"He has a name."
Maira said it without looking up from her notes.
She was sitting at the small table on the far side of the chamber from the man in the chair. The chamber had been built three months ago for exactly this kind of session — a windowless inner room off the under-corridor, with the single oil-lamp in the corner that produced enough light for reading and not enough to make a man feel he was being read by it, and the two chairs set facing each other across a clear floor with no table between them. The setup was Maira's. She had drawn it. She had not consulted Aldric on the design and had not needed to. He had walked through it the day it was finished, registered the careful absence of every theatrical element a chamber of this kind in another country might have included, and had not, since, set foot in it until now.
He stood at the door.
He did not, by any movement, draw the attention of the man in the chair.
"The name is real," Maira said. "He has given me three confirmations of it from his Bree side, all of which match. He has been in this country eleven years. He came in with the second wave of refugees from the Bree fever-spring. He has been a wagoner on the southern road since the year of Razorpeak. He is forty-three years old. He has a wife and three children in the upper-east holding."
"Did the wife know."
"The wife did not know. The wife and the children will be told what they need to be told, and not more, when the matter is closed."
"Good."
He came across the floor. He did not sit. There was no third chair; there had not been one drawn. He set his shoulder against the wall opposite the man and folded his arms.
The man in the chair was not bound.
The man in the chair was a wagoner; he had the long arms and the heavy shoulders of a man who had handled draft-horses every day for a decade, and the face of a man who had been awake for the better part of a day and a half and was, by Maira's reading and by Aldric's, past the point where he wanted to be holding what he had been holding. He had a cup of water on the floor by his foot. He had been given two meals and one hour of sleep. Maira's interrogation method, which Aldric had read in draft last winter and approved without amendment, did not involve withholding of food or sleep beyond the natural rhythm of a long session. The method was not designed to break a man. The method was designed to give a man the room to set his burden down.
The man had set most of his burden down.
He looked at Aldric.
He did not, by any movement, register fear of the lord at the door. He registered, instead, the small flat relief of a man who had been waiting for the higher authority to come into the room and take the matter off his lieutenant's hands.
"My lord."
"Sit. Drink the water."
The man drank the water.
Maira read on, without inflection, from the small bound book in her lap.
"He passes a summary north through a Bree courier on the first day of each month. The summary is — and I am quoting him — one page in his own hand, written before the sun on the last day of the month, dropped into a wooden case in the third stall of the south corner of the Bree weekly market. The case is collected by — he believes, but has not seen — a Bree-side man who is not himself the next in the chain. The summary content is, in his own description, whatever I have noticed, in three categories: who came in through the south road, what was traded, and what was said by the trade-folk about the council. He has never been asked for military information. He has never been able to provide military information. He has been asked, in writing, to listen for any mention of the Lady's family connections in the south. He has never heard such mention."
"How was he recruited."
"My lord. He was approached two winters ago, in Bree, by a man with a Gondorian-coast accent who had information about his brother. The brother is a soldier in the Tower of Ecthelion's garrison. The man at the Bree-end made representations about the brother's standing that the wagoner believed and which Maira's southern eyes will, in due course, test. The wagoner agreed to provide observations from the Northern road in exchange for the Bree-man's assurances about the brother. The arrangement has been a sequence of small payments and a series of explicit reassurances that the brother in the south has been promoted twice — once to corporal, once to sergeant — both of which can be verified."
"They are verifiable."
"They are verifiable, my lord. We will verify."
Aldric absorbed this.
He looked at the wagoner.
"And the second hand. The one in the settlement."
The wagoner looked at the floor.
"I never met him, my lord. I never met her. I — would not, if I had to swear today, say which. I was told, six months past, that some of the information I had passed had been cross-checked, by which the Bree-man meant — by which I understood — that they had a second source in Northwatch who had given them confirmation of one of my entries. There was — there was a request that I did not, for a season, understand. The request was for me to listen for any mention of a particular small thing — the schedule of the third bell on rest-days. I had no use for the request. I would not have noticed the schedule of the third bell on rest-days, my lord. I gave them what I could."
"They knew the third bell on rest-days had been moved."
"My lord?"
"By half a turn. Two years ago. The rest-day third bell was moved by half a turn at Halbarad's suggestion to align it with the garrison change-over. The change has never been published outside our keep. It is a thing only a man in this country would know."
The wagoner closed his eyes a moment.
"My lord."
"I am not telling you the matter, wagoner. I am telling Captain Maira."
Maira had set down the bound book.
She had been writing in her own hand on a small slate at the corner of the table. She did not look up at the lord at the wall. She did not, by any movement, indicate that the lord had given her the precise piece of information that had been the thing the previous three hours of the interrogation had been arranged to elicit.
She made the small dry note that was, in this room, the equivalent of her acknowledgment.
"Then we work the second hand by the bell."
"You work it by the bell."
"My lord."
"Captain."
"My lord, the deception."
He had been waiting for her to bring it up.
He had read her draft last night. He had not needed time to consider it. The shape of the matter had been clear since the previous council, and he had set out, in his own working notes, the only three boundaries he would put on her: that the falsified information given through the wagoner could not, in any version, threaten the safety of a person under Aldric's hand; that the falsification would be reviewed before each pass by him and by Tauriel; and that the operation would close within twelve months, with a clean account of what had been learned and at what cost, regardless of the outcome.
"Approved."
"My lord."
"Twelve months. The boundaries are in my notes. You will draft the first three months' content tomorrow. The first pass is the rest-day bell, with the bell moved back to its old turn by official announcement — a real change, to anchor the lie. Halbarad and I will agree the time-frame in the morning. The change goes into the keep notice and into the wagoner's next monthly summary."
"My lord."
"Wagoner."
"My lord."
"You will continue with your work. You will continue to write your monthly summary. You will give it to me through Captain Maira's channel for review before you drop it in the wooden case. You will go on with your wife and your children in the upper-east holding. You will speak to no one of this matter. If you do, the matter ends and you end with it. If you do not, in twelve months you will be told whether your service has bought your brother back his name in the south. Do you understand."
"My lord."
"Stand up."
The wagoner stood up.
Aldric crossed the chamber. He set his hand briefly on the man's shoulder — not on the arm, on the shoulder, the small flat weight of a hand a lord could be told he had not had to put there — and removed it.
"Go home to your wife. Sleep. Come to Captain Maira's office at the second hour after sunrise tomorrow for the first draft."
"My lord."
The wagoner went out.
The chamber was quiet a beat.
Maira stood up from her chair. She closed the bound book. She set the slate face-down on top of it.
"My lord."
"Captain."
"That was the easier of the two hands."
"That was the easier of the two hands."
"The harder one knows the bell. The harder one is in the keep, or in the council, or in a household connected to the keep."
"Yes."
She did not say more.
She went to the door of the chamber and opened it for him. He went out. The under-corridor was empty. The single lamp in the wall-bracket was lit. Aldric paused at the foot of the stair.
"Captain."
"My lord."
"Send a note to the Lady. Inner channel, not the council. Isengard has eyes inside the walls. Five words. Sign it as you sign."
"My lord."
He went up.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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