Cael Dornvast had been standing outside her door every night for four days, and Rania had not yet decided what to do about him.
He was good at his job. That much was obvious. He moved through doorways the way water moved through pipes, quietly and without ceremony, taking up exactly as much space as necessary and none more. When she reviewed the household, he gave her four sentences about the security situation and then stopped talking, which she found vastly preferable to the ministers who gave her forty sentences about the security situation and managed to say less. His men were positioned correctly. His shift rotations were sensible. He had, without being asked, changed the lock protocols on the treasury room the morning after she'd used the Ink.
He had also, for the past eleven months, been filing regular reports to a handler employed by the Thorngate Consortium.
She had found this on the second day, buried in a financial record that nobody had flagged because it wasn't labeled anything useful. A regular payment, modest in amount, quarterly, originating from a shell account in Thorngate's name that had been disguised as a maintenance contractor. She had stared at the entry for a while and then looked up at the window and thought about it.
The obvious move was to fire him.
She did not make the obvious move.
The thing about obvious moves was that they solved one problem and announced your method of solving problems to everyone watching. If she dismissed her head of security for being a Thorngate informant, Thorngate would know she had found him. Thorngate would send a different informant. The next one would be harder to identify because they would be more careful, and because she would have demonstrated that she checked financial records for irregular payments, which meant the next payment would be structured differently.
Better to keep the informant she knew about. A known informant was an asset, if you were careful about what they saw.
The question was whether to tell him that she knew.
She had been thinking about this for two days, turning it over, testing the angles. There was an argument for silence: let him keep reporting, control what information reached him, use him without his knowledge. Clean. Simple. But it required a performance she would have to maintain indefinitely, and Rania had found in her professional life that performances you had to maintain indefinitely had a way of becoming expensive.
There was a different argument. One that was riskier and stranger and that she could not entirely justify on strategic grounds, but that she kept returning to anyway.
On the evening of the fifth day, she called him in.
He came to attention inside the door in the way that suggested military training, some years ago, before whatever had brought him to this particular position. He was not young, not old, somewhere in a middle distance that suited him. His face did not do much in the way of expression. She had noticed this before and had found it, initially, somewhat difficult to read. Now she recognized it for what it was: not blankness but control. The face of someone who had decided a long time ago that expressions were a currency he preferred not to spend carelessly.
"Sit down," she said.
He sat. Across the desk from her, in the chair she had positioned there for this specific conversation because she wanted a desk between them, not for her own comfort but because formality sometimes helped people say difficult things more clearly.
She looked at him for a moment. He looked back without discomfort. This, she noted, was also useful data. A man with a guilty conscience either avoids eye contact or overcorrects and gives you too much of it. Cael was simply present, which meant either he had an exceptionally clean conscience or an exceptionally well-managed one.
"How long have you been employed by Thorngate," she said.
Not a question. She had learned early that framing things as questions gave the other person room to decide whether to answer. Framing them as statements of existing fact gave them a different problem: they had to decide whether to contradict you.
Something moved across Cael's face. Not panic. Something slower and more considered. He held the eye contact for another three seconds, and then he looked at the surface of the desk between them, and then he looked back up.
"Eleven months," he said.
"At what interval do you report?"
"Monthly. Sometimes more often if there's something worth reporting quickly."
"And what have you told them."
"Staff movements. Visitor logs. Your schedule, where I could determine it. The state of the treasury room security before you had it changed." A pause. "Nothing I thought they could use to cause immediate harm. I was told it was a business intelligence arrangement. That's what they called it."
"Business intelligence," she repeated.
"Yes."
"And when Lord Ashveil died and I arrived, did the nature of the arrangement change?"
He was quiet for a moment. "My handler sent a message asking me to assess your—" He stopped. Started again. "Asking me to assess your capacity for leadership. Whether you were likely to be a serious problem for the Consortium's interests."
"What did you tell him."
For the first time, something that might have been dry amusement crossed his face and disappeared. "I told him it was too early to say."
Rania looked at him. She thought about the nights she had spent in the study with the treasury records, the lamp burning until two in the morning, the half-eaten meals that one of the household staff cleared away without comment. She thought about what a man standing outside that door every evening might observe, if he was paying attention.
"Here is what I would like to offer you," she said. "I will pay you twice your current rate. In return, you will continue to file reports to your handler. The reports will contain accurate information about things I decide you should know about, and nothing about the things I don't. You will also begin providing me with whatever information you receive from Thorngate through that channel, which I expect will be more useful to me than what you've been sending them." She let that sit for a moment. "If you agree, I would like you to continue as head of security, because you are competent and because I would rather have someone in that position I understand than someone I don't."
The room was quiet.
Cael was looking at her with an expression she couldn't fully categorize. Not the absent blankness of before. Something more awake.
"You could simply dismiss me," he said.
"Yes."
"Most people would."
"Most people would also send a direct denial to Kaldreth's initial demand letter rather than a carefully noncommittal acknowledgment. I'm not most people."
Another silence. He looked at the desk again, then at the window, then back at her. She waited. She was, when the situation required it, a very patient person. What she lacked in the ability to comfort people she made up for in the ability to simply sit with them without filling the space.
"What would you have me report," he said. "As a first example."
"Tell them the new heir is overwhelmed. That she spends most of her time in her rooms reading old documents and has not yet met with any of the creditor representatives. That the palace household is demoralized and the succession feels unstable." She paused. "All of this is technically true, by the way. I have been reading old documents. The household is demoralized. And the succession is, from a certain angle, quite unstable."
"And the part about being overwhelmed?"
"Let them decide what to believe about that."
He was quiet for another moment. Then he said, "Thorngate's representative is a man named Verek. He's been with the Consortium for twelve years. He collects information from six or seven properties across the region and he routes it to someone more senior whose name I don't know. He responds fastest to reports that confirm things he already suspects." A small pause. "I think you should know that."
Rania picked up her pen. Wrote: Verek. Confirmation bias. 12 years, regional handler.
"Thank you," she said.
"I haven't agreed to anything yet."
"I know. But you told me about Verek anyway." She looked up. "That was the agreement, more or less. You just made it."
He looked at her for a long moment. She had the impression he was reassessing something, recalculating some estimate he had made about her and finding it needed adjustment. She was familiar with this look. She had seen it on the faces of clients and colleagues and, once, memorably, on the face of a very senior partner at a fund who had hired her expecting a junior analyst and received, somewhat to his alarm, someone who had read the footnotes of every document on the table.
"Double rate," he said.
"Double rate."
He stood. Something about the way he stood was slightly different from how he had sat down, some subtle shift in how he was orienting himself in the room. Rania noticed it and did not remark on it.
He crossed to the door. Stopped.
"For what it's worth," he said, without turning around, "the report I sent last week. I told Verek you'd changed the treasury locks and restructured the shift rotations within two days of arriving. I thought he should know that much."
"You told them something that made me look competent."
"I told them something that was true."
He opened the door and was gone.
Rania sat at the desk for a moment after he left. The number she had seen above his shoulder in the treasury room was still there, that faded red of an old debt, and she had been carefully not-focusing on it throughout the conversation. Now she let herself look at it, just briefly.
It was smaller than it had been. Or perhaps it was the same size but sitting differently, less like a weight and more like a record.
She filed this away as something interesting and went back to the treasury records.
There were still eleven years' worth to get through before morning.