The room above the Sealed Step was small, with one window that faced the back wall, which was the reason Alistair had paid for it.

He had crossed the gate into Verissan that afternoon under a name that was not his own.

Tobian Marrow was the third son of the Halversen line, a merchant family from the north of Caelmar with enough money to be ignored and not enough to be watched. Alistair had spent two weeks becoming him. The papers were real, the debts were real, and the cousin who had paid for the room downstairs did not exist.

It had held, so far.

He noticed the note before he noticed anything else in the room.

It sat folded on the inner sill of the window, a pale square against grey stone. No one should have been able to reach that window, since the wall outside dropped four floors into a lane too narrow for a ladder.

’Silas,’ Alistair thought. ’Naturally.’

He picked it up and unfolded it. Three sentences, in a cramped hand he had learned to read over the past year.

The cover is being checked. They have the name and the line. Stay in tonight.

Alistair read it twice, and then his jaw tightened.

The name and the line. That meant someone in Verissan had already spoken the words Marrow and Halversen out loud, in the wrong room, to the wrong person.

A draft moved across the back of his neck, though he had not heard the window open.

"You read fast," said a voice behind him.

Alistair did not turn right away. Silas had a way of arriving that made the air feel like it had always contained him, and turning quickly only ever made a man look afraid.

"You’ve never delivered one of these in person before," Alistair replied. "So whatever you found is worse than three sentences can carry."

Silas stepped further into the lamplight. He looked the way he always looked, forgettable and grey, a man you’d struggle to describe an hour after meeting him. Tonight, though, there was something tight around his eyes.

"I spent three days finding their courier drops," said Silas. "Three of them in the lower district. The last one is a hollow carved into an old stone post. The Upholders don’t build their drops, they inherit them, so they’ve been working that corner for decades."

"And it’s active," said Alistair.

"One message every twenty minutes through the afternoon," Silas confirmed. "Two separate courier circuits, tight schedules, no wasted motion. Whatever they’re passing, they need it fast."

Alistair set the note down on the sill. "That isn’t what frightened you. Drops don’t frighten you."

Silas was quiet for a moment, and then he nodded slowly.

"Two men, in an alley off the fourth street. Their voices were low enough that I shouldn’t have caught any of it. One of them said your name. Marrow, third son, Halversen line. Then the other one said the High Justicar wants the audit moved up."

Alistair’s eyes narrowed at that.

"Moved up to when?"

"Two days," Silas answered. "He wants Crane to test the cover before the seeding finishes. His words were, we won’t get another moment like this one."

Hearing this, Alistair turned the name over slowly in his mind. Renvald Crane was patient, and exact, and he did not put his hands on a cover unless he already expected it to come apart.

"The seeding isn’t done," said Alistair. "Half the Halversen records won’t hold under a hard look for another week. Crane knows that better than anyone. That is exactly why they moved it forward."

"That’s why I came in person," said Silas. "A note on a sill can wait until morning, and this couldn’t."

Alistair walked to the window and looked down at the dark lane, thinking.

The audit had been weeks away. Someone had reached into a sealed Upholder schedule and dragged it forward by a fortnight, and only one man on the continent gave Renvald Crane his orders.

’Aldous moved it,’ Alistair thought. ’He didn’t move it to catch a merchant named Marrow. He moved it because he already knows whose face is under the name.’

Alistair was honestly alarmed, and the thought settled in his chest like cold water poured slowly. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

For a moment he said nothing at all. Then he glanced back at Silas, and he let himself notice the thing he had been avoiding since the man arrived.

Silas’s hands were perfectly still. That, in itself, was the problem, since a man whose hands were that still was holding them that way on purpose.

"You’re afraid," said Alistair.

Silas did not deny it, which was answer enough.

"I haven’t been afraid in three years," Silas said quietly. "I built the last three years on not being it. I’d honestly forgotten the shape of it."

Alistair was unsettled, more than he wanted to show. Silas frightened was a worse sign than any courier circuit.

He almost told the man it would be fine, and then he decided against the lie. Instead, he lifted the note from the sill and held it over the candle until the flame took the corner.

"Then we don’t wait for Crane," said Alistair.

Silas raised his brows. "You have two days. That is not a thing you fix in two days."

"No," Alistair replied, watching the paper curl and blacken. "I have two days if I let Crane pick the room, the hour, and the questions. I have no intention of letting him pick any of them."

The fear thinned out of Silas’s face, and something closer to interest took its place.

"You mean to reach Crane first," he said.

"I mean to be the one holding the questions when we sit down," said Alistair. "A man being audited has already lost the conversation before he opens his mouth. He answers, he explains, he sweats. I won’t be that man in his chair."

He pinched out the burning note between two fingers and let the ash fall to the floorboards.

"Find me the courier circuits again at first light," Alistair continued. "One of the two carries the Justicar’s own dispatches and the other is decoration. The real one leads back to wherever Crane has been reading his mail."

Silas studied him for a long moment, then exhaled, the tightness leaving his shoulders by a fraction.

"You sound like you’ve already decided how this ends."

"I’ve decided how it begins," said Alistair. "That is usually enough."

Silas moved toward the window, and between one breath and the next the lamplight seemed to forget he had ever been in the room.

Alistair stood alone with the smell of burnt paper and looked at the streak of ash on the floor.

The audit was in two days. Aldous already knew his face, and Renvald Crane was somewhere in Verissan tonight, sleeping under a roof Alistair had not found yet.

That left one thing worth learning before the sun came up, and Alistair fully intended to learn it. He needed the name of the house where Crane laid his head, because in two days only one of them was walking out of that audit still wearing his own name.