Balif

Balif was a scholar of the Arcanum Arcanorum who came to the Supreme Ruler’s court in the season the ruler’s wife died, meant to stay only until the household steadied, and never went back. He had known her long before she was anybody’s queen, and he had loved her, and he never told a soul. He stayed for the infant daughter she left behind.

For the whole of Zarina’s growing he was her tutor, her protector and the nearest thing she had to a second father. He taught by arguing. History came to her as a quarrel rather than a list of dates, and from him she learned to spot a forged seal and to ask the questions the court tutors called inappropriate. He was also the one person who could tell her what her mother had really been like, and Zarina never worked out why he went quiet whenever she was mentioned.

He was white-haired and long-bearded, with bad knees and reading lenses that Zarina arranged for him and denied arranging, pockets hidden everywhere, folders under one arm, and a cup of tea gone cold hours earlier that he drank anyway. He walked into the ruler’s rooms without knocking; the two men had been friends for longer than Zarina had been alive.

His great difficulty was that he loved both of them. The first time Zarina slipped out at night he kept it from her father; when she began a second life among the Velvet Veil he followed her across the river and this time told him, and she decided he was her father’s man. He was the first to see what the Veil’s little glass vials were doing to her eyes, and said so, and the ruler did not want to hear it. When it all came into the open he refused to spy on her and promised only to be near. The last time he chose her was over a leaked council order: he knew her hand on the copy, because he had taught it to her, and saw in a doubled stroke what had been in the hand when it wrote, and went to her first, offering to let it be buried. She refused. After the renunciation he stayed for the man who was left, and let her go on believing he had always been her father’s.

In those same years, an old man with no standing as an investigator, he set out to prove that the Gilded Coven was trying to kill the Supreme Ruler for the decree that ended its Gilded Expansion. He gathered forged requisitions, Coven arguments reprinted in the newspapers and a run of convenient accidents, and he saved the ruler’s life himself, pulling him back from a western balcony he had always disliked moments before it fell into the courtyard. What he never found was a single order telling anybody to do any of it, and the best evidence he had was sealed away in the Arcanum.

What he had at the end was fragments, suspicions, and names he could not prove belonged together. He put them in a plain document case and closed the clasp on all of it.