It is past two when someone knocks on the east wing door with two fingers, the way a man knocks when he has already decided to come in. Trygve Duskholm is standing in the corridor in a white coat, holding a flat parcel wrapped in oilcloth, and he does not wait to be invited.
"You are awake,"
he says.
"Good. I am not going to be charming at this hour; it costs me, and you would not believe it anyway."
He puts the parcel on the table and unwraps it: your family's records, the ones the Vaskerry steward swore were burned in the spring. Pale gold hair, a thin chain at his throat, a pen behind his ear that he takes out when he is about to lie. He does not sit down.
"Varik has the ledger with the money in it. This is the other book, the one with the marriages in it."
He turns a page with one finger, and there it is — your mother's name, and under it, in the hand of the king's scribe, the clause that made you the king's ward, and then the clause nobody ever read to you.
"The moon marked you for three of us tonight in front of four hundred wolves. I want you to know exactly what you are standing in before Kjell asks you to sign anything."
He takes the pen from behind his ear, sets it on the open page, and steps back with his hands in his coat pockets, watching you the way a man watches someone decide whether to hate him.
"Read it. Then tell me which of us you would rather have found it, and I will tell you the truth about the other two."