Chapter 35: Unpaid Postal Service

"And who would that be?"

"Of course, it’s the Head of the Cryptography Department, my grandfather, and me."

Garrick paused mid-chew, a strip of roasted crackling dangling from his lip. "Why would an invalid keep encrypted military intelligence under a pastry?"

"Because he is an enigma, Garrick!" Silas declared, throwing his hands toward the ceiling. "A delicious, pale, and fragile enigma with cheekbones that could cut glass and a coat that smells like an apothecary shop! He was sleeping! So soundly! Curled up like a little black kitten under six layers of velvet! His chest was barely moving! For a moment, I considered slipping under the duvet to see if his body heat was truly as low as the medical rumors claimed—"

"If you had attempted that," a calm, sweet, melodic voice chimed from the threshold of the archway, "Lady Elara would currently be using your taxidermied pelvis as an umbrella stand in the Everhart foyer."

Seraphina Vale entered the room carrying a silver tray with a pot of black tea and five porcelain cups.

She was smiling her serene, saintly, yet utterly terrifying smile, the smile of a high-tier support healer who knew very well which nerve cluster to sever to ensure a patient remained conscious while having their spleen removed.

She set the tray down, handed Garrick an oversized mug of goat’s milk to prevent him from choking on pig bone, and cast a cold, clinical gaze at Silas. "You are a public menace, Silas. The student council has already received three anonymous complaints this week regarding a ’creepy, sandy-haired shadow’ hovering outside the female dormitories with a notebook."

"That was academic research regarding the nocturnal dispersal of mana!" Silas protested loudly.

Cassian did not join the bickering.

He had not moved a single muscle since Silas had tossed the parchment onto the table. His dark blue eyes that were deep, cold, and carrying the unyielding weight of an ancient family that had guarded the empire’s northern abyss for nine centuries, were locked onto the small, folded slip of paper.

Slowly, Cassian reached out.

His large, calloused fingers which were scarred along the knuckles from years of gripping starlight manifestations, picked up the scrap of kitchen parchment.

He didn’t open it immediately.

He held it up to the pale morning light streaming through the leaded glass.

"Silas," Cassian said.

The room’s temperature did not drop magically, but Silas’s theatrical smirk hitched for a fraction of a second.

When the Valemont heir spoke in that specific, quiet, monotone frequency, it usually meant someone was roughly three minutes away from having their military standing revoked.

"Yes, my glorious commander?"

"This parchment," Cassian murmured, turning it over between two fingers. "You say you found it hidden beneath a jar of almond tart?"

"I did! An exquisite pastry, really. Flaky crust, slightly too much butter, but—"

"It was placed on the corner of the writing desk nearest the unlatched balcony," Cassian stated.

It wasn’t a question.

Silas blinked. "...Well, yes. But it was under the jar of tart—"

"And the window latch. You picked it with a horsehair?"

"I am a master of stealth, Cassian, I don’t need to justify my—"

"The brass fitting on the third-floor balcony of the Everhart villa," Cassian continued, his voice as smooth, cold, and heavy as a block of ice sliding down a mountain, "is a right-handed lever. It cannot be manipulated from the exterior without either shearing the frame with high-tier earth magic, or... having the resident inside deliberately turn the deadbolt to the unlocked position before retreating to his bed."

Silas’s mouth opened slightly.

The smug, cat-like expression on his face began to peel away, revealing the raw confusion of a predator that had just realized the mouse hole had a neon sign pointing toward cheese.

"Wait," Silas muttered, scratching his messy hairline. "Are you saying...?"

"Look at the ink," Cassian said, finally unfolding the coarse paper.

Across the surface was a dense, yet aligned grid of numerical notations, astrological coordinates, and administrative stock-ledger codes, written in faint, greenish-brown ink that smelled faintly of scorched citrus and iron gall.

"This is not a hastily scribbled battlefield memo," Cassian observed, his eyes scanning the cipher with terrifying, photographic speed. "The lines are ruled at five-millimeter intervals with perfection. The numbers follow the standard bookkeeping ledger format of the Imperial Ministry of Agriculture. The cipher... you claim only three people know it?"

"Yes!" Silas insisted, leaning over the table. "It’s the Old Nightingale Military Grid! My family used it during the Border Wars eighty years ago! It hasn’t been in active service since—"

"It is an obsolete cipher," Cassian interrupted calmly. "One that was declassified forty years ago and relegated to Volume 14 of The Imperial Archives of Tactical Cryptography."

Cassian looked up from the paper, his piercing blue eyes locking directly onto Silas’s bewildered hazel ones.

"A volume that was checked out of the grand library of House Everhart five days ago, according to the public registrar’s checkout log."

Silas froze.

The silence that descended upon the room was finally broken by the whistling mushroom shrieking once before Lyra crushed it beneath a brass paperweight.

"He... he knew," Silas whispered, his voice climbing an octave in disbelief. "He left it there for me?! He knew I was in the tree?!"

"He didn’t just know you were up in the tree and spying on him like a pervert," Lyra cackled wildly, slamming her palms onto the table, her violet hair whipping around her face like a cloud of manic static. "He also set a trap for you! With pastry! He baited an A-Rank Nightingale scout using carbohydrates! Oh, by the stars, I love him! I need to dissect his prefrontal cortex right now! The neural density required to calculate Silas’s voyeuristic tendencies down to the minute, it’s magnificent! It’s an art!"

"He did not bait him with a trap," Seraphina corrected softly, though her sweet smile had sharpened into something predatory. "He used an unpaid postal service."