The Price Of Knowing
The capital looked different when you returned to it in disgrace. Mira had grown up in its streets, learned its moods the way a sailor learns a particular stretch of coast — where the currents ran treacherous, which taverns you could drink in without becoming involved in someone else's quarrel, which merchants gave honest weight and which shaved it. She had served in its palace for eleven years. She knew its smell, its light, the particular quality of its silences. And yet coming back to it now, with the crown in her pack and three men dead somewhere on the road between here and Varath, she found it looked like a city she had only heard described.
The men had come for her at the second inn, forty miles north of the capital. They had not been subtle — you rarely were when your employers wanted the message delivered as much as the object — but they had been professional, and there had been a moment when she thought they had her. She still did not know who had sent them. The cut along her left forearm was clean and would heal without infection if she kept it clean, and one of them had said something in the moments before the end, something she kept returning to: *The king doesn't know it exists. That's the whole problem.*
She had a contact in the city — a woman named Fen who dealt in historical objects and the information that accumulated around them, who owed Mira a favour of