No Private Way Through

The bank failure changed the hearing because it changed the morning journeys of people who had considered those journeys reliable.

A senior court secretary arrived forty minutes late and demanded to know why the emergency lanes had not been used. Ren asked which emergency lanes he meant. He named a branch that shortened travel between the upper residences and the Regent's outer gate.

“How many grain carts can it carry?” she asked.

“None. It's a carriage way.”

“Where does its distance go?”

The secretary did not know.

By noon, they were examining the private branches.

Ada had expected concealed luxury, and some of it was exactly that: a visitor route kept active for a household that had spent the season elsewhere, a ceremonial turn preserved because closing it would imply a change in status, an evening path serving an official whose work now took place at home.

Other branches were less simple. One carried a physician to the prince's rooms. Another served the Regent's administrative messengers, who would have taken the general gate queues without it. A third connected kitchens feeding both the court and the night watch.

Ren refused to put them all in one category merely because the residences had fine windows.

“Which journeys require the speed?” she asked. “Which require the route? Which can leave earlier? Write the actual use before you call it essential or ornamental.”

Tovan supplied the watch times. A kitchen steward supplied delivery records with a defensive expression that softened when nobody suggested feeding soldiers was inherently frivolous. The secretary continued to object.

Cal inspected the household branch he knew best.

He had walked it at twelve, at fourteen, at sixteen. It had seemed one of the few privileges available to the young people held in the capital: a short route between their lessons and the outer garden, occasional access to the practice yard without crossing the public quarters.

Its current receiving mark included passages reserved for visiting governors. Its bearing load fell partly on a steep service approach near the northern stores.

“My father's visits,” he said.

“Others too,” Ada replied.

“He used to complain he didn't get long enough with me.”

She looked at the figures rather than at his face.

A privilege could make an unjust arrangement bearable without making the arrangement just. She suspected Cal had known that for years in a way the map had only now given him a means to describe.

He asked for the actual traffic tally. The steward brought it reluctantly. The branch could be reduced by more than half if the visiting traffic used ordinary approaches and the lesson journeys were rescheduled. It could not be closed altogether until the young wards' arrangements were changed.

“We'll change those,” Cal said.

“Not by promising for them,” Ada reminded him.

He glanced at her, then nodded.

That afternoon he asked to meet the others under Tovan's protection. No governor, tutor or household officer was to answer a question directed to the young person concerned.

The request was entered. Ada saw him keep a copy.

While he was gone, Prince Evin came into the hearing room with an attendant carrying an armful of lesson books. He appeared to have taken the wrong door. The attendant began an apology, but the Regent called him over.

He studied the maps while Meral finished speaking to the clerk. His eyes stopped on the bright prepared lines and then on Ada's rough ground sketch beneath them.

“Is that the broken bank?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why doesn't the big map show it?”

“It was made before the bank broke.”

“Then why is it still the big one?”

Ada looked towards Hald. He had heard.

“That's one of the questions we're trying to answer,” she said.

The boy accepted this more readily than most adults. His attendant led him away before he could ask anything else inconvenient. Ada did not imagine that a child's question would repair the governance of roads. She was grateful for the moment in which the obvious had been permitted to sound obvious.

At dusk, the revised private-branch figures were posted beside the public supply estimates. The secretary requested that household names be omitted. The Regent allowed privacy for sleeping rooms and refused it for allocations paid from the national system.

Sile objected formally.

Meral listened, then signed the release for the ceremonial stone stock.

It was the first physical resource they had obtained from the hearing. By the next morning, masons could start work on a road no one important had previously needed to see.