The note had come to him through the lamp.

Alistair held it in his hand, and for a moment the room above the Sealed Step felt smaller than it was. He had read worse things on paper before.

He had read the dispatch about the accelerated Upholder movement without his pulse changing once.

This was different, since this was not about a faction, it was about a person, and the person was Elara, and she was three days south of him, and there was nothing he could do for her tonight.

He folded the note over the flame and watched it catch, then let it burn down to nothing in the small iron dish.

Following that, he sat at the table and thought.

The note had not been from Silas. Silas always signed, in his own crooked way, and Silas always left a route to a follow-up.

This one carried neither.

It had come from someone in the city he had not yet put a name to, someone who knew enough about Tobian Marrow’s business to write the sentence at all, and who had chosen to pass it through the keeper’s lamp downstairs.

’That means one of two things,’ he thought. ’Either the keeper is being used without knowing it, or the keeper is part of a network I have not named yet.’

Neither answer was a good one.

The list of people who knew the name Tobian Marrow was short, and Alistair had built it that way on purpose.

Silas knew it. Elara knew it.

A handful of contacts knew the face without the name behind it.

Whoever had lit that lamp belonged to none of those, which meant the list had a leak in it he had not found, or a name on it he had trusted too easily. He clicked his tongue at the thought and let it sit, since chasing it in the dark would only wear a groove in his head.

He sat with it for the better part of an hour, turning the cold tea in front of him without drinking it. The lamplight moved on the wall.

Outside, the Sealed Step’s sign creaked on its hook, the way it had creaked every night since he took the room.

Eventually, he stood.

He took the pen from the desk and a scrap of paper he had been saving for nothing in particular, then wrote four words on it.

Three days. Velden first.

He folded it once, set it on the windowsill, and left it there for the hand that would come for it.

He had never once seen Silas take a thing from that sill, and that was the point of Silas. A man who could be seen was a man who could be followed, and Silas had made an art of being neither.

Alistair went down to the common room and ate the supper the keeper had set aside, tasting none of it, the way he had eaten the soup at the wayside lodging on the road in.

He watched the keeper move between the tables, refilling cups, trimming the wicks, lighting the very lamps someone had used against him without her knowing.

She smiled at him once. He nodded back and learned nothing from her face, which was either proof of her innocence or proof of how good she was at hiding it.

The base would be quiet now, half a continent east of here.

Elara had ridden south three nights ago, carrying no name and no banner, only a borrowed horse and a sealed letter.

Alistair had watched her go from the perimeter, and he had gone the other way the next morning, since two people moving in the same direction was a signal any watcher could read.

Due had stayed behind to hold the rooms together. Alistair could picture him already, adjusting his collar, pretending the empty chairs did not bother him.

’He will manage,’ Alistair thought. ’He always does.’

He went back up at the ninth hour and did not sleep.

He lay in the dark and ran the names he had instead.

The Velden manor sat faded and half-kept at the edge of the southern Oasis, where a house had lost its seat two generations ago and an old man still kept a dovecote no one used.

That was the first door Elara would knock on.

If Lord Velden opened it, and if he was the man the records claimed him to be, Sun Harvest would gain something it had not held in forty years, a foothold inside Caelmar’s council.

The Upholders were courting two of those council seats already.

Alistair knew that much. What he did not know was the name of the man doing the courting for them, and that was the gap he needed Elara to close.

It was a thin plan, built on an old man’s grudge and a young woman’s nerve. Regardless, it was the only plan with a door at the end of it, and a door was more than he had owned in months.

Slowly, the hours moved.

At the fourth hour he could not stand the ceiling any longer, so he rose, dressed, and went out into the cold streets to walk.

The city above the river was never fully asleep. Lamps still burned in a few high windows, and a cart rattled somewhere out of sight, and a drunk argued with a wall near the bridge.

He walked the long way around the quarter, watching for the same face twice, and saw none.

When he came back, the windowsill was empty.

His shoulders eased, only a little. The reply had been taken. Somewhere out there Silas had passed in the dark, lifted four words off the sill without disturbing the dust, and gone again, the way he always went.

Alistair was honestly relieved, and that surprised him, since relief was a thing he had stopped expecting from himself a long time ago.

He sat back down across from the lamp, meaning to wait out what was left of the night there rather than in the bed that had given him nothing.

That was when he saw it.

There was a second scrap of paper resting against the base of the lamp, folded once, that had not been there when he left. The keeper had not come up. The window was still latched from the inside, the way he had latched it himself.

His grip tightened on the edge of the table.

Hearing his own breath go shallow, he reached for it, unfolded it, and held it close to the flame to read the small, careful hand. Four words again, in a hand he did not know.

He knows about Elara.

Alistair read it twice. His jaw tightened, and the cold tea, the creaking sign, the empty chairs half a continent east of him, all of it went very far away.

’Who,’ he thought. ’Who knows, and how long have they known, and how did they put a hand in this room without my hearing it.’

He stood, crossed to the door in three steps, and found it locked exactly as he had left it.