The Registrar's seal arrived on the fourth morning after the festival, and it arrived without a messenger.
That was the first thing Delary noticed. There was no knock, no liveried clerk, no wax in a diplomatic folder. There was simply a small brass disc on her writing desk when she came back from the orangery with scorched cuffs, sitting precisely in the centre of the blotter, aligned with the grain of the wood.
The second thing she noticed was that the doors had been locked. Both of them. She had locked them herself.
She picked the disc up. It was heavier than it looked, warm from the light through the window, and stamped on one face with the fractured star and the flame. On the other face was a number. Twelve digits, cut in a hand so small she had to hold it to the window to read it, and beneath the number, one word.
Tomorrow.
The creature came off the windowsill and landed on the desk with a weight that made the inkwell jump. It looked at the disc. It did not hiss. It had hissed at the tutor, at the under-steward, at a moth, and at a bowl of soup. It did not hiss at this.
"That is very nearly a recommendation," Delary said.
She spent the rest of the day doing what she had done for nine days, which was read.
The attendance rolls were in the estate's own archive, four thousand sheets of them, one per autumn festival. She had pulled the last forty years and stacked them on the long table in the library, and she read them the way she had once read a shipping house's ledgers, looking not at what was written but at who was missing.
Six houses had attended every festival since the founding. Aurelian. Calloway. Wyvern, who cultivated roses and grudges. Tallow, which had produced three High Priestesses and no sons. Marchmain, which was poor and had been poor for two centuries and attended anyway, every year, on foot. And Halloway, which had stopped attending in the year Delary was born, and had never been listed again.
Four houses missing this year. Marchmain among them. The house that walked to the festival when it could not afford horses had not come at all.
That evening she went down to the kitchens.
She had not been to the kitchens in six years, and the reaction was worth the trip. The head cook nearly dropped a pan. Two scullery boys stopped mid-scrub. Delary stood in the doorway with a dragon the size of a greyhound sitting behind her legs like a shadow with opinions, and said, pleasantly, that she had a question about the salt stores.
The question about the salt stores took eleven minutes to answer and twelve seconds to ask. The other forty minutes she spent in the corner of the room with a cup of something hot, listening, because that was where the household's real archive was kept, and it was not kept in ink.
She learned that the under-steward had been seen in the eastern passage on the night of the attack, which was odd, because the eastern passage led to the west wing.
She learned that the second gate had been open for a quarter of an hour that evening for a delivery of lamp oil, which had not been ordered, which had been signed for, and which had never arrived.
She learned that a maid named Sera had been dismissed eleven days earlier for insolence, which was the fourth such dismissal that season, and that three of the four had been rehired within the month.
None of it was evidence. All of it was the sound a set of books makes when the totals are right and something underneath is wrong.
The office was not in the palace. It was under it.
Delary worked that out from the number on the disc, which was not a registry number at all but a coordinate, and from four hours in the map room with the estate's survey charts and a lamp, and from the simple fact that a man had come from the east and told her that a page had been rewritten by people who no longer worked for anyone.
At the second hour after midnight she stood in the old undercroft beneath the east wing, in front of a door that had been walled over, at some point, by someone in a hurry. The mortar was wrong. It was the wrong colour and the wrong age and it had been laid, she judged, about nineteen years before.
She put the disc against it. Nothing happened for a long moment.
Then the wall went quiet, which is not the same as a wall opening, and she understood that it had opened by becoming something she could walk through without noticing she had.
The corridor beyond was lit by lamps that hung from nothing and burned without heat. The floor was the same grey stone as the palace. The walls were different. The walls were entirely covered, floor to ceiling, in narrow wooden drawers, and each drawer had a brass plate, and each plate had a name.
Delary walked down the corridor for a long time before she understood what she was looking at.
Every drawer had a name. Every name was crossed out.
Some of the crosses were neat, cut with a blade. Some were scratched, four or five times over, deep enough to splinter. One had been gouged so hard the plate had come away from the drawer, and someone had nailed it back.
She stopped at the fourth bay and read. Andronikos of House Marchmain. Sela Tallow, second daughter, no issue. A name she did not recognise, then another, then another, ninety of them in a single bay, and she had been walking for four minutes and there were eleven bays.
The creature had gone very still against her shoulder. Its tail had tightened around her wrist.
"I know," Delary said.
At the end of the corridor was a room with a table in it, and at the table was a woman of about sixty, writing in a ledger by the light of a lamp that burned without heat, and she did not look up when Delary came in.
"You walked past the third bay," the woman said. "Most people stop there. It is the one with the children."
"I read it on the way back."
"That is the correct order."
She finished her line, blotted it, and looked up. Grey hair cut short. A plain grey dress. A face like a person who had been in that chair for a very long time and had stopped being interested in whether anyone noticed.
"Registrar Ferren," she said. "Third rank. You have my disc. It was a courtesy to return it."
"I have not returned it."
"No," Ferren agreed. "You have not. Sit down, Lady Aurelian. You have questions and I have an hour, and I would rather answer them than pretend I do not know you came in through the wall."
Delary sat.
"The men who attacked my house," she said. "Four days early. Was that you?"
"No."
"Was it your office?"
Ferren considered the question for a moment, which Delary appreciated, because it meant the answer was not going to be a denial.
"The office is four people," Ferren said. "I am one. There was an instrument issued in the autumn concerning an unregistered entry in the western houses. It did not specify an attack. It specified a correction."
"Whose correction?"
"Mine was the seal," Ferren said. "The hand was someone else's."
"That is a distinction without a difference."
"It is the only distinction there is," Ferren said, "and you will need it before the year is out."
She turned the ledger around and pushed it across the table.
Delary looked at it. It was a working record. Dates down the left, four columns of initials across the top, and entries in a shorthand she did not know, but the shape of it was a ledger, and she had read ten thousand ledgers, and the shape was enough.
"This is a search register," she said. "You are looking for something."
"We are looking for a page that will not stay removed."
"Which page?"
Ferren looked at the creature on Delary's shoulder for a while, and the creature looked back, and neither of them did anything, and Delary understood that they had met before, or something very like it, and that neither was going to say so.
"Yours," Ferren said. "Why did you think the disc was warm?"
Delary was on the stairs back up, three hours later, when she heard the voice.
She had taken the eastern service stair, because it was the one nobody used and the one that came out above her own corridor. Halfway up, in the dark, someone was talking on the landing above her, and the words were not meant for her, and she stopped where she was, in the black, with one hand on the cool wall.
"—aware of it before the festival. The boundary was a courtesy," a voice said. Calloway's voice. Pleased, unhurried, entirely at ease at half past three in the morning in a stairwell of somebody else's house.
"And the other thing?" A second voice. Older. Lower. One she knew.
"The other thing has been arranged for eleven years." A pause. "Do not look at me like that. You knew the terms when you sold the page."
Delary stood in the dark and did not breathe.
"I know the terms," said the second voice. Her father's voice. "I have known the terms every day for nineteen years."
And then the truth landed on her, in a stairwell in the middle of the night, in the worst possible place, four days after she had stopped being careful.
That was not why she had recognised his voice as a child.
She had recognised it because she had heard it before she was born. In the room where she died. The last tea.
She did not move until both sets of footsteps had gone, and when she finally did move, she went up the stairs carefully, quietly, and sat on the floor of her own room with her back to the door, and took out the book, and wrote the fifth rule with a hand that was very nearly steady.
Rule five. The hand that corrects the record does not have to hate you. It can be a person who loves you and has decided that you are the error.
The creature did not go to the sill that night. It curled against her ribs and stayed awake, and it purred, and the purring sounded, if she let herself hear it, like something very old being patient.
Somewhere below the palace, in a room lit by lamps that burned without heat, Ferren blotted her line and turned to a fresh page, and at the top of it she wrote the same name she had been writing for eleven years.
This time, she did not cross it out.