POV: Caelen
I had one of the guard posted at the far end of the corridor, not at the door.
The distinction mattered. A guard at the door would have made it an interrogation.
Davan had come in on his own feet and offered the conversation; that entitled him to the shape of one — a room with a closed door, two men without witnesses, the old table by the south wall where we had played tiles half our lives ago.
I remembered the table as larger. It wasn't. The distance between boys and men had done that.
Davan was sitting at it when I walked in. Hands folded on the surface, back straight, already wearing the face he'd decided to wear before I arrived. He stood when the door opened.
I closed it and stayed at it, one shoulder against the frame, and looked at him across the width of the room.
"You talk. I listen. You don't ask me for anything." I held his eyes. "Start."
He started.
He talked for a long time and I gave him the silence to do it. The names came first — every Valdris contact operating inside the palace walls, most of them new to me, two of them not.
He gave them in the order they'd been recruited, east-to-west, the way a man delivers a list memorized long enough to run beneath conscious thought. His hands stayed flat on the table. His voice was even, with the specific evenness before the dates came next.
"Veth's man reached me in the third year of the regency," he said. "I took the first contact in winter. The first fee came in spring — not a large amount, and I told myself for a long time that smallness was the same as innocence."
He named the amount. He named the grain merchant who moved the routing east. He even named the timing windows, the cipher rotating on a fourteen-day cycle, the palace correspondence schedule it had been built to mirror.
"I filtered three requests in the second year," he said. "Modified the information before it moved east. Kept the damage from landing where it would have been worst."
I watched his hands while he spoke. He did not move them. A man who had learned that stillness was the most credible thing he had left to offer in a room where credibility was the only currency.
"I ran the palace channel for four years," he said. "Three handlers, two in rotation after the second year. Every name I gave you — every contact in this palace — moved east through me." A pause. "You would have found the grain merchant without this conversation. I'm giving him to you faster. That's all it is."
The methods ran for another twenty minutes.
The cipher. The timing. The eastern routing through shipments no one questioned because no one questioned grain.
He gave all of it with the precision of a man handing over a mechanism he had run himself, every working part named and surrendered.
The why came last.
He set his hands in his lap. When he looked up, the composure had changed texture — not cracked, but thinner, the last coat of lacquer on something refinished too many times.
"I was young," he said. "My branch of the family was never going to be more than a footnote to yours. They gave me a way to matter. To have weight."
A pause was flat and honest.
"By the time I understood what I'd given my life to, my life was already inside it. I looked for the exit for years. I never found it." His voice did not break. "That's not an explanation. I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm telling you so you have the record. All of it. You're owed the whole picture."
He stopped and the room went quiet.
Through the narrow window behind him, the east courtyard moved — guards rotating at the gate, a groom crossing with a pair of horses, the ordinary machinery of a morning that did not know what was happening in this room.
I held the silence for a count of five. At the man behind the table who had become someone I would not have recognized from the distance of thirty years ago and that same table and two boys who did not yet know what they were going to cost each other.
Then I crossed to the door and did not look back.
"You leave by sundown. South border." My hand found the latch. "Don't come back. If I see your face on this side of the river again, I won't try you. I'll kill you."
The words came out the way a decision feels when you've been carrying it long enough — not hard, just finished.
"This is the last time we talk. Goodbye, Davan."
He did not answer. There was nothing to answer.
I opened the door, stepped through, and closed it behind me without sound. Stood in the corridor for three counts — not hesitation, the simple mechanics of letting something settle into the past tense before you move on from the room where it happened.
Years of knowing that conversation was coming. Done in the span of one morning.
Sera was three paces down the hall.
She stood with a folded report in her hand and the expression she wore when she had already decided how to deliver something and was waiting for the opening. She did not say good morning.
"Lord Voss did not come to council this morning," she said. "He is not in his quarters. His servants have not seen him since last night. His rooms are undisturbed — no signs of rapid departure, no missing documents, his personal correspondence still on the desk."
She held my eyes, her voice stayed level.
"The two remaining council members on the petition went into a private breakfast together early. They have not come out. Whatever they're planning, they're planning it without their third name. Either he ran on his own terms, or someone made sure he ran."
She handed me the report. "And I cannot yet tell you which."