two weeks already, and which still refused to make any sense no matter how many ways he turned it over.

The third item was the one that mattered.

Duke Caldren of Therasia had formally invited an Upholder delegation into the eastern province. It was not a treaty, and it was not an alliance either. The word Caldren had chosen was talks, plainly, and nothing more.

The Record had set the word in italics, the way it did when the word itself was the whole point.

Due was reading over his shoulder by then.

"Talks," Due said, drawing it out like the word tasted strange in his mouth. "He is not committing to a single thing, and yet he wants the Upholders to read it like he already has."

"That is the word they use in their own documents," said Alistair. "Caldren knows that, and he chose it on purpose."

"So he is positioning."

"He is positioning very carefully. He is turning the Upholders into a blade he can hold over Elysium, and the clever part of it is that he owes them nothing for the privilege. When the blade stops being useful, he sets it down, and no one will be able to say he ever picked it up."

Due went still, his hands stopping on the edge of the table.

Alistair set the dispatch down again and walked to the window. The morning was grey the way it always was, though the grey today carried a weight to it that he could not have put into words for anyone.

’He is handing them the Oasis of Grain to investigate,’ Alistair thought, ’and he is letting them believe the idea was their own.’

The Upholders were not fools. They would understand they were being used, and they would allow it anyway, because the alternative was admitting a duke had reached the table first, when they had been planning to summon him within the year.

He turned back into the room.

Elara stood at the table now, reading over Due’s other shoulder.

"He is doing what we expected," she said.

"He is doing it earlier than we expected."

"Earlier than your projection?"

"By about three weeks. Most men move once the ground is ready, yet this one is moving like he has already seen ground the rest of us have not."

Alistair was honestly unsettled.

"And what would he have seen that we did not," she asked.

He did not answer her, and Elara had grown up around enough unfinished sentences to know better than to chase this one.

Silas surfaced at the doorway.

Over the past two months he had developed a habit of arriving exactly when the conversation became the one he needed to be in, without ever explaining how he had known. Alistair had stopped finding it surprising, but he had not stopped finding it useful.

"You are leaving sooner," said Silas.

It was not a question.

"Tomorrow," Alistair replied.

Due’s hands resumed their motion, slower now. He had been ready for soon, and yet not for tomorrow in particular.

"The papers are not finished," Due said.

"How much is left."

"The forgery in the Halversen archive is seeded, and the residency credentials are clean. The seal is the seal, and the journal entries are written. What is left are two affidavits from Sable’s network that I have not placed yet."

"Then place them today, and at dawn tomorrow, I leave."

Elara set down her cup.

"Alistair."

He looked at her.

"You are certain about this."

"I am certain."

"Because if Caldren reaches an arrangement with Aldous before you reach Aldous yourself," she said carefully, "then the Upholders gain everything Therasia holds on Sun Harvest. Including everything Caldren holds on me."

"I know that."

"Including the things he holds on me that I have not told the three of you."

The room went quiet.

She had never said it out loud before, the idea that there were Therasia files on her she had kept even from her own faction, and the silence that followed registered the way a held breath does.

She did not look away from the table.

"I will tell you everything before you leave," she said. "Tonight, once Due has set the last of the papers." 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Alistair nodded slowly. He understood that he had just been handed a kind of trust that came with a bill attached, and he understood that he would pay it, because refusing the trust was the one thing he could not afford to do.

"Tonight," he said.

Due watched the two of them with the careful neutrality of a man who had decided long ago not to make Elara’s confessions any harder on her than they already were.

Then he spoke quietly, in a voice that mimicked Alistair’s exactly.

"Then I leave tomorrow."

Alistair was almost amused, which was clearly the entire point of it.

He turned to Silas instead.

"You leave today."

Silas raised his brows slightly. "Today, then. Ahead of you, and out of sight before you ever reach the gate."

"That is the idea. You arrive in Verissan before me, so that you are already settled in the lower district when I cross over. We do not meet, and we do not signal. The first contact you make is the windowsill at the inn, and anything I need that cannot wait for a meeting we are never going to have, you leave on that sill in the hour before dawn."

Silas considered it for a moment. Then he said something he rarely said.

"Be careful, Alistair. I am not going to be there to pull you out of anything this time."

"You are not going to need to be."

"I hope you are right about that, because hoping is all I will be able to do from where I am standing."

Silas did not wait for a reply. He pulled his coat from the back of the chair and walked out without another word, and Alistair watched him go, aware that six months ago the man would not have known how to say that sentence at all.

Outside, on the sill, the parchment from the morning dispatch finished dissolving into the air.

Behind him, Elara finally said the thing she had been holding onto all week.

"Alistair. My father was not the only Vance who kept a file on me."

He turned around.

She was still looking at the table, not at him.

"Emrys did too."