Chapter 108: The Cracked Wheel

The Cracked Wheel hadn’t changed in the three years since Lancelot had last set foot in it, same low ceiling black with old smoke, same sawdust floor gone dark in patches where blood hadn’t quite scrubbed out, same particular quality of silence that fell over a room full of men who made their living in ways that didn’t survive close questioning. He found Silas exactly where he’d expected to, in the back corner with his boots on the table and a knife spinning idle between his fingers, the picture of a man entirely unbothered by anything the world might currently be doing to him.

"Well." Silas didn’t look up from the knife. "The palace finally fell down, or did you just miss my company that badly."

"Neither. I need something."

"You always need something. That’s usually how these conversations start." Silas’s eyes came up then, red catching the low firelight in a way that had unsettled plenty of grown men who should have known better than to be unsettled by a color, and something that wasn’t quite a smile moved across his face. "You look like a man who’s been sleeping badly. Court finally getting to you, or did you find something worse than boredom to occupy yourself with."

"Both, if I’m honest." Lancelot dropped into the chair across from him, and for a moment neither of them said anything, the particular comfortable silence of two men who’d once burned down a significant portion of a merchant’s warehouse together over a debt neither of them had actually owed, and had come out the other side of that specific disaster considering each other something closer to family than either would have admitted sober. "I need hands I trust in a crowd, six days from now, in the central square."

Silas’s boots came off the table slowly. "That’s not a bar fight."

"No."

"That’s Sowing Blessing. Half the city’s watching hands." He set the knife down, and the careless humor had drained out of his voice entirely, replaced by something more careful, more assessing. "You’re planning something at Sowing Blessing."

"I’m planning to burn a saint’s reputation down in front of everyone who’s ever believed in her, using a witness who’s already had one attempt made on finding her, and I don’t know yet whether that ends cleanly or whether it ends with several people trying very hard to make sure it never gets said out loud." Lancelot kept his voice low, pitched for exactly the two of them, and watched Silas’s expression shift through something that looked almost like genuine surprise, an emotion Lancelot had rarely seen cross that particular face in the years he’d known it. "I need someone in that crowd who isn’t afraid to get their hands bloody if it comes to that, and who isn’t going to ask a hundred questions about why beforehand."

"You’re talking about Serenya."

"I’m talking about all six of them, eventually. She’s just where it starts." Lancelot let that sit, watching it land, and Silas’s face went very still, the particular stillness of a man doing arithmetic he hadn’t expected to need to do tonight. "I understand if that’s more than you signed on for, three years ago, over a warehouse full of grain nobody actually wanted burned."

"You’re going to kill your own family."

"They were never my family in any sense that mattered. You know that better than most people, considering you’re the closest thing to family I’ve actually had since I was old enough to notice the difference." Lancelot’s mouth curved, thin and humorless. "I’m not going to pretend that makes this simple. It doesn’t. But I watched a man kill his cousin in an alley without hurrying, because he’d already worked out there wasn’t another way, and I believed him, and I’ve decided I’d rather be the one holding the knife in that story than the one bleeding out against a wall."

Silas was quiet for a long moment, turning the knife over once more, slow, deliberate, and when he finally spoke his voice had lost every trace of its usual mockery. "You know what people call me down here."

"Several unflattering things, last I heard."

"They call me the thing you send for when you’ve already decided somebody doesn’t get to walk away from a conversation." Silas met his eyes directly, red and steady. "I’ve never once asked what that makes me, because asking felt like the kind of question a man only gets to survive answering once. But I’m asking you, right now, because you’re the one person who’s never once treated me like the answer to that question was the only interesting thing about me. Are you sure. Not brave-sure. Not angry-sure. Actually sure."

Lancelot considered the question with more weight than he generally gave anything, because Silas asked it the way he asked most things that mattered, rarely, and only when the answer genuinely couldn’t be guessed at beforehand. "I watched them decide, years ago, that I wasn’t worth the effort of killing properly. I’ve spent my whole life being grateful for that mistake without ever once asking myself what happens the day one of them stops making it. I’m not doing this because I’m angry, Silas. I’m doing this because I’ve finally worked out that the alternative isn’t peace. It’s just a slower version of the same ending, dressed up as patience."

"That’s a very controlled way of saying yes."

"I’ve had time to get comfortable with it."

Silas studied him a moment longer, and then, abruptly, the mockery came back into his face all at once, sharp and familiar, the particular expression that had always meant he’d decided something and had no further interest in discussing the decision itself. "Six days. Central square. I assume you’d prefer I not set anything on fire this time."

"I’d prefer it, yes. It’s a strong preference."

"No promises." Silas grinned, and for a moment the room felt considerably less heavy than it had a minute before, the particular relief of two men who’d just agreed to something dangerous and had decided, mutually and without saying so, that dwelling on the danger wasn’t going to make either of them better at surviving it. "Who else is in on this."

"Fennick’s handling logistics. Garran knows, mostly because I can’t hide anything from him even when I try. There’s a witness, a woman named Odile, currently somewhere I don’t even know myself, for her own protection." Lancelot hesitated, weighing how much further to go, and decided, on balance, that Silas had earned at least the shape of the rest of it. "And there’s someone watching all of it from somewhere I haven’t identified yet. Dark hair, tall, careful. Been circling the edges of this for weeks."

"You think it’s someone at the palace."

"I think it’s someone who already knows more about the rules of succession than I did a month ago, which narrows the field considerably, and I think whoever it is has been close enough to my own household recently that I can’t entirely rule out someone I already trust." Lancelot’s jaw tightened, the words costing him more than he let show in his voice. "I’d rather not say more than that. Not because I don’t trust you. Because I don’t trust myself not to be wrong about her yet, and I’m not in the business of ruining someone’s life over a suspicion I can’t prove."

Silas’s eyebrows rose slightly at the her, but he let it pass without comment, which was, Lancelot thought, one of the specific reasons he’d trusted this particular man with something as dangerous as an unfinished suspicion in the first place. "Six days," Silas said again, standing, tucking the knife away into whatever hidden place it usually lived. "I’ll be there. I’ll bring Wren’s replacement if she turns out to be a problem, and I’ll bring an apology if she doesn’t."

"That’s oddly generous of you."

"I contain multitudes." Silas’s grin widened at Lancelot’s expression, clearly pleased with himself for landing the echo of Lancelot’s own line back at him. "Go home, Lancelot. Sleep, if you remember how. You’ve got six days to become the kind of man who can actually watch a saint fall in front of a crowd without flinching, and from where I’m sitting, you’re not quite there yet."

Lancelot left the Cracked Wheel with the cold night air doing little to loosen the tightness that had settled into his shoulders sometime during the conversation, and walked back toward the palace turning Silas’s last words over the way he turned over most things that landed somewhere he didn’t want them to.

’He’s right,’ he thought, watching the palace walls rise dark against the sky ahead of him, close enough now that thinking too loudly felt like a risk in itself. ’I’ve spent my whole life becoming very good at being unnoticed. I have exactly six days left to become something else entirely, and I still don’t know, if I’m honest with myself, whether the man on the other side of that change is someone I’m going to recognize when I finally have to look at him.’