Chapter 9 The Council Fracture
CAEL
Councilor Mave arrived without appointment at eight in the morning, and that told him everything.
Mave's unannounced arrivals were a feature of the relationship. She had spent twenty-two years developing a precise instinct for when information was moving through the Confederation without her involvement, and she responded to that instinct with the particular consistency of someone who had never once been wrong to act on it. She appeared, she asked questions that were really confirmations, she left with whatever she'd come to verify. He had tolerated it because she was good and because the information she surfaced was often valuable and because twenty-two years of reliable service earned a certain latitude.
Today it was intolerable.
She appeared in the doorway of his office at eight in the morning with the ease of someone who had never needed to knock, and she said: "The omega healer. What is she?" And the certainty underneath the question told him immediately that she had not come to find out. She had come to confirm what she already knew. There was a difference in the texture of those two things and he had spent enough years in rooms with Mave to feel it.
He was still for one second. He made a decision.
"Close the door," he said.
She sat down and waited with the ease of someone who had long since earned their chair. He told her what he'd chosen to tell her: a Hollow, the Voidborne threat, the operational necessity of Seraphine's presence at the estate. He kept it clean and factual and watched her face while he spoke, and what he saw was not someone receiving new information. What he saw was someone using the confirmation to rearrange something that had already been partially assembled. The pieces had been there. He was giving her the last one.
She said of course and I understand before he'd finished his sentence, and she left with the composed efficiency of someone who had gotten what they came for.
Both responses too fast.
He sat at his desk after the door closed and looked at the space she'd occupied and thought about the quality of that too-quick agreement. He thought about the sources she had mentioned without naming — sources, plural, which implied a network of some kind, which implied that the information about Seraphine had traveled through more than one point before reaching her. He thought about a specific phrase she had used without apparently noticing its weight: I wanted to hear it from you before I made any decisions.
Before she made any decisions. As though confirming with him was one input among several in a calculation that had other inputs he wasn't seeing.
He called Rook.
"Pull her communication logs," he said, when Rook appeared. "Every outgoing message in the last fourteen days. Anything that bypasses the standard estate routing. I want it on my desk."
Rook looked at him with the look he used for: you're sure about this.
"She arrived at eight knowing something she shouldn't have known," Cael said. "She left before I could understand how she knew it. Pull the logs."
"Give me an hour."
Rook brought the folder in fifty minutes and set it on the desk without ceremony and didn't leave, which meant he had already read it and had decided that leaving was not the appropriate response to what was in it.
"Third page," Rook said.
Third page. An outgoing message from the previous evening — sent before this morning had happened, before Cael had told Mave anything, before the conversation in his office that he was now understanding had never been about discovery at all. The message had been sent on a channel that did not appear anywhere in the standard estate communication architecture. Encrypted. Routed through an external relay.
"She sent this last night," Cael said.
"Yes."
"Before I told her anything."
"Yes."
"She didn't come this morning to find out what we had." He set the folder down. "She came to see whether I knew she already knew."
Rook said nothing. He didn't need to. The implication had settled into the room between them with the specific weight of something that had been present for a long time and was only now acquiring a name — the kind of weight that didn't arrive suddenly but had been accumulating quietly, in small increments, across years of decisions and briefings and rooms where trust was the operating currency.
"Break the encryption," Cael said. "I need to know where that message went."
"Six hours. Maybe four if we push."
"We leave for the Mordecai meeting tomorrow evening."
"I know. I'll push for four."
"And Rook."
"Yes."
"Nobody outside this room. Not yet."
Rook looked at him with twenty-five years of being his brother packed into a single, precise expression.
"Not even her?" Rook said.
"She goes into that meeting needing to focus on Mordecai," Cael said. "If she's running a second problem at the same time it splits her attention, and I need her sharp. I need all of her in that room."
"She'd handle it better than you," Rook said. Not as a criticism. As a fact he had simply observed and was reporting accurately.
"Probably," Cael said. "But I'd like to solve at least one thing before I hand her another."
Rook left. Cael sat at his desk and thought about twenty-two years of trust and what it cost when that trust had been built on a foundation that someone had quietly hollowed out from underneath. He thought about every decision Mave had shaped, every briefing she had influenced, every moment he had deferred to her judgment in rooms where judgment was the only currency that mattered and he had believed, completely, that she was spending it in the same direction he was.
The encryption broke in three hours and forty minutes.
The destination resolved to a relay server in the northern territories. The relay's recipient was coded F.I. — Farren, Ironspire intelligence division. The same operative who had run Seraphine's sister as a source for fourteen months, feeding her location and her health and the shape of her life in neutral territory back to a Confederation that had already decided she wasn't worth having.
He read that twice.
The net was smaller than any of them had understood, and it ran through the center of his own house, and tomorrow night he was walking Seraphine into a meeting with the man who had designed it.
He went to find her.