Something is wrong.
He has been noticing it for weeks.
A face in the wrong corridor.
A maid tidying a room that does not need tidying.
A crest in the library that makes his pendant feel heavy.
Pay attention.
✦ ✦ ✦
Aldric noticed things.
He always had.
It was not a skill he had developed intentionally — more something that had happened gradually, the way most useful things happened, through years of being in situations where noticing the details before other people noticed them was the difference between managing and not managing.
In the village, you noticed which neighbours were struggling before they asked for help.
You noticed which jobs were going to create problems before the problems arrived.
You noticed the small wrongnesses in ordinary situations because the small wrongnesses, left unaddressed, had a habit of becoming large ones.
He had brought this into the palace with him.
He had not thought much about it — it was simply how he operated, the background process of a man who paid attention.
He noticed things in the council meetings he was beginning to sit in on.
He noticed things in the corridors.
He noticed things about the way the palace worked, its rhythms and its patterns, the ordinary business of several hundred people occupying the same space.
He also noticed when something was not part of the ordinary business.
It started small.
✦ ✦ ✦
The first thing was the attendant.
Not the one who had made the comment about his presence being unusual — that situation had resolved itself quietly and efficiently in a way he suspected involved Isadora, though she had said nothing about it and he had not asked.
A different attendant.
Young, perhaps twenty, was assigned to the east wing corridor, where his office was.
The attendant’s job was in the corridor.
Maintaining it, directing guests, and the ordinary work of keeping that part of the palace running.
He was at his post every morning when Aldric arrived at his office and every evening when Aldric left.
This was not unusual.
What was unusual was that he was also there at midday, which was not his assigned shift.
And in the late afternoon.
And once, when Aldric had gone back to retrieve something he had forgotten, at an hour when the east wing should have been empty of staff entirely.
Aldric noticed this on the third occasion and filed it.
On the fourth occasion he stopped and looked at the attendant directly and said, “What is your name.”
The young man looked at him — a fraction too long before answering.
“Tomas, my lord.”
“How long have you been assigned to this corridor, Tomas.”
“Three weeks, my lord.”
Three weeks.
Since before the wedding.
Since before Aldric had arrived in any formal capacity.
“Thank you,” Aldric said, and went to his office, sat at his desk, and thought about that.
✦ ✦ ✦
The second thing was the maid.
She was assigned to their rooms — one of four, rotating shifts, the ordinary business of keeping a royal suite maintained.
He had learned all their names and their schedules in the first week because it seemed sensible to know who was moving through the space where he slept.
Three of them he had no concern about.
The fourth — older, quiet, grey-uniformed — had a habit of being present in rooms she was not scheduled to be in.
He had found her in the sitting room adjacent to the bedroom twice when her shift had ended.
Both times she had been doing something that looked like tidying but was not tidying — the arrangement of the room was the same after she left as it had been before she arrived.
She had been standing.
Looking.
He mentioned this to no one.
✦ ✦ ✦
The third thing was the crest.
He had been in the palace library — Isadora had shown him which sections were relevant to his new responsibilities, and he had been working his way through them with the systematic thoroughness of a man who was going to do the job properly or not at all.
He was in the historical records section, third shelf from the left on the east wall, reaching for a volume on administrative precedent, when he saw it.
Not the whole thing.
A fragment of it, pressed into the leather cover of an older volume on the shelf beside the one he was reaching for.
A crest, or part of one — the kind that was stamped into the covers of volumes that belonged to specific noble houses, identifying their library contributions.
He stood with his hand on the spine of his intended volume and looked at the fragment of the crest on the volume beside it.
The arrangement of the lines.
The fragment of a symbol at the centre.
The particular shape of the border.
He had seen those lines before.
He reached up and pulled the older volume from the shelf.
Looked at the cover.
The crest was partial — the spine had worn away, taking part of it with it — but enough remained.
He turned the book over in his hands.
His other hand moved to his chest.
To the pendant beneath his shirt.
He stood in the library for a long time.
Then he put the book back exactly where he had found it and went back to his office and sat at his desk and looked at the wall and thought about the fact that Isadora had looked at the pendant on the first day in the formal receiving room and said she was not certain but she had seen something like it and she would look.
She had looked.
He knew she had looked — she had gone to the library that afternoon, he had seen her come back, he had seen her face when she came back.
He had not asked her what she had found because he had not been ready to ask and she had not offered because she was not the kind of person who offered things before the other person was ready to receive them.
He thought he might be ready now.
✦ ✦ ✦
He did not ask her that evening.
He meant to.
He came back to their rooms and she was at her writing desk with her correspondence and she looked up when he came in and said hello in the way she said hello when she had been in her own head for several hours and was glad to have an interruption, and he looked at her and thought — not yet.
Not tonight.
He wanted to think about it more first.
“You are doing the thing,” she said.
He looked at her.
“What thing.”
“The thinking thing. Where you go somewhere internally and your face does that.” She gestured vaguely at his face.
“My face does not do anything.”
“Your face does several things. You are simply not aware of them.” She set down her pen.
“What is it.”
He sat in his chair by the window.
Looked at the garden.
“Have you ever felt like you were being watched,” he said.
“Not in the way people watch a crown prince. Differently.”
She was quiet for a moment.
He turned to look at her.
Her expression was composed.
Completely, carefully composed in the way it was when she was managing what it showed, which was itself information.
“Why do you ask,” she said.
“Because I have felt it,” he said.
“For the past two weeks. In specific places, at specific times. The same faces in places they should not be.” He watched her.
“You know something.”
“Aldric—”
“You are doing the composure thing,” he said.
“You do it when there is something you have decided not to say yet. I have been watching you do it for a month.” He said it without accusation — just plainly, as a fact.
“What do you know.”
“Not tonight,” she said.
“I need — I am not ready to say it tonight because I do not have all of it yet and I need all of it before I say any of it. Can you give me that.”
He looked at her.
At the composure and underneath the composure the thing she was not showing — not dishonesty, he knew what dishonesty looked like and this was not it.
This was someone carrying something heavy and carrying it carefully because they did not want to set it down in the wrong place.
“How long,” he said.
“A few more days,” she said.
“I promise.”
He held her gaze for a moment longer.
“All right,” he said.
She nodded.
Picked up her pen.
Put it back down.
“The watching feeling — where specifically.”
He told her.
The east corridor, the times Tomas had been there.
The maid, the off-shift appearances, the tidying that was not tidying.
She listened without interrupting, her face doing the careful thing, noting it all.
“All right,” she said, when he finished.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“You are not surprised,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“I am not.”
He looked at her.
“Isadora.”
“A few more days,” she said.
“Please.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
The composure.
The something underneath the composure that was not keeping things from him but was managing how and when she gave them, the way she managed everything — carefully, with attention to what the moment could hold.
He trusted that.
He had decided to trust that.
“Fine,” he said.
He looked back at the window.
The garden was dark below, the last of the evening light gone, the stars beginning to appear.
“There was a crest,” he said.
“In the library. On an old volume.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“It looked like the pendant.”
“I know,” she said again.
The room was very quiet.
“A few more days,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“I promise.”
He nodded.
Looked at the stars.
Felt the pendant sitting against his chest, warm and familiar and suddenly heavier than it had ever felt before, as though it had been waiting for him to start asking the right questions and had been patient about it but was running out of patience now.
He put his hand flat against his chest over it.
Outside the stars came out one by one, indifferent and ancient and completely unbothered by the questions of people who had taken twenty-seven years to start asking them.
He sat with it.
He was getting better at sitting with things.