Chapter 2: No Third Option

"Who are you?" she asked.

"My name is Francis Wren. I handle intelligence matters for Her Majesty's government. I have been reading your documents for eight months. Your cipher is excellent. Your tradecraft is improving. Your assessment of Alderton's movements is accurate. You are also reckless in ways that suggest you think yourself invisible."

"I am invisible," Margot said. "That is precisely the point."

"Invisible to the court. You are not invisible to the people who are looking for you."

He shifted his weight slightly. It was a minute movement, barely noticeable, and it brought him closer to the window and the light. His face was still perfectly arranged—no warmth in it, no particular unkindness either, the face of a man delivering information. But his jaw was sharp and tightly held, and there was something about the way he stood, entirely present and entirely self-possessed, that made the watching chamber feel small.

Margot forced her eyes away from it.

"If Alderton's man is so competent," she said, "then you must be competent as well. You could have had me arrested. You could have confronted me in a dozen different ways. Instead you are standing in an empty room warning me. Why?"

"Because I am not Alderton, and I am not the Queen, and I prefer to manage my own sources if it is possible to do so without compromising security. You are too valuable to lose to a witch-hunt."

He spoke it as though it were obvious. As though the calculation was as simple as the arithmetic of risk and benefit. Margot felt a cold realignment of what she thought she was in this palace. A shadow. A vessel for information. Too valuable to lose.

"What do you propose?" she asked.

"That you stop sending documents through the established channels. That you use a different method, one that cannot be traced to you. That you meet with me directly to discuss the intelligence you gather, rather than encoding it at length."

"Meetings are riskier than documents."

"Not if they appear to be accidents. Which they can be, in a palace this size, if both parties understand the geography."

He was standing still again. Completely still. His hands had not moved since he began speaking, and Margot found herself aware of them—irritatingly, uselessly aware. She did not want to notice his hands. She did not want to notice the particular angle of his jaw or the way his eyes held steady when he looked at her, without the slight warmth that courtiers cultivated to make themselves palatable.

She straightened her shoulders. The book grew heavier against her chest.

"I will consider your proposal," she said.

"Consider it quickly. Vickers is competent. Within a week or two, he will have narrowed the possibilities further. Within a month, he will likely identify you. You have that long to decide whether you intend to continue or to retire from the work entirely. If you continue, you come to me. If you retire, you stop entirely. There is no third option that ends with you alive and free."

He said it without inflection. It was a statement of fact, the same way one might remark on the weather or the time of day. Margot's stomach was tight, though she would not show it.

"And if I refuse both options?" she asked.

"You will not. You have already spent eight months proving that you prefer to act rather than to remain idle. You will choose to continue. The only question is whether you will be foolish enough to continue alone."

He turned then, with that same economical precision, and moved toward the door. He did not wait for her response. He did not look back. He moved out into the corridor with the same unhurried certainty with which he had entered, and was gone.

Margot stood in the watching chamber with the blue book growing heavier against her chest and the morning light still falling across the wooden floor. The palace sounds resumed—the distant murmur of voices from the presence chamber, the creak of the gallery above, the small rustlings of a great house conducting its daily business.

She set the book down on the bench. Sat. Picked up the embroidery frame.

Her needle found the linen.