The next day came and went, bleeding away into the sweltering, unforgiving heat of the capital, and Heena had almost absolutely nothing to show for it.
Which was, if she was being ruthlessly honest with herself, entirely predictable.
This wasn't some cheap, serialized play where the protagonist casually wandered into a fragrant teahouse, dropped a single silver coin on the table, struck up a convenient conversation with a gossipy merchant's wife, and walked out forty minutes later with the complete, annotated history of a noble family's darkest, most guarded secrets. That was simply not how real information worked in the capital. Real information was slow. It was stubborn, paranoid, and highly defensive. It hid in places you couldn't reach without either extensive time or high-level access — and right now, as a supposed dead woman wearing a young master's disguise, she had a desperate lack of both.
