SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 871: What Was Missing

Two days later Trafalgar had read the card until the words stopped being words, then put it face down under the lamp and gone back to the ledgers.

the one who brought it up every

He had gone at it the obvious way for two days. The one who brought it up every time, the one who kept raising it, in a meeting or at a table or in some room where it should never have been mentioned.

That had gone nowhere. Half the people in this city brought things up constantly, and none of them had ever been near Nyssara di Myrrhvale's rooms.

The ledger page in front of him was a supply list for the residence floor. Linen, lamp oil, and a column of the same three entries repeating down the whole month.

He stopped with his finger halfway down it.

'It isn't raising a subject. It's carrying something. Up the stairs, to her rooms, every night, for months.'

He turned the card over and read it again, and this time it wasn't a fragment of an accusation at all. It was a description of a job. Small, dull and entirely domestic, done so many times that it stopped being worth writing down, and Skeff had known who did it.

Trafalgar got up and stood in the middle of the room for a while.

Everything he had been asking had been the wrong question. Who wanted her dead, who profited, who moved when she died. All of it useless, because the whole city had spent two years asking exactly that and come out with a name and a grudge.

'Forget who wanted it. Somebody was in that room every night for months, carrying the same thing, and nobody ever thought twice about them.'

Then the second half arrived, and it landed hard enough that he sat down again.

The attendance registers. Eleven days at a time, four months running, out of an archive where the salt accounts and the lamp oil and the laundry slips were all present down to the last barrel.

He had known for weeks that somebody had taken the pages recording who went into her rooms. What he hadn't known was why those pages, out of everything in that building, had been worth going back for.

Now he did.

Three names came out of it, and two of them were dead ends before he had finished writing them down.

The intendant took an afternoon to close out. Bellick Harrow, forty-one years in the household, dead of a burst vessel in his own bed eight months after Nyssara. A physician's note, a burial record, a widow still drawing a pension, a brother who talked about him for twenty minutes.

The second was Halvic Meer, her personal physician for six years. He had signed most of the medical entries in that last year in his own hand, and then he had left Meraval and nobody in this city had thought about him since.

The third had no name, because the third had never been written down anywhere.

"That's what bothers me most," Zafira said, when he laid the three of them out. "Two of your three are in the paperwork. The third isn't in it anywhere, and that's not an accident of filing."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning there was a reason not to write them down." She turned her cup without drinking from it. "Household service doesn't get recorded by name in half these places. Neither does family. Nobody logs who walked up their own stairs in their own house."

He asked four people about the doctor over the next two days.

The steward's clerk said Meer had gone back up to the surface after Lady Nyssara passed, and that a lot of the household had moved on that year. A woman in the archive office said much the same, and thought he had family in one of the coastal territories.

A guard captain who had served the residence floor remembered him leaving and couldn't remember it being remarkable. Ithanne's office had one line in a staff register and nothing else.

Four people, four reasonable answers, and every one the same shape.

'None of them has ever turned it over. They aren't covering anything. They were handed the same explanation, it fitted, and they got on with their lives.'

He brought it to Nerith that evening.

"Meer?" She was signing something and didn't stop. "He went home. Half the household went somewhere that year, Lord Morgain. People do that when the house they work for stops having a head."

"He was her doctor. He was in her rooms every day for six years, he wrote the last year of her medical record, and he walked out of this city within days of her dying."

She looked up.

"Your family has spent two years accusing your eldest brother of murdering your mother. You've had an investigation, a standing committee, four factions tearing each other apart over it. Did anyone go and find the physician?"

Nerith put the pen down.

"No."

"Did anyone ask why nobody went and found him?"

"No." She said it slowly, the way a person says something they're hearing properly for the first time. "I didn't either. I read his name in that ledger a hundred times while I was copying it, and it never occurred to me once."

"That's what I keep coming back to." He leaned his forearms on the back of the chair. "It doesn't surprise me that he left. That's an ordinary thing for a physician to do."

"But?"

"But it didn't surprise anybody else either. This house has been obsessed with that death for two years, and the one person standing closest to it walked out of the door and nobody in Meraval has said his name since."

The archives came up after that, because they had to.

Everything he held was a copy in her handwriting, and every hour he spent on it made that worse rather than better. None of it would survive one question from anybody who wanted to be difficult.

"You can't have them out," Nerith said. "I can't sign a removal order for the household ledgers without it crossing three desks, and one of those is a Tide desk."

"I know. I'm asking about the floor."

"What about it?"

"The man you told me about. The one who sits at the end of the row all day with no reason to be there." Trafalgar kept his voice even. "How long has he been there?"

Nerith opened her mouth, and then didn't use it for a moment.

"Since my mother died."

Something went cold and very still behind Trafalgar's ribs.

'Two years. Not since I landed, and not since a clerk turned up in a drained channel.'

He had been carrying that watcher around as a problem aimed at him, placed in his path by somebody who had noticed him getting close. That was flattering and it was wrong. The man had been sitting on that floor for eighteen months before anyone in this city had heard the name Trafalgar du Morgain.

"He isn't there for me," he said. "He's there for you."

"For me?"

"You've spent two years being careful, and this whole castle has spent two years working out how to get you out of the succession. I've been assuming that's because you might actually win it."

He shook his head slowly.

"It isn't. You're the heir who holds the household archive. You've been sitting on the only thing in Meraval that can put a rope on somebody, and you've had it so long you stopped seeing it as anything except paperwork."

Nerith looked at the stacks on her own desk as though somebody had moved them while she wasn't watching.

"They don't want me gone because I'm a candidate," she said.

"They want you gone because you're the librarian."

Rhosyn went in at the fourth hour of the morning, and the problem was never the men.

The watcher wasn't alone. Two more sat on the level below, on no rota Nerith had ever seen, moving like people who had done this in other cities. Any one of them would have been asleep on the floor before he understood what had happened to him.

Which was exactly why she couldn't touch them.

Three unconscious men on an archive floor is a sentence, and the sentence reads somebody came for the ledgers. There is one heir in this castle who lives on top of those ledgers, and they'd have been at Nerith's door before the lamps came up.

So she worked around them, and working around them meant slow.

She got four pages.

The older volumes she could open and close without leaving a mark on anything. The one covering the eleven days she'd gone in for sat in a cased box with a wax seal and a tally slip, and there was no version of opening that box which didn't announce, in writing, that somebody had wanted those exact days.

She stood over it a while, and left it where it was.

"Four," she said, putting them on his table.

Trafalgar looked at the pages, and then at her, and couldn't fault a word of it.