Chapter 64: Ansel Gave Me Six Doors to Guard, So I Set a Dinner Table in Front of All of Them

The letter from Ansel Vosk was still lying on my desk when Zelina arrived, and she read it standing up, the way she reads anything she intends to argue with.

"He tells you to choose a door to defend," she said. "And your face is already doing the thing it does before you do something expensive."

"Then you know what I’m about to write."

"Say it out loud first. I want it on record that I advised against it."

I pulled the stopper off the ink and dipped the pen.

"He’s spent twelve years billing me for things I didn’t know I’d bought," I said. "Rewards I earned, points he siphoned, a jar of honey on a windowsill. The man’s whole religion is ledgers. So I’m not going to hide behind walls and wait for Friday like a man with something to defend. I’m going to send him an invitation."

"To dinner."

"To be counted." I started writing while she stood over my shoulder pretending not to read, which for Zelina means reading twice. "It’s the only currency he’s ever robbed a treasury to buy. I’m paying up front so I can watch what it does to him."

I wrote four lines.

Ansel Vosk.

There will be no doors defended. There will be one room, and it already has a table in it.

Friday, eight o’clock. Seven chairs. One of them is yours.

Come hungry.

Zelina read it a third time anyway.

"This is either the bravest or the stupidest..."

"You wrote that about the poison test," I said. "You were wrong then. Keep the streak alive."

She took the letter, folded it along my creases instead of her own, and gave it to Teo Marren with delivery instructions that included three exits and a whistle code. Then she came back and planted herself in front of the desk with her arms crossed.

"Seven chairs," she said.

"Six are spoken for."

"And who sits where?"

"Everyone finds out at once, at the table, so nobody negotiates a better seat out of turn." I capped the ink. "That’s how I lost money at my last job. Never auction seats at your own table."

"You had a last job?" One eyebrow went up. "Someday you’re going to tell me about that, and I’m going to bill you for the telling."

"Someday I’m going to pay."

We looked at each other a second longer than the conversation needed. She left first. She usually does, when staying would mean admitting the visit wasn’t business.

Lunara took the news best, which surprised nobody more than it surprised her.

"An assassin sends an ultimatum and the emperor replies with catering." She tested the edge of her sword with her thumb, found it acceptable, put it down again. "I’ll allow it. Two conditions."

"Name them."

"One: I sit between you and the seventh chair."

"Lunara..."

"My second condition is that I sit between you and the seventh chair." She picked the sword back up. "You’ve stopped arguing with me when I’m right. Don’t start over seating."

"It’s your table too," I said. "Sit wherever you want. That’s been true since January and I should have said it sooner."

She went quiet for a moment, doing whatever she does with sentences she wasn’t braced for.

"Fine," she said finally. "Then I choose the chair next to yours. And don’t look pleased about it. It’s tactical. From there I can reach both your throat and his."

"Noted for the seating chart."

Saoirse wanted probabilities, so I gave her the honest version.

"Chances he comes: high. Chances he comes armed: certain. Chances he comes to actually eat: forty percent, rising if Calista cooks, because nobody poisons a kitchen they respect."

"That’s sentiment, not data."

"It’s both. Write it down twice."

She wrote it down twice. Then she uncrossed one of the twos, crossed it back out, and kept the other, which is how Saoirse says a thing moved her without saying so.

Calista said nothing all day until evening, and then she appeared in the small hall with a measuring string and began pacing off the table.

"The seventh chair goes there," she said, pointing. "By the wall, out of the draught from the west door. If he’s spent twelve years eating standing up in corridors, he’ll want to see his hands while he eats."

I looked at her.

"Don’t ask why I know that." She wound the string around her fingers. "Some people you feed by fixing their food. Some you feed by fixing the chair. I’ve done this longer than any of you, and the ones who eat standing up are never full."

Miralys came in last, looked at the seven places being laid, and stayed. She has stayed every evening since the rice lessons started, four evenings now, and each evening she corrects exactly one thing I do wrong and withholds the name of the next thing until I’ve earned it.

"Two days left of the lessons," she said.

"There’s an ultimatum happening Friday."

"Yes." She set the pan on the heat herself. "And there are two evenings before it, and you promised me four. My country holds grudges longer than that over broken promises about bread. Sit down and wash nothing."

So Thursday night, the emperor of the known world stood in his own west kitchen getting corrected about steam by a woman who had not raised her voice above a murmur in eighty days, and it was the best hour of my week, which I did not calculate even once.

[DING]

[Investment tracking: negative.]

[No action registered.]

[Integrity: 47%. No change.]

[Note: I am learning to leave these alone. It took practice.]

Afterward I walked Lunara back along the east gallery, because her rounds end there and because I like walking with her, and I’ve stopped lying about the second part inside my own head even if I still manage it in hallways.

"Six chairs," she said as we walked. "You never said what happens if he sits down."

"Then we eat."

"And after we eat?"

"After we eat, I ask him what his real price is." The gallery lamps threw our shadows long against the stone. "Everybody at that table has carried a price for years. He’s held his for twelve without ever spending it. That means it isn’t money. Money he could have taken any Tuesday."

"And if he won’t name it?"

"Then I name it for him. I priced dead men for a living, Lunara. Living ones are easier. They flinch."

She stopped under the last lamp before her post and turned, and considered me the way she considers terrain before crossing it.

"If Friday goes badly," she said, "and it goes badly fast, I want you to already know where I’ll be standing."

"Between me and the seventh chair."

"Every time." She fixed my collar with two fingers, the old escutcheon gesture from her standard-bearer days, then let go before it could mean what it meant. "Go to sleep, husband. You have a table to set."

At midnight the window opened on its own, and it only does that when something is wrong.

[Carrier load: 57% ▼ 54%]

[HERO.]

[Roderic Alden is asleep in his own bed. Nobody has touched him.]

[The number fell four points in six hours anyway.]

[Something is drinking from his side of the ledger. And it has stopped waiting for Friday.]