The room was small, which Sito had not expected.
He had been in the council room with the teardrop table and he had been in the throne room with the mosaic, and this was neither.
It was a plain square chamber off the west corridor with one window, one table, six chairs and nothing on the walls at all.
Alfred Cagle, Master of the Castle, was setting out cups when Sito came in.
"Your highness."
"Alfred."
"You've grown."
"Everyone keeps saying that."
"Everyone is correct." Alfred set down the last cup. "Sit on the left of your father. Do not put your elbows on the table. Do not drink anything until he has drunk something."
"Why?"
"Respect for the king is important even in front of his own advisors." said Alfred. "Sit down, your highness."
---
Reginald Stillwater arrived next with a folio under his arm, said "my prince" without appearing to look at him, and sat.
Night was already in the room.
Sito had not seen him come in and had not seen him at any point in the preceding four minutes, and then he turned his head and the Master of Shadows was standing against the far wall with his arms folded.
"You weren't there a second ago."
"I was," said Night.
"You weren't."
"You'll get better at it," said Night.
---
The King and Queen came in together and everybody stood.
"Sit," said Xerxes.
Everybody sat.
Marcus came in last, with his coat brushed and his hair tied back and nine weeks of road entirely invisible on him, and he did not sit, because nobody had told him to.
"My Crown."
"Lord Benedictus." Xerxes put both hands flat on the table. "You were gone four months."
"Yes, my Crown."
"Begin."
---
He began with the mine, and he was extremely fast about it, and Sito, who had watched this man work a room for a hundred and thirty days, understood inside about a minute that he was watching a completely different technique.
In Vradia Marcus had taken his time. He had let silences run. He had given things away before he was asked for them.
Here he simply put it all down as fast as a man could talk.
Five levels. Sixty-eight miles paced twice.
The worked stone that was not elven and not dwarven and matched no human style in the records.
A survey mage's core reading that put the dungeon's heart more than a hundred miles further north than anybody had walked, and an ambient mana density at the far point that was higher than the deep groves of the Mist Forest.
Eleven dead on the joint expedition. Four of them elven.
And the deepest point they had reached lying close enough to the elven capital to spark concern.
He did not stop once and he did not embellish anything, and when he was done the room was quiet for some time.
"Reginald," said the King.
"It is consistent, my Crown."
"With what?"
"With itself," said Reginald. "Which is the only thing I can test at this range. The numbers do not contradict one another and the sequence of decisions makes sense in the order given. I would want the survey tallies."
"I have them here," said Marcus.
"Then I shall be happy in about three days."
"The terms," said Xerxes.
"All mithril under Epirian soil to Epiria outright. A third of everything lifted from under Vradia." Marcus said it plainly.
"A fixed portion of that third to be spent on arming and supplying the clearing teams before any of it comes south. No surface works in the forest — nothing, no shaft, no road, no camp, everything in and out through our own mouth. Elven overseers underground with standing authority to halt work, no appeal to me or to the Crown. Ninety years, renewable."
Nobody said anything.
"And I signed it," said Marcus.
Alfred Cagle's face did not move. Reginald's pen stopped.
"Repeat the second one," said the Queen.
"A third, your majesty."
"You went north for a mithril mine and you have come back with a third of half of it."
"Yes, your majesty."
"After they learned it was under their own capital."
"Yes."
"Lord Benedictus," said Amestris, "at the point at which those elders understood what was beneath that city, what could you have asked for?"
Marcus did not hesitate, and Sito found afterward that this was the part he remembered most clearly.
"Half," he said. "Half and the northern groves and a road. I could have had it that afternoon and three of their eleven elders would have voted for it out of fright."
"And you took a third."
"I took a third."
Xerxes had not moved.
"The first question," he said.
"My Crown."
"Could they have refused you entirely and solved it themselves?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because the only door into that dungeon is in our rock and there has never been another," said Marcus. "They cannot reach the core without us. We cannot survive the rupture without them. That is the whole of the arrangement and it was true before I opened my mouth."
"Then you had them."
"I had them."
"Second question." Xerxes turned a cup a quarter turn on the table. "What does the Crown gain in the first ten years of this that it would not have gained by taking half?"
And there it was.
Sito was watching for it because Marcus had told him on a terrace in Thelvarion that it would happen, and he saw it, the exact moment, somewhere in the middle of that question, when his father finished the arithmetic and arrived at a word.
"Nothing," said Marcus.
"Nothing."
"In the first ten years, nothing, my Crown. The clearing will eat the first four or five years of yield entirely and I built that into the terms deliberately. The Crown will see very little mithril before your son is a grown man."
"And you understood that when you signed."
"I did."
Xerxes nodded slowly.
"Third question," he said.
"When Vradia comes to renew this, in ninety years, who will be sitting on the other side of that table?"
Marcus's head came up.
It was very slight. Sito saw it because he was eight years old and had nothing to do in that room except watch faces, and he saw the Master of Diplomacy be surprised.
"Elders who were children when it was signed, my Crown. Some of them elders who are not yet born."
"And what will they have been told about us?"
"That we came by the road," said Marcus. "That we asked instead of took. That we could have had half and did not."
"By whom?"
"By the people who were in the room. Who will still be alive, my Crown. That is the part our own people do not hold in their heads properly. Vaeneth will be sitting in that chair in ninety years. So will Sylvaen. So will their general. The men who will negotiate the renewal of this treaty are the same men who watched me sign it."
Xerxes was quiet for a long moment.
"That is a very long horizon," he said.
"It is their horizon, my Crown. Not mine. I only borrowed it."
"I will not pretend to you," said Xerxes.
He sat back.
"I sent you for a mine. You have brought me a third of a mine, a bill for a war underground, and ninety years of elven overseers with authority to stop my own men working in my own rock. Duncan will be sick. My treasury will write me eleven letters and every one of them will be correct."
"Yes, my Crown."
"And in ninety years there will be an heir of my blood in that chair who will get a renewal without having to send an army north to get it." Xerxes picked up the cup. "Which I did not ask you for and which I would not have thought to price."
Alfred Cagle, very carefully, exhaled.
"I am not pleased, Marcus."
"No, my Crown."
"I am going to be unpleased about it for some time, publicly, because there are men in this kingdom who need to see me be unpleased about it." Xerxes drank. "Privately, you have done something I did not ask for and could not have ordered, and I am aware of the difference. Do not make a habit of signing things."
"I will try, my Crown."
"You will not try. You will do it again the moment you think you are right." Xerxes set the cup down. "Which is why I gave you the ring."
"Sito."
Sito's stomach went through the floor.
"Father."
"Stand up."
He stood up.
"You sat in that hall. You sat in the council trunk. You were in rooms I was not in and you were the only Meridius in them." Xerxes did not raise his voice at any point. "The elven royals and their council. How did they come off?"
"How do you mean, Father?"
"I mean were they arrogant. Were they slippery. Were they people who will hold to a thing or people who will find a way out of it in forty years." Xerxes watched him. "Answer it in full."
Sito thought about it properly, because he had been told not to be clever and because he had actually been there.
"The King's warm," he said. "Actually warm, not the kind you do at people. He's old and he lets you see it, and he asks questions he doesn't already know the answers to, which Father, nobody here does that. The Queen's the dangerous one. She says about nine words an hour and every single one of them is the right one."
"Go on."
"The council's split. About three of them hate us. Vaeneth's the loudest one, and he's old and he's southern and he thinks humans cut things down without thinking about it, and he's not wrong about that, because one of our guards cut a sapling at the border and Vaeneth could've had us all shot."
"Did he?"
"No. Marcus knelt in the grass and asked him to teach us where the line was." Sito swallowed. "That's when it turned. That was the first day. Everything after that was easier because of that one thing."
Marcus was looking very hard at the table.
"And the rest?"
"They're not slippery. That's the thing I'd want to say if I only got to say one." Sito's hands were behind his back and he made himself keep them there. "They don't do the thing our nobles do where they agree with you in the room and then it's different in the corridor. When they didn't like something they said it, in front of everybody, while we were standing there. Elder Vaeneth called us liars to our faces and then voted for the expedition anyway because he thought it was correct."
"And will they hold to it?"
"Yes," said Sito. "I think they'll hold to it harder than we will."
Nobody in that room said anything.
"That is a considerable thing to say about your own kingdom," said the Queen.
"You asked me to answer in full, Mother."
"I did," said Amestris, and did not take it any further.
"Second question," said Xerxes.
"Father?"
"You were in the room when he signed. You had four months of him." The King put his fingers together. "If you had been Marcus, at that table, in front of those elders, with a frightened council and a city with a hole under it — what would you have done?"
The room went extremely quiet.
Sito understood that there were two safe answers. He could say *I would have taken half*, which was the answer a prince gives and which his father might well want.
Or he could say the thing Marcus had said to the Queen of Vradia on that terrace about grandchildren and treaties, which was true and which was not his.
"I'd have asked Baron Geralt for his rotation book," he said.
Xerxes blinked.
It was a very small thing. Sito had never seen it before in his life.
"Explain that."
"There's a man in that mine called Edrin Fell." Sito's voice came out steadier than he expected. "He's not a soldier. He cleared rat dens before this. He stands four paces inside that portal in the dark for six hours at a time and counts, and he doesn't turn round, because if he turns round he might see the thing that's breathing out there and then he'd run and it would follow him out.
"He's taken forty-one shifts. He's rotation lead now, which means he takes the worst ones himself instead of giving them to somebody else. His daughter was born five weeks ago and he hasn't been home to see her because the camp pays double for the men who stay through."
"And the rotation book?"
"There's a page of them, Father. Eleven at a time, six hours each, since the day they broke through. Names in a clerk's hand." Sito made himself keep going. "If I'd had that book I'd have put it on the table in front of the elders, open, and asked one of them to read it out. Not to shame them. Just so that everybody in that room was looking at the same thing while we argued about thirds."
"To what end?"
"Because the number we were arguing about was how fast that hole gets shut," said Sito. "And Marcus knew that and I knew that and I'm not sure the elders did. They thought we were arguing about mithril. We were arguing about how many more shifts Edrin Fell stands."
Xerxes did not say anything for what felt to Sito like a very long time.
"You would have used a man's name," he said.
"Yes, Father."
"That is a lever, Sito. You understand that. You would have picked that man up and used him as a lever against a foreign council."
"Yes," said Sito. "I know. That's why I'd have asked him first."
Reginald Stillwater's pen had stopped some time ago.
"My Crown," he said quietly, "may I note that for the record."
"You may."
Xerxes was still looking at his son.
"Where did you get that," he said. "Who taught you to put a name on a table."
"Nobody, Father."
"Somebody did."
"Nobody taught me," said Sito. "I just went down into the mine and talked to him. Nobody told me not to."
His father gazed at him and held it steady for a time. Then he nodded.
"Very well. Get out," said the King. "All of you."
Chairs went back. Marcus bowed, and Alfred bowed, and Reginald gathered his folio, and Sito bowed and went for the door with his ears roaring and no idea whatsoever whether he had done well or ruined something.
At the door Marcus put a hand briefly on his shoulder and did not say anything, and Sito decided afterward that this had probably been good.
The door shut.
"Night."
"My Crown."
"Stay."
The Master of Shadows had not moved from the wall in an hour and did not move now.
Xerxes sat looking at the door for a while.
"Your report came in eleven days ago," he said.
"It did."
"How much of what he told me was in it?"
"All of it, my Crown."
"All."
"Every figure. Every level. The stone, the readings, the dead. The terms in order." Night tipped his head slightly. "Your ambassador told you the truth and he told it to you faster than I would have thought a man could."
"And the differences?"
"One."
Xerxes turned the cup a quarter turn.
"Say it."
"On the road home, nine days south of the Vradian border, a hollow came into their camp. It killed a horse and it killed a royal guard called Bertram Ault and it took Lord Benedictus eleven minutes to put down."
Night's voice did not change at all. "In that eleven minutes the beast could not be held still long enough for a killing strike. The Master could not land one. Your captain could not hold the ground. Your prince left cover, went up onto the west wall of a road cutting, put a mithril knife into the side of its skull from a direction it could not read, and made it stop for about one second.
"That is when Lord Benedictus killed it."
The room was very quiet.
"He omitted that," said Xerxes.
"He did. He also stopped the column short of Greymarch and told eleven royal guards, in the open, that it does not leave the road and that the boy was in the wagon." Night shrugged one shoulder. "Eleven men, my Crown. Not one of them has said a word since. That is a better-run secret than most of the ones in this castle."
"And his reason?"
"He gave it to them straight. That the boy has five years before his Rite, that the most valuable thing he owns is that nobody outside your council knows what he is, and that a story about a child grows every time a tavern tells it."
Xerxes nodded slowly.
"That is exactly correct," he said.
"It is."
"And he did not tell it to me."
"No," said Night.
Xerxes said nothing.
He was not angry. Night had spent nineteen years in rooms with this man and could tell the difference between the King being angry and the King filing a thing on a shelf mentally, and this was the second one.
Marcus Benedictus had protected the prince, which was right, and had done it well, which was better. And in doing it he had made a judgment about what his king needed to know and had acted on that judgment without asking.
That was a fact about Marcus. It went on the shelf with the other facts about Marcus.
"You have an opinion," said the King.
"I have an observation."
"Give it."
"I have read eleven field reports about that boy in the last four months," said Night. "Two of them are about the fight. The other nine are not.
"He goes down into a mine nobody asked him to go down into and talks to a guildsman for a few minutes and can still tell you his wife's name. He gets out of a second-floor window in a foreign capital and comes back with the elven princess. He plays a Vradian song in front of their entire court, and their king and council sang along.
"None of that is training, my Crown. You cannot drill a child to do those things. He is simply doing them."
"And the fight?"
"The fight is the least interesting thing in the file." Night unfolded his arms for the first time. "Any number of people can throw a knife. What nobody else on that hillside did was work out, under a Master who had ordered him to stay put, that he was the only object on that field the beast could not perceive — and then argue a Fifth Circle into letting him prove it."
"He argued with Marcus."
"He told him they would all die there otherwise. In front of the guards." Night paused. "Marcus gave in."
Xerxes drank the last of the cup.
"That is all, my Crown," said Night. "I am not recommending anything. You did not ask me to."
"No," said Xerxes. "I did not."
"Send for Gideon."
"Tonight?"
"Tonight." Xerxes stood. "Tell him I want the preparation strengthened. As potent as it can be made without harming the boy, and I want him to tell me to my face where that line is, and I want him to be certain of it, because if he is wrong about it I will hang him."
"And the Old Master?"
"In the morning. Tell him the boy's training is to be increased."
"He will ask by how much."
"Then tell him," said Xerxes, "that I want the ambidexterity used. Properly used, not as a curiosity. The boy fights with two blades and now he throws, and I am told he throws from cover at things that cannot see him, and I want those two facts to stop being separate.
"Tell the old goat I want it seamless. He will know what I mean and he will be insufferable about having thought of it first."
Night inclined his head.
"My Crown."
He went out, and Xerxes Meridius stood at the window of a small square room and looked down over the city for a long time.
---
Three floors below, Sito was sitting on the wall above the training arena with his boots hanging over the drop.
He was eating a piece of bread he had stolen out of Damien's kitchen and feeling enormously relieved that the whole thing was over and that nobody had found out about the hollow.