One of the best parts of Yeijiro’s new assignment was unrestricted access to the records library that belonged to the Imperial Marshals. Taking up half the building that housed the high officers of both the marshals and the legion, the library held information that had been collected and tracked by imperial investigators all the way back to the beginning of the Empire. Investigations, treaties, taxes, observations and notes—a thorough history of everything written by the people whose jobs were to pay close attention.

Yeijiro had so much to learn, and he was excited for the opportunity to learn it, which was why he was spending not only his work hours, but a great much of his free time buried in here as well.

Tax and trade records, criminal activity on Pax that the marshals had been called in to deal with. Yeijiro was trying to figure out how money flowed across an entire planet. How so much had gone astray without anyone in authority noticing.

Along the way, he was also reading anything that referred to the negotiations that led to the Dragon being the hosts of this particular Shadow Court, because the politics of that were interesting. The curious part of his brain hadn’t missed the fact that the Dragon hadn’t done much to take advantage of their position as hosts. If anything, the court had been a monstrous imposition. So why fight so hard for it?

This position was everything Yeijiro had ever wanted. It was a chance to do the things he was good at. To be useful. To be valued. It was like a dream come true.

Or would have been, if not for Marshal Elena.

Yeijiro’s project today had been finicky, meticulous work, demanding close reading of incredibly dry material. Unquestionably fun, but when he looked up and realized the lights had come on and the sun had gone down, the stiffness in his back made the complaint that he hadn’t really moved for hours.

He stood, pulling his arms behind his back, working his shoulders. But as his body stretched, so did his mind, breaking free of the focus he’d held himself to and wandering back to what had become a well-trod path over the last couple days.

A quick glance at his digital assistant showed Yeijiro had no new messages. Not from anyone. Most especially, not from Tōru. That was no surprise, of course. Electronic correspondence was notably insecure, and Yeijiro couldn’t imagine the Lord of the Serpent had much use for it.

Not that Yeijiro expected anything. Tōru was a busy man, and Yeijiro was…only himself. Whatever had passed between them…

What had passed between them?

Should he expect some acknowledgement? Should he, himself, offer some response? Should he simply be patient?

Tōru had said he’d noticed Yeijiro. Had that been meant as a final punctuation to their encounter? Or an opening move in a longer game?

Yeijiro knew what he wanted. What he desperately wanted. He recognized that the very strength of his longing, the depths of how much he cared what happened next, probably meant he was ill equipped for the games of court.

Probably, he was in utterly over his head.

Footsteps in the hall made Yeijiro stand straighter, bracing himself for intrusion on what had, all afternoon, been his space. When Lindsey Elena came through the door, her arms full of folders, he had only a half second of panic before reflex took over and he bowed his head.

She’d been hounding him ever since Roderich had given Yeijiro over to her supervision. She gave him work, but interrogated him on every detail of it. She demanded insultingly detailed accounting of his time. She checked and double checked every conclusion he reached, every report he made. She made it clear in a thousand different ways how little she trusted both his intentions and his honor.

This evening, it seemed, she hadn’t been following him, because she started, surprised to see him. With an irritated huff, she approached his table. “Here.” She dropped the files on top of his work. “You can file these for me.”

“Of course, Shai Lindsay.”

She made a frustrated noise. “Don’t Shai Lindsay me. This isn’t the Emperor’s throne room, and I’m no Swan.”

Yeijiro had to bite back a reflexive yes, Shai Lindsay, and tried to cover that moment of awkwardness by turning his attention to the paperwork she’d handed him. Each file had a name on it. “May I ask what these are?”

“All the marshals for this past year who have been reassigned. Or removed from office. The top file may be of interest to you.”

Since she made no move to leave, Yeijiro was forced to assume she wanted him to read it right now. He opened the front cover, scanned down what seemed unremarkable information about a Swan marshal, from the Fréneau family, who had served first at the Imperial Palace, been reassigned to Kanto, on Tacitus, had moved up through the ranks…

And ended up as the Imperial Marshal assigned to Castle Miyōshi, to the Serpent Court.

Yeijiro looked up into Elena’s cold, iron glare. “Keep reading,” she said.

The next few pages seemed as though they’d been mixed in by mistake. They certainly didn’t belong in the file of a man who’d seemed a commended and capable servant of the Emperor. A receipt of the cost of property damage from a bar fight. A report of gambling debts. A report from local Serpent authorities about an unlicensed duel. At the end, a hand-written letter of apology from Marshal Fréneau to the Lord Marshal himself, confessing to all his crimes and mistakes, insisting that they were no one’s fault but his own.

Yeijiro finished reading. Closed the file. Looked back up. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you?” Elena’s eyes were sharp, assessing, studying him like some unpleasant bacteria under a microscope. “Tell me, Marshal Miyōshi, what you see here.”

It was obvious she was trying to trap him, but Yeijiro couldn’t see any way out of the conversation. “I see a man with hidden vices, who gave in to temptation.”

“It’s funny,” she said in a tone that clearly said it was not, “how every marshal who goes to the Serpent court turns out to have hidden vices.”

Yeijiro understood the accusation she was making. But he couldn’t argue it without an implied insult to her, to Dahle Roderich, to the marshals as a whole. Nor could he agree with it without accepting Elena’s premise and damning his own clan. Because either Roderich had incredibly bad judgement and every marshal he sent to Castle Miyōshi was weak-willed and flawed to their core, or the Serpent were going out of their way to—at best—manipulate them and—at worst—set them up to get caught in compromising positions.

So he temporized. “The Serpent court is very different from the Imperial court. Perhaps overwhelming.”

“Or perhaps your Lord Miyōshi considers it a game to destroy the good people who are just trying to do their jobs in service to the Emperor.”

“He wouldn’t—” Yeijiro stopped himself, seeing her eyes flash, ready to flay him for daring to stand with his clan. Besides that, what did Yeijiro actually know? What might Tōru do?

A visceral memory of the feel of Tōru's touch. What might Tōru be doing with him? Another game? In six months—a year, could someone be closing out a folder with his name on it?

Elena’s words snapped him back into focus. “The evidence lies before you. Either the Lord Marshal is in the habit of hiring undesirables.” Her pause and glare made it clear she considered Yeijiro to be part of that category. “Or the Lord Miyōshi is engaged in a systematic attack on every agent of law and order who comes into his court. So tell me, Marshal Miyōshi, which is it?”

She was asking him to pick a side. The easy answer would be to denounce his clan. To say the Serpent were at fault. That was obviously the interpretation she believed.

But to say he believed that would be a lie, and Elena was just waiting to catch him in a lie.

Honesty, as ever, was his refuge. “I don’t know enough about the Marshals who have served in the Serpent Court, or what situation they faced there. I can’t possibly make any sort of determination based on one file full of biased observations and a self-reported confession.”

“Biased?” Her voice raised on the word. “Are you accusing me of—”

“Excuse me.” Vin’s soft, polite voice from the door. “Am I interrupting?”

Vin stood there, Kaveh at his side. The lion’s ears were back and his tail swished, his attention trained on Elena.

If Elena was cowed, she didn’t show it. She gave Vin a cold look. “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting a friend. I didn’t expect to find him under attack. And from someone who wears the same uniform. That seems unworthy of you, Elena.”

“You would know all about unworthy, Vin.” She sniffed. “Just because we wear the same uniform doesn’t mean we serve the same lord.”

She looked back and forth between Yeijiro and Vin. “I don’t know which of you is worse. The Serpent who claims he isn’t still dangling from his clan’s strings, or the Griffon who—”

“That’s enough.” A dangerous edge had crept into Vin’s voice.

Whether Elena heard it, she didn’t show. “Marshal Miyōshi and I can continue this conversation later,” was all she said before she stalked off into the library.

Yeijiro let go of the tension that had been holding him rigid. He went back to gathering files, using the busywork as cover as he tried to regain his equilibrium.

“So you’ve made a friend,” Vin said, still focused on the door Elena had gone through.

“It’s all right,” Yeijiro said automatically.

“Obviously it isn’t.” Vin’s tone was soothing, like Yeijiro was a wild animal he was trying to calm.

Which only reminded Yeijiro that Vin was an empath too, which meant Vin knew exactly how upset he was now, and Vin had felt how mistrustful Elena had been.

Vin was quiet for a few moments, then said, “I came by to see if you wanted to go to dinner. But if you’d rather I go…”

Which wasn’t at all what Yeijiro had wanted. “No. I mean,” he took a deep breath, “I do want to go to dinner. It’s just…she caught me by surprise.”

“Then I made it worse?”

Yeijiro had squared and re-squared the files and was now just keeping his hands busy. “No. I mean, yes. But it isn’t your fault. It’s just…” The truth was even more embarrassing, but Yeijiro managed a half-hearted smile. “You’re the only person, since I got here, who hasn’t judged me one way or another for being a Serpent. I keep…waiting for you to start.”

“You haven’t presumed about my affairs. It seemed rude to make assumptions about yours.”

Which provoked a surge of guilt because, while Yeijiro certainly hadn’t asked any questions that Vin seemed disinterested in answering, he was practically incapable of seeing a puzzle he didn’t try to solve. Inside his own head, he’d been making all kinds of presumptions.

For example, the fact that Vin was a griffon. Yeijiro had figured that out long before Elena’s confirmation. That Vin was a strong enough empath to have a trained lion walking around with him was one clue, but there were other things. Patterns of speech, little things he said, the things he noticed, even the way he bowed. Tiny clues, none of them a giveaway on their own, but Yeijro’s mind had tracked them and synthesized them, leaving Yeijiro confident in his assessment.

Everything else about Vin was a contradiction. He claimed no family name, held no position, but he walked around the Golden Palace like he owned it. He didn’t play the games of court, but he knew all the players, able to fill Yeijiro in on details that no one on the outside could know.

So Yeijiro had spent plenty of time thinking about Vin. Putting together pieces. But on the other hand, he’d respected Vin’s privacy enough not to ask those questions out loud—not to Vin, or to anyone else.

Yeijiro stored his files and his notes in a cubby, coded the lock to his eyescan. Then he was ready to go, and happy to escape before Elena returned.

He and Vin walked together across the palace grounds, on their way out to the city. Yeijiro didn’t ask where they were going; Vin knew all sorts of obscure little restaurants and he hadn’t disappointed Yeijiro yet with his choices, so Yeijiro was happy to go along and be surprised.

Kaveh walked between them. Yeijiro was getting used to the lion and the lion was getting used to him. Kaveh even tolerated Yeijiro’s hand on his shoulder, stroking his warm, soft fur.

In this way, with his hand on the big cat, with Vin’s continued silence, Yeijiro was able to talk. “Marshal Lindsay doesn’t like me because I’m a Serpent. She doesn’t trust me.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m not about to change my opinion of you based on anything that comes out of Lindsey Elena’s mouth.”

Vin’s reassurance did nothing to ease the lump of anxious fear Elena’s simple presence had prompted. “I appreciate your support. Don’t think that I don’t.”

“But my support isn’t going to help you keep your job.”

Yeijiro nodded, sliding his fingers deeper into Kaveh’s warm mane. “I worked so hard to get here. I thought…I thought it would be enough. That at some point, people would accept me. That they’d stop questioning everything I do.”

Vin was silent for a time, long enough Yeijiro wasn’t sure he’d respond at all. Until he said, “I wish I had something hopeful to tell you. Some trick to offer to win her over. But some people, once they decide not to trust, they’re not going to be persuaded.”

Even quieter, he added. “Sometimes, that can even be for the best.”

Yeijiro looked at Vin, unsure what he was trying to say, but Vin was staring off into the distance, like he’d forgotten that Yeijiro was even there.

After a moment, he seemed to come back to himself. “I’m sorry. I’m not being helpful.”

“I don’t know what help there is,” Yeijiro said.

He was just going to have to do better. Somehow, he was going to have to do so well that even Elena couldn’t deny he was a good marshal.

Somehow.