Valttair answered without a pause, as though he had drawn the whole plan up long before Trafalgar walked in and had only been waiting to be asked.
"Several steps." He came back from the window to the desk, unhurried. "The first is your sister. She gets looked into properly now, all the way down. It is plain my daughter had a hand in something. Something I take no pride in. But a thing like that was always going to happen the moment she slipped past where I could see her."
No feeling in it. He said it the way another man might note a crop had failed, a loss to be counted and worked around, and moved on before it could sit in the room.
Trafalgar kept his own read behind his teeth. He had walked off that airship two days ago already certain the road ran back to Rivena, and here was Valttair naming her with not a scrap of proof laid on the desk between them.
