The Founder Who Ruled A Country

Chapter Nine: The Chamberlain

The prosecutor's office opened a case against Senator Cordell Rayne before the end of the next day.

The announcement came at four in the afternoon, and by five every network in the country had cut away from whatever it was showing. Rayne's office said nothing. Detective Pasco was suspended that same evening, and he handed his badge across the front desk of the precinct where he had once laid out the evidence against Zara one page at a time. The espionage charges against her collapsed overnight. Without them, the warrant against Lucien had nothing left to stand on, and it went with them.

They released him at nine the next morning. A clerk slid his wallet and keys across the counter in a plastic tray and asked him to sign for them, and he signed Lucien Kerrigan in his usual hand. He had spent two nights in a cell, and he had never once said who he was.

Zara was waiting outside on the steps.

She stood exactly where he had stood the night she walked out of this building, with two cups of coffee and her bandaged hand tucked into her coat pocket. She looked as if she hadn't slept in days. When she saw him, she didn't smile. She just came down the steps and held out a cup.

"You didn't tell them," she said.

"No."

"Idiot," she said softly, and then she put her arms around him and held on, coffee and all, while the morning traffic went past.

They stood like that for a long moment. When she finally stepped back, her face had changed. The relief was still there, but something harder had moved in behind it.

"Lucien, the money that paid Rayne came from Valmorre," she said. "Someone in your own country has been paying an American senator to destroy your company. This didn't start in Harbridge."

He had been thinking the same thing for two nights on a narrow bench. Rayne was finished, and Bastian was falling, but they had only ever been the hands. Whoever had been paying them was still out there, and it was not here.

The war was in Valmorre.

* * *

They flew out together that night, the night before the Council vote. Zara spent most of the flight with her forehead against the window, and when the mountains finally rose out of the dark below them, white stone and glass glowing along the cliffs, she let out a slow breath.

"You grew up with this," she said.

"Part of the time," he said. "The rest of the time I was in Harbridge, failing algebra."

The car took them up the switchback road to the palace. Aurelio was waiting at the gates in his dark coat, and Lucien knew something was wrong the moment he saw him. The old steward's face was grey, and he bowed to them both without his usual care.

"Your Highness. Counsellor." He kept his voice low. "I have traced the Chamberlain account."

Lucien stopped walking. "How?"

"The only way a steward can, sir. Through the household books." Aurelio glanced back toward the lit windows of the palace. "Every account the royal household has ever opened passes through my ledgers. This one was opened inside these walls, under the palace's own authority. Whoever opened it had access to the royal seal."

Zara looked at Lucien. Lucien looked up at the palace, at one window in particular on the second floor, where a lamp was still burning.

"Take Miss Bennett to her rooms," he said.

He went straight to his uncle's study.

* * *

Prince Casimir was sitting at his desk with a stack of papers for the morning's vote spread in front of him. He looked up when the door opened without a knock, and for once he did not bother to arrange his face.

"Lucien. I heard you were released."

"No thanks to you." Lucien shut the door behind him. "You left me in a foreign cell. You ordered the embassy to deny I existed."

Casimir set down his pen. "Yes."

The word landed harder than a lie would have. Lucien had come ready for excuses, and his uncle offered none.

"I have governed this country for two years," Casimir said evenly, "while you wrote software in a garage on the other side of the world. I wanted the throne, Lucien. I won't pretend otherwise. When you fell, I saw a way to take it that the Council would accept. It was ugly, but it was legal, and I took it."

"And the Chamberlain?"

Casimir frowned. "The what?"

"A private account opened inside this palace, under the royal seal. It has been paying Senator Rayne to bury my company." Lucien leaned on the desk. "Tell me you've never heard of it."

His uncle stared at him. The color drained slowly from his face, and his hand went flat against the papers in front of him.

"I have never heard that name in my life," Casimir said. "I have never paid a foreign senator a single coin. I wouldn't have needed to. You were doing well enough ruining yourself without my help."

Lucien searched his face for the lie and could not find it. A man who had just admitted to wanting the throne had no reason to lie about the rest. And Casimir's hand, still pressed against the papers, was shaking.

Lucien believed him, and that frightened him more than anything else.

He walked back to his rooms through the dark corridors without seeing them. If his uncle had only taken advantage of the fall, then someone else had caused it. Someone else had built the whole trap, the stolen code and the senator, the voice on the phone and the men in the garage. Someone inside these walls, with the royal seal within reach, who had been patient for a very long time.

He did not sleep. He sat by the window and watched the sky over the mountains turn from black to grey.

At dawn, a soft sound came from the door. A folded note lay on the floor, slipped underneath it. Lucien crossed the room and picked it up, and his breath caught at the handwriting, thin and unsteady, the hand of an old man.

Come and see me before the vote.