Chương 165: Chapter 161. The Merchant

"Time?"

"Nine fifty-nine," Sam said, not looking up from the watch.

"Right." Adom pushed the door open.

"In we go." The Silver Bough was warm, low-ceilinged and smelled of woodsmoke and some herb he didn't recognize, the common room half-full at this hour, a stair curving up at the back. An elven woman looked up from the long counter as the four of them came in out of the cold, took in the road-dust on them, and smiled.

"Welcome. Rooms, or a meal?"

"Both, we hope. We've a reservation." Adom kept the borrowed voice easy.

"Under Law." She drew a ledger toward her and ran a finger down it.

"Law. Party of four." Her eyes passed over the others politely.

"And your companions?" The names came one after the next — the ones they'd each settled on, not one of them their own — and she marked each down without a flicker.

"All here. You're on the second floor, the three doors at the end of the east landing." She lifted a small brass bell and rang it once, and a pair of young elves appeared as though they'd been waiting for exactly that.

"They'll see your things up. Will you take the meal now?"

"If it's no trouble," Adom said.

"It's been a long road, and a longer day before it. We'd be glad of a seat and something hot."

"No trouble at all. We're not full yet, so sit where you like, and someone will be over." She gestured at the room with an open hand, leaving the choosing to them. That was the moment he'd been waiting for. Adom let his gaze drift across the common room as though he were only picking a table, in no hurry, looking for the one he'd been told to find. Back corner. Furthest from the door… ah, there it was. The right table, exactly.

Tucked into the far corner where a man could sit with the whole room laid out in front of him and the wall at his back. The man sitting at it was wrong, though. Adom had been told to look for an older gentleman, silver at the temples. Instead there sat someone young, not much past his own apparent age, clean and well-dressed with an iron ring on one hand, and a compass on the table at his elbow.

And as Adom's eyes found him, the young man looked back, unsurprised, and made a small, deliberate sign with two fingers against the tabletop. It threw him. Badly, for half a second. But he didn't let it reach his face.

"Actually," he said to the woman, with a nod toward the corner, "our friend's already here. We'll sit with him, if that suits." She glanced over, found the young man, and whatever she made of four dusty foreigners joining a lone young patron, none of it showed.

"Of course. I'll have a waiter sent across for all of you." They started across the room toward the corner, unhurried on the outside, and Sam dropped into step at Adom's shoulder, his voice falling to nearly nothing.

"That," he murmured, "is not an older gentleman with silver at his temples. The compass, fine. The rest of him, no."

"I noticed."

"So who is—""I don't know yet." Adom kept his eyes ahead and his borrowed face pleasant.

"But he was watching the door when we walked in. Clocked us the second we came through, like he'd been waiting for us specifically. And he just signed to me." They kept walking.

"The table's right, and so is the compass. So whatever this is, we find out the way we'd find out anything."

"Which is?"

"We walk over, and we sit down." The young man watched them come the whole way, and didn't say a word until they were standing right in front of him. The young man smiled up at them.

"Law, I presume?"

"That's right."

"Please." He graciously gestured to the empty chairs across from him.

"Sit. You've come a long way. The least I can do is let you do the rest of it off your feet." They sat, Adom taking the chair directly across from him and the others settling in around, and for a moment the young man simply let them get comfortable, hands folded loosely on the table beside the compass.

"Forgive me if I'm too direct," Adom said.

"But you're not who we were expecting to find here." The young man chuckled.

"No. No, I don't imagine I am." He dipped his head, half an apology on its own.

"My name is Caelen. My father is the gentleman you came to meet. He ran into rather an unexpected sort of morning, I'm afraid, and couldn't be here himself; so the burdensome honour of receiving you has fallen to me. Along with the still more burdensome one of telling you that the meeting you crossed an ocean for isn't going to happen today, and won't be happening for a good while yet." … Huh?"' He sends his sincere regrets,' Caelen went on, 'and asks to put it off to some later date.'"

A small silence went round the table, reflecting everyone's confusion. Adom kept his borrowed face pleasant.

"Forgive me again," he said, "but is there a reason? We didn't come from next door. Seven days on the water to get here, on the understanding your father wanted this as much as we did."

"He did. He does." Caelen's composure held.

"And I'm sorry. I know precisely how far you've come, and what it's worth to you, and I wouldn't squander it lightly. If there were any other way through this morning, believe me—""Good morning, sirs!" Every one of them startled. A waiter had materialised at Adom's elbow out of nowhere, beaming, pad in hand, cheerfully oblivious to having walked straight into the middle of something.

"Sorry to keep you. Have we decided, or shall I give you a moment longer?" There was a beat while everyone recovered.

"What's the— ahem," Sam cleared his throat.

"What's the specialty here? What does everyone get?"

"Oh, the river trout, young sir, no contest. Done in brown butter with the little crisped roots. You'd be sorry not to. And to drink, can I tempt you with the frostpetal fizz? Brewed up the mountain, it is. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. Comes up sparkling, tastes like a cold morning and pears, and there's not a thing better for road-weariness."

They all ordered the river trout and a round of the fizz; wanting the interruption gone rather more than they wanted to deliberate. The waiter wrote it down with great satisfaction, promised it wouldn't be long, and went off whistling. The corner fell quiet again.

"Where were we," Caelen said.

"You were about to tell me why," said Adom. Caelen turned the compass a slow half-circle on the tabletop, weighing how much to say, then seemed to decide on all of it. He leaned in, and dropped his voice beneath the noise of the room.

"My father couldn't come this morning," he said, "because this morning, he was taken. Lifted off the street by armed men and put under lock and key. It was done on the order of one of this kingdom's princes; and it's the prince's own people holding him now." Hearing that, Adom put his head down on the table. Just like that, forehead to the wood, in front of Caelen, his friends and the whole half-full room, letting out a long breath through his nose.

"Why," he said, to the tabletop, "why does this keep happening." Nobody answered, which was wise of them.

"Just once. One time. I'd like one thing to go the way it's supposed to. The way I planned. I plan things. I'm told I plan them well." He turned his head enough to get one eye clear of the wood.

"And then somebody looks at the plan, and decides that no, it's not for them. Let's make it interesting. I mean, hah, it's so consistent it has to be on purpose, right? Somebody's doing it on purpose." Across the table, his friends traded a look, the worry plain on all three of them now. This only made Adom angrier at the injustice of his struggle not being understood.

"When I find out who, I'm going to punch them. For all the times I could've had a quiet life and got this instead."

"Sorry… he's had a lot on," Sam said to Caelen, laughing nervously.

"Haha, the journey here was quite long, you see. You'll have to excuse him."

"... No excuse needed." Caelen, to his credit, didn't so much as blink. If anything there was something warmer in him now than there'd been a moment ago.

"Take the moment. I find them in rather short supply myself, lately." The waiter chose that exact instant to come back, tray balanced high and beaming. He set the plates down one by one with little flourishes — the trout steaming, the roots crisped and golden — and was most of the way through distributing the fizz when he registered the magus face-down on his table.

"Everything all right there, sir?" he asked, genuinely concerned, leaning to peer at the side of Adom's head.

"Only you've gone rather horizontal. Shall I send for a healer? We've a good one two doors down, very quick—""He's fine," Damus said.

"Just having a moment." He nodded at the spread.

"This looks excellent, though. Thank you."

"Thanks," Adom added, to the tabletop, without lifting his face from it. The waiter hesitated, decided this was above his pay, wished them a good meal, and withdrew. It was not, Adom reflected privately, his most glorious showing. He decided to put it down to the hormones. Even at nineteen — especially at nineteen, he was beginning to suspect — a sudden mood crashing through you sideways wasn't all that rare. He'd give himself that one.

Then he stayed down there a second or two longer, sat up, scrubbed a hand over the borrowed face, and reached for the fizz.

"Right," he said.

"Sorry. Long week." He took a sip, and it was, irritatingly, exactly as good as promised, which somehow helped.

"Tell me about the prince, will you?" Caelen's brow creased. For the first time since they'd sat down, he was the one caught off balance.

"Why?" he said.

"Forgive me — but why? Are you planning something?"

"I might be." Adom turned the cold glass slowly between his hands.

"The matter with your father isn't a small inconvenience to me, Caelen. It's the whole reason I crossed an ocean. There's a great deal riding on the answers he was going to give me, more than I can lay out at this table, but enough that I can't simply turn around and sail home with nothing. That isn't an option that exists for me." He set the glass down.

"And the way I see it, you came here to send us off. Which tells me you weren't sent to answer the questions in your father's place, meaning you can't. Only he can. So if there's a way for us to get him back, then I'd very much like to hear it." Caelen stared for a long moment — recalculating, maybe, weighing what Adom was and what he might be worth — and then seemed to decide to lay the whole thing out.

"All right. Then you should understand what you'd be walking into." He turned the compass another slow degree, ordering it in his head.

"Oriscael's king died a year ago, and left no named successor. That's the root of all of it. Until the throne is settled, the kingdom is held by an official called the Intendant; he keeps order, preserves the crown's authority, and oversees the succession when it finally comes. A caretaker, and nothing more. He isn't a king and isn't meant to become one."

"And the heirs?" Adom asked.

"Four. The old king had four children, all born on the same day, which would sound like a fairy story if it weren't the root of the entire mess. Four children of equal standing, and one throne between them." He named them off without hurry.

"Kazimir. Veyslav. Radomir. And the princess, Vesna. With no senior claim, the crown falls to the old emergency tradition." A glance flicked toward Sam, who gasped audibly after hearing about the tradition.

"None of them have been able to take the sword out, though. So we're in a limbo""Officially, nothing is wrong," Caelen went on." The kingdom is simply between rulers, ticking along under the Intendant while the matter resolves in good order. In truth, Highmere has been quietly at war with itself for a year. The four of them are buying officials, packing the duel-courts, courting the officers who command real soldiers, and lining up nobles, all to bend the rite in their favour."

Adom was one moment away from doing something stupid, irritated by the complicated situation.

"Of the four, Kazimir is winning. His hands are deepest in the palace, the city authority, the courts — not the Intendant's chair itself, but very nearly everything around it. And he doesn't move in the open. He uses the machinery, like a rival's man arrested on some technicality, a witness leaned on, a merchant pressured, all of it procedural and deniable."

"And the trouble for him," Adom said, having a hunch, "is Veyslav?"

"You're quick." Caelen almost smiled.

"Veyslav has the fastest-growing faction, built mostly from everyone Kazimir's methods have frightened or insulted. And my father has been quietly helping him. Money, trade contacts, information; enough outside weight to turn a hopeful into a genuine contender. We're not subjects of this kingdom, which makes us useful, and dangerous, in about equal measure."

"So Kazimir took him off the board?"

"This morning. His people lifted my father on a charge of foreign interference in the succession, which isn't, I'll admit, entirely a lie. But the law was never the point. With my father in a cell, Veyslav loses his coin, his eyes, and his outside legitimacy in a single dawn." Caelen met his gaze.

"And you lose the one man who can tell you what you sailed all this way to hear." He sat back.

"For completeness, there are two more. Radomir has his own faction and his own soldiers, and nobody can say which way he'll jump, which makes him worth watching closely. And Vesna; everyone assumes the princess will be married off or traded away before she matters, which is exactly the assumption a clever person would want her rivals to keep making. I wouldn't write her off." The corner had gone quiet. Down the table the trout sat mostly untouched.

"So that's the kingdom you've sailed into," Caelen finished. Adom didn't answer straight away. Something in all of that sat wrong with him, and it took him a moment to find the edge of it. He knew how Oriscael's succession went — or how it had infamously gone once, in a life nobody at this table remembered but him. And in that version, that Veyslav fellow had no part in it.

The man had died before the old king's death was ever made public, gone before the throne was even a question, so far out of it that all Adom had carried away was a name and the fact of a death. The fight he remembered had been Kazimir against Radomir, and it ended the usual way: a deal, a short peace, and then one brother in the ground and the other ruling alone. But here Veyslav was alive. At the centre of it. Backed by Oberys, no less. That was not a small change.

Dead men staying dead was one of the few things Adom had learned to rely on, and when one didn't, it generally meant something had reached in and moved a piece that had no business moving. He wanted very much to know what, since he—a regressor— had never been in Oriscael. None of it reached his borrowed face.

"Caelen," he said.

"Before anything else, do you think you could get me a meeting with Veyslav?" Caelen's brows lifted a fraction.

"Veyslav?"

"Your father's in a cell I can't reach yet. Veyslav isn't, and he's the reason your father's in one." Adom drank the fizz again, this time finishing it on one go. Very good. He'd order some more later.

"I'd like to look at the man everyone's paying so much to back. And then we can talk about what's actually possible here."