The Hero System Glitched And Now It Pays Me to Love My Assassin Wives

"Somebody in this house is reading your mail to the Chancellery and I’m going to charge you for telling you who."

Zelina came into the study at midnight with a wooden box under her arm and dropped it on the table without any care at all.

Inside were twenty six letters. All mine. All sealed by me and delivered by hand.

"They’re open," I said.

"They’re open and closed again. With wax from the same batch, which is the expensive detail." She pulled one out and held it up against the candle. "Look at the edge. You soften it with steam and press it back. People with training do that."

"Where did you get the box?"

"The old map cabinet in the west wing." She sat on the arm of the chair. "It’s been locked since March and the dust on the floor was stepped in. A locked cabinet has no footprints."

"And the key?"

"I had it."

"Why did you have it?"

"Because I’ve spent five years married to a man who wanted me dead, and a careful woman makes copies."

I counted the letters twice before I sorted them.

"Twenty six."

"Twenty six."

"I’ve sent thirty since January."

Zelina raised her head slowly.

"You’re sure?"

"I’ve kept count since the first day. Thirty letters sealed by my own hand." I counted the row again. "Four missing."

"Then there are four he never got around to opening."

"Or four he didn’t put back."

I laid them out by date on the long table. Eleven were from the week of the trial. Six from the week of the Council.

The seventh in the second row stopped me. It was the transfer order for Petre, the apothecary, three days before they found him dead with his own formula on him.

I wrote it. I named the safe house, the hour of the guard change, and the sergeant who was going to move him.

Zelina saw it in my hand and said nothing, which was worse.

"He’d be alive if I hadn’t written this."

"He’d be alive if the kettle didn’t exist." She took the letter out of my fingers and put it back in its row. "Set that aside properly, because if you carry it whole you won’t work today."

"Do you set it aside?"

"I’ve been doing it every night for five years." She squared the edge with the rest. "You learn."

The last three were from this week. One of those three was the order I’d sent to the river garrison.

There was Decimus’s Tuesday, written in my own hand, in a cabinet that had been locked since March.

"Name," I said.

"Price first."

"Zelina."

"Price first." She folded her hands over her knee. "And this time it isn’t gold."

I looked up.

"When all of this is over," she said, "I want you to tell me where you came from."

The study had two candles lit and both of them were behind me, which struck me at that moment as good luck.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"You know exactly what I’m talking about." She didn’t raise her voice. Zelina never raises her voice when she’s winning. "I poisoned that man for five years. I measured his pulse while he slept. I counted his breaths to work out the dose."

"Zelina..."

"Three things." She raised one finger. "He breathed seventeen times a minute asleep. You breathe twelve."

Second finger.

"He held a cup by the bowl. You hold it by the stem, like people who’ve waited tables."

Third.

"And in five years he never once wrote the word sorry, and you sent it to me in January in writing, under your own seal."

She lowered her hand.

"The first one could be an illness," she said. "The second, a new habit. The third, no."

Eleven weeks. She had known before the System, before Saoirse, before Decimus.

And she’d sat on it.

"Why didn’t you say anything?"

"Because the other one would have killed me and you apologized to me in writing." She shrugged. "I’m a chemist, not an idiot. I prefer the one I’ve got."

"And what do you expect me to answer when the day comes?"

"The truth."

"And if the truth is worse than what you’re imagining?"

"Then it’s worse and I’ll know it." She leaned forward. "Vaelion, I’ve spent eleven weeks working with a man whose most basic facts I don’t have. I don’t do that with anyone."

"Why do it with me?"

"Because in eleven weeks I haven’t caught you in a useful lie." She settled back on the arm of the chair. "And at this point that makes me more nervous than catching one would."

"Deal," I said.

"Put it in writing."

"Now?"

"Now, under your seal, and I keep it." She pushed the inkwell toward me with two fingers. "The other one gave me his word too."

I wrote it. Four lines and the seal. She read it, folded it in four and slid it into her sleeve lining, in the same place she keeps the papers she’s stolen.

"Good." Out of that lining came another paper folded the same way. "The steam comes from a field kettle. Copper, narrow spout, continuous jet. There are three in this palace."

"Where?"

"Two in kitchens, with twelve people around them at all hours. Neither one works for opening a letter in secret."

"Did you check them?"

"Both, yesterday, with a tisane as an excuse." She pushed a sleeve back. "The one in the lower kitchen has had a bent spout for a year and scalds sideways. The upper one is used for bread and you can smell yeast three paces off."

"And the wax smells of yeast?"

"The wax smells of nothing, and that’s the finding." She lifted one of the twenty six and held it under my nose. "Smell."

I smelled it. It smelled of nothing.

"A kitchen kettle leaves a trace in wax even if you scrub it. This one left none." She put the letter back in its row. "This kettle doesn’t cook."

She set the paper on the table and didn’t let go of it right away.

"Vaelion, when you read this you’re going to want to go tonight. Don’t go tonight."

I read it.

The third kettle was inventoried under the name of the palace master of arms. Signed for in the register in his own hand, in the writing I’d watched correct Lunara Marr’s stance for twenty years.

Bren Olvar.

I held the paper longer than it takes to read it.

"How many of the twenty six went through him?"

"I don’t know. I know the kettle has been in his name for twelve years." Zelina stood. "And I know he trained half this guard, including the one sleeping outside your door."

"I’ll go in the morning."

"Liar."

"I’ll go in the morning," I repeated, "because I want Lunara standing there."

Zelina picked up the box of letters and stopped at the door without fully turning around.

"She isn’t going to forgive you for it," she said.

"I know."

"I don’t mean you." She opened the door. "I mean him."