Paper Trails

Darkness waited behind the shelf.

A narrow stone staircase descended beneath the study, turning sharply enough that the bottom disappeared almost immediately.

“You were right,” Isabelle said.

“I always am.”

“Yeah, yeah. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

She opened the small shutter on a nearby lantern until only a thin line of light escaped, then we stepped inside.

The bookshelf closed behind us with a soft mechanical thud.

The sound went through my chest before my mind caught up. A different passage. A different staircase. But for an instant I could feel my mother’s hand at the back of my head, my father kneeling in front of me, the scrape of barriers closing somewhere behind as I ran into darkness.

My fingers tightened around the railing. Isabelle had gone down two steps before noticing I’d stopped. She looked back, so I started moving again before she could ask.

The memory followed for several steps before fading into the stone. The staircase ended at a single wooden door that was, somehow, unlocked.

The room beyond was small, more like an old refuge than an archive or a dungeon.

A narrow cot folded against one wall. Shelves held water flasks and preserved food that had been replaced recently. A wardrobe stood beside a cabinet, while a plain desk occupied the centre beneath a single oil lamp.

The sort of room someone built because they expected that one day they’d need somewhere the rest of the world could not reach.

Cedric had found another use for it.

Papers covered the desk in untidy layers: folders, loose notes, three ledgers and two open packets. I crossed the room as Isabelle shut the door behind us.

For the first several minutes, the documents were frustratingly normal.

Troop assignments, supply movements, names of officers and household transfers filled the first pages, followed by several sheets of expenses so ordinary that I began to resent the amount of effort required to reach them.

“Find anything?” Isabelle asked.

“Yeah. Cedric spends way too much money on books.”

She ignored me and opened the second ledger. I reached for a closed book near the far corner of the desk.

The cover had no title.

When I lifted it, several folded pages slipped from between the back cover and the final sheet. They scattered across the floor. The first contained a list of names.

Several were familiar.

Not because I knew the people, but because I knew the Houses beside them: Falkenberg and Brankovic first, then Valemont.

My hand stopped.

“Isabelle.”

She was already beside me before I finished saying it.

We spread the pages across the desk. At first, they looked like intelligence reports.

Then I noticed the annotations.

Imperial orders copied by hand. Payments routed through offices that did not officially exist sat beside dates, locations, and the names of men assigned to operations later described publicly as accidents, illness, suicide or treason.

Cedric’s own notes filled the margins. They were not confessions so much as records—insurance. He had kept evidence of what the Crown ordered him to do, and evidence of what he had done for them.

“They must have something on him,” Isabelle suggested.

I read the next page.

An operation years before Valemont. Cedric’s name did not appear directly, but a designation did. The same designation appeared beside a payment recorded after Falkenberg’s wife was poisoned, then again near the report concerning her husband’s supposed suicide, and again in correspondence surrounding Brankovic.

The dates formed a pattern of work, silence and reappearance somewhere else, while failed attempts had their own gaps.

Periods where Cedric seemed to vanish from official records now had answers.

“He was involved in all of them,” I said.

The words sounded strangely flat as Isabelle turned another page.

“He wasn’t alone.”

That answer made everything suddenly feel much larger.

The Crown had directed it, and Cedric had carried it out.

Then he had quietly kept enough proof to drag them down with him if they ever decided that he had become inconvenient. It was a partnership held together by mutual blackmail, which felt very Imperial.

I found the Valemont entries and read the date twice. Orders to isolate the estate sat beside false notices that had been prepared before the attack had ever begun, along with instructions concerning surviving witnesses.

My name appeared once, listed at eight years old with my status marked unresolved.

I stopped reading.

Beside me, Isabelle had gone completely silent, so I looked towards her. She was holding one page with both hands, the colour drained from her face.

“What?”

She didn’t react, so I moved closer.

Rochefort.

The date was more than a decade old. A medical report beneath several short instructions described a persistent fever, physicians predicting recovery and a payment to one of the household doctors.

Then came a line concerning replacement of a tonic with a prepared compound intended to worsen the fever while preserving the appearance of natural illness.

The final note read: Subject deceased.

Isabelle’s fingers began to shake.

“My mother.”

She had been seven.

Disease. No knights. No conspiracy.

That was what she had told me, and that was what she had believed, but the page said otherwise.

Another annotation sat at the bottom.

A short confirmation from the same designation appearing across the other operations.

Cedric.

Isabelle lowered the page very carefully, and for once, I had nothing useful to say.

Her jaw tightened.

“Take it.”

“Isabelle—”

A click sounded above us—the bookshelf opening.

Isabelle’s eyes found mine, and we both realised there was nowhere else to go: no second door, no window, only the wardrobe.

We returned the papers to rough approximations of where we had found them, replacing the closed book, ledger and loose stack as quickly as we could.

The Valemont records disappeared beneath my cloak before I realised that I had taken them.

Isabelle folded the Rochefort pages and kept them in her hand.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, measured and unhurried. He was back far earlier than I had expected; either the palace meeting had ended quickly, or he had left before it did.

Isabelle extinguished the lantern and opened the wardrobe; we stepped inside and pulled the doors almost closed.

The room narrowed to a line of light.

Then the door opened, and Cedric entered.

I saw him only in fragments through the gap: dark uniform, gloved hands and pale-gold hair beneath the lamp as he crossed the room.

He was close enough that if I opened the wardrobe and took two steps, I could reach him. My hand rested against the hilt of my sword without drawing it.

The reason we had come mattered more than the fact that he was standing only several feet away.

Cedric placed a leather document case on the desk, opened the clasp and removed several bundles of paper. They shifted softly as he checked the first pages and arranged them beside the other records.

For one terrible second, his hand paused above the closed book we had tampered with, and my breathing stopped. He moved past it, and a minute later, the case closed.

Then Cedric left.

His footsteps climbed the stairs, and the bookshelf shut behind him. We waited anyway until I had counted fifty breaths, then Isabelle opened the wardrobe, and I stepped out after her.

The new documents sat on the desk, the ink still fresh.

Imperial seals marked the pages. By the time I reached the desk, Isabelle had opened the first bundle. Her eyes moved down the page, stopped, then jumped to the next sheet and another after that.

“Isabelle?”

Her eyes stayed on the page. I moved towards her, and when she looked up, the shock from reading about her mother was still there, but something new had joined it: fear.

“We need to go.”

“What is it?”

She gathered the pages together.

“Now!”

I reached for the top sheet, but she pulled the bundle against her chest.

I took the Valemont records, the pages connecting Cedric to Falkenberg and Brankovic, and the copied Imperial orders. Isabelle kept the new bundle and the evidence concerning Rochefort.

Cedric would notice.

There was no way around that anymore.

We had entered hoping to learn something without alerting him, but whatever Isabelle had just read mattered more.

We headed back up immediately.

A small recessed button sat on the back of the shelf, almost exactly where the book had been on the other side.

Of course.

Pull the book from the study, press the button from the inside.

Same mechanism, two directions.

Annoyingly clever.

I pressed it, and the mechanism engaged beneath my hand, revealing the study beyond the moving shelf.

We crossed the estate faster than we had entered it.

The delivery wagon was gone. The patrol had changed direction. A servant almost caught us at the eastern staircase, but Isabelle pulled me through a side room and out onto the balcony before she turned the corner.

From there, the garden trees were close enough. We cleared the wall, caught the neighbouring branches and dropped into the darkness beyond the estate.

Only then did I speak.

“The guild?”

Isabelle was already pulling her hood up.

“No.”

She looked towards the distant glow of the capital.

“The dockyard.”