He found her two days after she began working in the supplementary archive. She had not been obvious about it—she went in the early morning, when foot traffic in the archive wing was minimal, and she stayed no longer than two hours at a time, and she made no notes in the archive itself, holding everything in her head until she could write it in her rooms. But Caelan had eyes she was still mapping and he found her anyway, and he found her in a way that suggested he had known about the supplementary authorization before she used it, which meant he had access to the Keeper's office or the Keeper's schedule that she did not.
She was not surprised. She had expected Caelan to find her when something changed. Something had changed.
He sat across from her in the general archive—not the supplementary section—and he did not perform pleasantness. This was new. The pleasantness was not gone, but it was set aside, and what was beneath it was something more serious and more direct, and she found that she trusted this version of him more than the other, which was perhaps the point.
"This court has two factions," he said. "You know this."
"I know there are factions," she said. "I've been working on two versus three."
He acknowledged this. "Two primary ones. One wants you here. One wants you gone. The one that wants you gone is currently more powerful—in terms of numbers, resources, and historical relationship with the Ducal courts." He paused. "The one that wants you here is more powerful in terms of what they know."
She kept her face neutral while she processed this. "Which side are you on?" she asked.
He smiled. Not the genuine version or the performed version—something in between. "I'm on the side that wins," he said. "Which is why I am telling you this: the faction that wants you gone is going to make a second attempt within the next thirty days. The first one—" he paused, and she understood that he had known about the first attempt, possibly beforehand, and the weight of that knowing sat in the room "—was minor. A probe. The second will be more direct."
"Why are you telling me?" she asked.
"Because," he said, "the faction that wants you here needs you to still be here."
"And which side has Lucien?" she asked. The question she had been building to for sixty days arrived without announcement.
Caelan looked at her for a long moment. "That," he said, "is the question everyone in this court is trying to answer." He stood. "Including him, I think."
He left her with that. She sat with it for a very long time and thought about what it meant that a man who carried the kingdom's central ward and signed her contract with his blood and had the western cluster courtier re-contracted after a poisoning attempt was still, somehow, a question about which side he was on. As though sides were not the frame he used. As though he was working from a framework she had not yet found.
She went back to her rooms and to her notebook and she added Caelan's information to the map and she looked at the map for a long time. Two factions. One more powerful by numbers, one more powerful by knowledge. She was a variable that one side wanted eliminated and one side wanted preserved. The side that wanted her preserved knew something the other side didn't. The Keeper of Seals knew something everyone else didn't. And somewhere in the supplementary archive, sixty years of uneuphemized history waited for her to read it. She thought: I have perhaps thirty days. She thought: I had better read faster.