“Thank you.” I gave her a small smile in return as I seated myself in the empty chair to Iannis’s right. My stomach growled as I caught sight of the bread basket, and I took a roll for myself as Rylan left the room at a gesture from Iannis. I figured it would be weird to have him hover over us and listen to us talk about sensitive information. Maybe he’d head down to the kitchens and get himself some food in the meantime.

“I hope I didn’t miss anything important while you were waiting for me,” I said to Iannis. It was the closest I would give to an apology—after all, I hadn’t been told we were having a dinner meeting, though I supposed it wasn’t surprising.

“We were just discussing the interrogation of the Palace staff,” Iannis told me. “Fenris was running it before he joined us in Osero.”

“Oh, right.” The bomb attack had almost slipped my mind in the last few days. I turned to Fenris. “So did you find anything before you left?”

“Three humans fled the Palace after I announced we would be subjecting the staff to a truth spell,” Fenris said. There was no hint of the tension he’d radiated earlier, but then again, he was talking to me rather than Iannis. “I was in the middle of tracking them down, with the help of the Enforcer’s Guild, when I was called away.”

“One of them was Darca, one of my better accountants,” Cirin said irritably, his dark blue eyes narrowed. “As you can imagine, finding out that I may have been employing a traitor has not improved my staff’s morale.”

“I imagine not,” I said, sympathizing with him a little. It was probably a fucking nightmare, knowing that a Resistance spy had access to the Palace’s financial documents. If Darca was in fact a spy, she could have passed all sorts of confidential information about the state’s finances to the Resistance, information the Benefactor could have used against us. “Who were the other two suspects?”

“A groom from the stables named Tadir, and a maid called Cralia.”

I frowned. “Those are all very different positions. Do you think all three of them could be spies?”

“I don’t see why not,” Director Chen said. “If I were organizing the Resistance, I would want my spies to be set up in different areas of the Palace, in order to get as much intel as possible.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” It bothered me that there could be so many enemies hidden amongst us, inside the very walls I’d trusted to keep me safe. “Still, I wonder if they were all in on the assassination attempt, or if it was just one of them. And if we catch the wrong one, will they still lead us to the other?”