Percival novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Terms

The archive of the Eastern Crown takes up three floors of the north tower.

It holds four hundred years of ledgers, treaties, birth rolls and quarrels, and it smells of dust and lamp oil and old leather.

It is mine, and I love it with my whole heart.

By noon I had washed, dressed in a clean cardigan, and written a list.

I sat on the library ladder in the back stacks with the ledger paper on my knee.

Nobody comes to the back stacks, because the shelves there are filed by a system only I understand.

At twelve-fifteen the door at the end of the aisle opened and closed.

I knew the footsteps.

"Miss DeMille," Percival said.

"Shut the door properly. Come here."

He came down the aisle between the tall shelves.

He had tied his hair back again and put on a fresh waistcoat, and he looked like a man who had been interrogated by a king.

"Hugh did not ask a single question," he said. "He looked at me for a full minute and said, 'Congratulations, you idiot.' Then he said he would pretend he knew nothing."

"That's kind of him."

"It is dangerous. Cornelius Bascombe will have heard by now."

"The Speaker of the Council?"

"He has wanted my chair for forty years." Percival stopped three feet from the ladder. "I do not know how he will use this."

I noticed the three feet.

"You stood exactly that far from me for four years," I said.

He went white.

"Yes," he said, because he had to.

"We'll get to that. Not today." I held up the paper. "I wrote you terms."

"Terms."

"You're in a bond that only works one way. I'm not signing anything, but I'd like us to understand each other."

He folded his hands behind his back.

"One," I read. "When I ask you something, you answer. Plainly. Not a diplomat's answer."

"Agreed."

"Two. I decide the where and the when. You don't get to decide what I can handle."

"Agreed."

"Three. I'm allowed to lie to you whenever I want. You don't get to ask me to prove anything."

He closed his eyes.

"I will not ask," he said. "You have my word, and my word is the one thing I have always kept."

"Four." I looked up. "You touch me when I tell you to, and not before."

His eyes flew open.

"Not before?"

"Not in this room."

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