Chapter 12: The Gold Cloak Commander's Actual Record

The clerk's name was Perris, and he had the particular quality of a man who had spent twenty years being the last person consulted on any subject — a cultivated inconsequence that Elizabeth recognized immediately as either genuine or extremely well-maintained. He was perhaps forty-five, with ink-stained fingers and the faint, permanent squint of someone who read by inadequate candlelight, and he occupied a desk in the Gold Cloak's administrative annex that was positioned, she noted, at precisely the angle where anyone entering from the main corridor would see only his back.

She had found him on a Tuesday, which was not an accident. Mira had established that Tuesdays the senior officers held their morning assembly in the training yard, which left the administrative annex staffed by the middle tier — men of reasonable authority and limited oversight, which was precisely the combination she required.

The hairpin she offered was a good one. Not her best — she retained the best on the theory that she might need it later for something worse — but a silver piece with a small garnet set into the head that had come with Elara's travelling chest and that she suspected cost more than this man earned in a fortnight. She did not offer it directly, which would have been insulting to both of them. She set it on the corner of his desk while explaining, in tones of mild bureaucratic inconvenience, that she was attempting to resolve a question of property assignment related to a retainer recently released from Gold Cloak custody, and that the household steward had sent her to request sight of the intake record.