Chapter 31: 31 - Problem
Adrien went in first, and his father’s study turned out to be exactly what the name suggested. A desk down the middle with a chair on either side of it, two tall windows behind the one that belonged to whoever was in charge, and books along every wall that had room for them. All sorts of books. Ledgers and histories and things about metal and things about rivers, sitting together in an order that had probably made sense to one man and nobody else.
Adrien pulled out the chair that had belonged to Alaric and lowered himself into it.
"Take the other one, Vikir."
"With your permission, then, young master." Vikir put himself down opposite and set the packet of documents on the desk between them. "Or my lord, I suppose it is now. I don’t imagine it’ll take me long to get used to it, but bear with me for a while."
"Don’t worry about it." Adrien folded his hands on the wood. "And let’s do this without going around anything. What did my father send you to do, and how did that end with you in a cage?"
Vikir did not go around anything.
"Your father knew it was coming, my lord."
Adrien’s hands stopped moving.
"He knew what was going to happen to him. I never worked out how, and he never told a soul, and he kept it to himself right up to the end." Vikir turned his hat over once in his lap. "There were men in this house who wanted to do something about it. He told all of them the same thing. That the best thing anybody could do for you and your mother and your sister was nothing at all."
"He chose it?"
"Yes, my lord."
Adrien had suspected some version of that since a road in the mountains, and hearing it out loud from a man who had been standing in the corridor was a different thing entirely.
"Alright," he said. "The rest of it, then."
"I’d been looking into the families that wanted us gone. Arquenay was one of the names on that list, so that’s where I spent most of my time." Vikir sat forward. "And they were doing something with the forest. That camp was not there by accident and it was not there because the ground was convenient. Somebody put those men in that valley on purpose."
"Why?"
"To force a war with Sylvamir."
’That would put the entire kingdom in an impossible position.’
He turned it over and it kept holding together the harder he pushed at it.
’Aurelian knew something about this. He told me on that balcony that half the great houses had started helping themselves and that the kingdom comes apart in two years. This is one of the things he was talking about.’
"Catching elves out of a border forest and selling them," he said. "You don’t need to be clever to see where that ends."
"No, my lord. You take enough of them and you take the wrong one, and eventually somebody on the other side of that border decides they’ve had enough. A war between two kingdoms on this continent would be a disaster for everybody standing in it." Vikir’s mouth went thin. "And now I understand why they chose this territory. It’s close to the line, and our house had already been gutted. Nobody was watching this ground. They could work here for as long as they liked and nobody would ever come up the mountain to check."
"They nearly managed it too."
"They very nearly did."
Adrien put his shoulders against the back of the chair.
"Although it didn’t go that way in the end." He tapped one finger against the desk. "But I wouldn’t have guessed Arquenay for something like this. And looking at it now, they weren’t only doing it here because it was quiet. When the elves finally worked out what was happening in that forest, whose forest would it have been?"
"Ours."
"Ours. Our border, our ground, our name on the map." Adrien’s voice stayed level. "They were setting up somebody else’s crime to be found in our house."
"That does look like the shape of it, my lord." Vikir hesitated before going on. "There’s one more thing I’d like to be clear about, though."
"Go on."
"Gaspard Arquenay hasn’t got the vision or the stomach to have planned this."
Adrien looked at him.
"You’re telling me he was taking orders."
"I’m telling you he was paying invoices."
"From whom?" Adrien ran through it and did not like anywhere it landed. "The king? I met the man. Whatever else Osric Valleroy is, I don’t see him arranging this. And I can’t see it coming out of one of the other houses either. Half of them are too small to want a war and the other half would lose one."
"That part I don’t know." Vikir shook his head. "I only know what I saw and what I heard through those bars for months. But knowing the sort of man Gaspard is, it wasn’t him."
"Leave the books."
Vikir laid them out and squared them off, which was a habit from a man who had spent his life handing things to other people.
"Thank you for telling me. Go and eat something and go to sleep, and I’ll want you again tomorrow."
"My lord."
He went out and closed the door behind him, and Adrien pulled the ledgers across the desk and opened the top one.
Names. Dates. Prices. And two letters appearing again and again beside every payment that had a serious number attached to it.
’So here’s what I actually have.’
’Written proof that a great house of this kingdom has been financing slavers inside my borders. Signed off in their own bookkeeping, in their own hand, by a man who apparently never once considered that anybody would read it.’
He turned a page and carried on reading.
’Arquenay could disappear off that register inside a month with what’s sitting on this desk.’
Adrien looked at the two letters for a long moment.
’The question is what I get for it.’
...
Two hundred kilometres east, Gaspard Arquenay was being handed a cup of tea when his steward came into the room considerably faster than a steward should.
"My lord."
"I’m having breakfast."
"It’s the timber concession."
Gaspard put the cup down. He had chosen that name himself eleven years ago, on the grounds that nobody in this kingdom had ever asked a follow-up question about timber, and in eleven years nobody had.
"What about it."
"It’s gone, my lord."
"Gone how? What do you mean by gone?"
"We’ve had nothing for four days. No riders, no shipment, no word from the site. So I sent two men up to look." The steward’s throat moved. "The camp’s burned. All of it. The tents, the wagons, the pens. Bodies frozen into the ground from one end of that valley to the other."
The tea went cold in front of Gaspard Arquenay and he did not touch it again, and something went down the inside of his shirt that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
"How many did we have up there?"
"Forty, my lord."
"And how many of the forty walked out?"
The steward said nothing at all, and Gaspard got up and put himself at the window with his back to the room.
"Who did it?"
"We don’t know."
"Then find out." His voice did not rise. It got quieter, which everybody in that house knew was considerably worse. "I want to know what came into that valley and I want a name attached to it before the week is out."
"My lord, we don’t even know whether they were..."
"That is Clairmont ground."
The steward stopped talking, and Gaspard stayed where he was, looking out over land that had been his family’s for six generations, and turned the whole thing over the way a man turns over a bill he has no intention of paying.
"The traitor’s boy," he said. "That house has been on its knees for a month and a half. It has shit soldiers and no money and a widow running the accounts."
"Yes, my lord."
"So somebody else did this, and they did it on his ground, and either he knows about it or he doesn’t."
He was quiet for a while after that.
"Have the carriage in a few days. I think it’s time House Arquenay paid our neighbours a visit."
He picked the cup back up, found it stone cold, and set it down again.
"This is not good."
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