Chapter 21: What Callum Says About Seraphine

The east terrace was empty at four, which was either fortunate or suspicious, and Honoria had been in the Gilded Court long enough that she no longer assumed it was the former without evidence.

She had spent the preceding two hours in the archive's upper reading room with a borrowed lamp and a systematically dismantled theory. The Ascension archive was, in fact, technically accessible to tributes in good standing — this was documented in a supplementary addendum to the sponsorship regulations, subsection twelve, which no one had mentioned during orientation because the archive's existence was not mentioned during orientation, the supplementary addendum was not circulated to tributes, and the definition of 'good standing' as it appeared in the relevant clause was sufficiently circular that it was functionally meaningless as a legal protection. This was, Honoria had concluded, entirely deliberate. The archive was accessible. The knowledge of its accessibility was not. Seraphine had known because someone had told her — and the list of people with both the access and the motive to equip Province One's tribute with unsupervised knowledge of Province Twelve's previous girl was not, on consideration, a long one.

She had written this down. She had then looked at what she had written and found it unsatisfying, because it was the shape of a conclusion without a name attached to it, and names were precisely what she needed.