Alistair found his way into the council records through a lonely man, which was how most doors opened if you had the patience to wait at them.

His name was Hessel. He was a clerk of the second register, middle-aged, ink-stained to the second knuckle, and he had spent thirty years being the least interesting man in every room he sat in.

That was the kind of man who talked, given the right ear. Alistair had learned long ago that the lonely ones always did.

So Tobian Marrow sat down across from him and stayed.

It took three evenings of cheap wine in the back room the clerks favored.

Alistair gave Hessel the one thing nobody had given the man in years, which was attention, the real kind, the leaning-in kind that makes a person feel like the center of something for once.

Hessel bloomed under it like a plant carried to a window.

He talked about the register, the procedure of it, the small endless wars between the first and second clerks over precedence and ink, and who got the good lamp. Then he talked about the year the Great Seal nearly cracked.

"Forty years that man gave them," Hessel said, three cups into the third evening, his eyes wet and bright. "Forty years. And when the seal split, they hung the blame on him so a council son would not have to answer for his own clumsy hands."

Alistair said nothing, letting him go on.

"He died in a rented room two streets from the building. Nobody came to it. Not a single one of them." Hessel drank. "That is the register for you, Marrow. It remembers every name in the realm except the men who keep it."

"That is a hard thing," said Alistair, and he meant it.

That was the part that made the rest of it bearable. He had always found the bones of any system honestly interesting, the gears and the grudges and the small reasons things broke, and half the time he was not pretending at all. Hessel could feel the difference. Lonely men always could.

"It is," Hessel agreed, brightening again, unable to stay down in the grief for long. "But here is a thing most men don’t know."

He leaned across the sticky table, suddenly delighted to be the keeper of a secret worth keeping.

"The warrant register. It is a public document. Technically. Always has been, by an old statute nobody ever thought to repeal."

His curiosity piqued, though Alistair only raised a brow. "Surely not."

"Surely so. Any man of standing can walk in and request to read it, and they are bound by the statute to hand it over." Hessel sat back, hugely pleased with the weight of his own knowledge. "Nobody ever does, mind you."

"And why is that, if a man is owed the right?" asked Alistair.

"Because you would have to be very brave or very stupid to walk in and ask whose names the Scrivener has been signing while she still sits in that wing of hers." Hessel laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. "Most men would sooner not know if their own name is waiting in there. However, there is a kind of peace in not looking, Marrow, and most men buy it cheap."

Alistair refilled the cup before it ran empty.

"Brave or stupid," he repeated, and he smiled Tobian’s smile, the harmless one, the one that asked nothing of anyone. "I am afraid that sounds a great deal like me."

Hessel laughed properly that time, the laugh of a man having the best evening he had had in a year.

"It does, it does. The east breeds you reckless." He waved a loose hand. "Go on then, request it. Give my clerks something to chew on that is not the lamp for once in their dull little lives."

The talk moved on after that, to the lamp, to the old wars, to a woman Hessel had loved in his twenties and lost to a grain merchant. Alistair bought the last round, and when the night was spent he walked the man to the door and pointed him the right way home.

He did this for a reason.

Hessel had earned that much, and beyond that, a lonely clerk who one day decided Tobian Marrow had used him was a lonely clerk who might say the name Tobian Marrow to exactly the wrong person.

Alistair walked back to the inn the long way, the way he walked everywhere now.

The cold thing in his chest had gone quiet, the way it went quiet when a decision had already been made somewhere below his thinking and was only waiting on him to say it out loud.

The warrant register was public.

He could request it in the morning, under Tobian’s name, on the grounds of scholarly interest in Caelmari law. The statute said the request had to be accepted. And then he would learn at last whose names Mira Solenne had been signing into the dark of that sealed wing.

He stopped walking.

Because the same motion that brought him those names would also write Tobian Marrow into the council records as a man who had asked to read the death warrants while the Scrivener still sat in the building.

It would mark him there in plain ink as a young lord too curious to think the matter the whole way through.

That was the exact phrase Crane had set in front of him, days ago, across a wine table, watching his eyes the entire time.

’He laid it on the table for me,’ Alistair thought. ’The villages, the sealed wing, the audit, all of it in a neat row, and then he watched me walk out and leave them lying there untouched, the way an honest man would.’

Alistair clicked his tongue, frowning at the empty street.

’And now I am going to walk back in and pick one of them up, because I cannot afford not to know. That is the exact man he has already decided I am.’

Hearing his own reasoning laid out like that did nothing to soften it.

Crane was not building a case.

A case needed a crime, and there was none yet.

He was building a shape instead, a hollow in the air the size of a guilty man, and he was waiting, patiently, for Alistair to step into it on his own and fit.

Alistair was honestly unsettled by how cleanly the man had measured him.

The trap was a good one.

It was good because the bait was the truth, and a man who refused the truth to keep himself safe was no use to anyone, least of all to the work he had come here to do.

He reached the inn and climbed the stairs.

At the third step, he crouched and drew a fresh line of chalk beside the others, counting the days the way he had taught himself to, and then he lay down and slept very little.

In the morning, he put on Tobian’s good coat.

Then he went to ask, politely, to read the names of the dead.