Chapter 857: The Sealed Room

Morning came, and the castle had clearly decided to do something with it.

Trafalgar picked up on it halfway through breakfast. People kept crossing the far end of the hall in the same direction, in twos and threes, none of them stopping to eat. Rhosyn had gone off on her own before he was awake, which she was entitled to do and almost never explained.

Toran sat across from him, working through a plate with the focus of a man who fully intended to finish it.

"Where's everyone going at this hour?" Trafalgar asked.

"Honestly, I've no idea." Toran looked up long enough to watch another group pass. "I've been here months and I don't think I've seen them all move the same way at once. Then again, we're observers. We could go and observe."

Trafalgar was already pushing his chair back. "You coming with me?"

Toran put down his cutlery, shovelled in the last bite, drained what was left in his glass, and stood up with his cheek still full. "Ready when you are."

They followed the flow of it through two corridors and up a level.

Trafalgar had no idea what the meeting was, and that was most of why he wanted to see it. That many people walking to the same room on the same morning meant a decision was being attempted, and any room where a decision got attempted was a room worth standing near. If a lead fell out of it, better still.

He also needed to talk to Lyren. Not about anything dramatic. Lyren had told him The Tide brought Lucard in through the proper channels, Nerith had told him the invitation belonged to a thirteen-year-old girl, and one of those was wrong.

It wasn't a fight between them, more a piece of information that had come apart somewhere between two siblings who were supposed to be on the same side.

'Later,' he thought.

The doors at the end of the corridor were open and swallowing people, and Trafalgar was three steps from going through them when a guard moved into his path.

"I'm sorry, my lord. You don't have access here."

Ithanne came out from behind the man before Trafalgar had to decide how to take that.

"My apologies, Lord Morgain. This is one of the rooms you can't enter." She said it without any padding around it, which he appreciated. "The heirs sit with the people who've administered and supported House Myrrhvale for generations, some of them for centuries. I'd rather you didn't take it as an insult. Your standing as an observer is recognised, and this is simply one of the places it doesn't reach."

"Understood." Trafalgar stepped back from the doorway. "Thank you for coming out to tell me yourself."

Ithanne inclined her head and went back in, and the guard resumed being furniture.

Trafalgar stayed where he was and watched the room fill.

The five heirs came through in no particular order and with a great deal of space between them. Then everyone he had met the day before, Ondrek walking like a man who had done this a hundred times, Corvyn saying something to somebody that made two people laugh, Kesh a step behind him and saying nothing at all, Maela arriving last and looking like she had been up as late as he had. And behind all of them, forty or fifty others he had never seen, older, plainer, carrying folders.

'Those are the ones who help to run this city,' Trafalgar thought. 'And I don't know a single one of their names.'

The doors closed.

There was a bench along the corridor wall, so he took it. Toran had already claimed the other end.

"It's strange, them all being in one room," Toran said. "There's real tension between those five over the seat. You'd think they'd avoid it. I suppose they've got to try to decide something eventually."

Trafalgar slid down the bench to sit beside him, and Toran shifted a hand's width away.

It wasn't obvious and Toran probably didn't know he'd done it. Whether it was the Morgain name or something about Trafalgar himself, the man's body had made a decision his manners hadn't caught up with.

Trafalgar let it go without comment.

"You're right, I'd guess," he said. "If they never sit in the same room they'll never decide anything, and they've gone a long time without choosing. Every month this drags out costs them more than the last one did."

"Isn't that good for you, though?" Toran turned to face him properly. "One of the Eight getting weaker, and you're one of the Eight. Seems like something you'd want."

Trafalgar looked at the closed doors for a moment.

"Yeah." It came out lower than he meant it to. "Not for what comes after, though."

Toran waited for the rest of it and didn't get any.

The meeting ran long enough that Trafalgar counted the panels in the ceiling twice. When the doors finally opened, people came out slower than they had gone in, and nobody looked like they had won anything.

He got his first proper look at Vaelis in the middle of it.

The eldest of them was tall and had gone thin in a way that suggested it hadn't always been the plan. Dark green hair pushed back, heavy scales down the sides of his throat, and the flat, worn expression of a man who had stopped expecting anyone in a corridor to be pleased to see him. Two years of being called his mother's killer had gone into that face and stayed there.

He stopped in front of Trafalgar without being asked to.

"Vaelis di Myrrhvale."

"Trafalgar du Morgain."

They shook hands. Vaelis's grip was brief and correct, he inclined his head exactly as far as protocol wanted, and then he walked on and didn't look back.

That was the whole of it.

'Well. Honestly, I was expecting something else…' Trafalgar watched the last of the administrators file past with their folders.

Lyren came out near the end, saw him, and came over.

"You didn't miss much," Lyren said. "Four hours of everyone agreeing that a decision is urgent."

"I've got something small for you." Trafalgar kept his voice down. "You told me The Tide brought Lucard in. Formally, in writing, months ago. Nerith sat me down and told me the invitation came from Ilyra."

Lyren stopped.

"Now that you put it like that, that is odd." He said it slowly, working it as he spoke. "Both of those can't be true, and neither of us has any reason to lie about it. That sounds like something worth pulling on. Please do."

Trafalgar nodded.

He was still nodding when he caught movement further down the corridor, someone coming toward the emptying doors at an unhurried pace, in no rush at all to be anywhere.

Lucard au Vaelion.