Chương 118: Chapter 111: An Obvious Lead

Lira stood there, staring at a place she had not seen in six years. It had changed so much that she could barely recognize it. She sighed. Maybe she had been mistaken. Perhaps Henry wasn't coming here after all. She had thought she had everything figured out. No offense to the man, but Henry seemed easy to read. She had spent weeks occupying the same space as him, and with her Perception spell, she could notice things about people that most would never pick up on.

She had watched him closely enough to form a fairly clear picture of the man behind the armor. Henry was dutiful. He was the kind of man who took pride in serving those above him rather than resenting them. He was poorer than most nobles but richer than most commoners, and that position had shaped the way he viewed the world. The system had been good to Henry, so he believed it was fair. He had never had much reason to question it.

He could afford to look at the world from inside his comfortable little bubble, never needing to see the horrors that ordinary people encountered every day. And yet, somehow, it was difficult to hate him. Deep down, Henry was a good man. He tried to do the best he could with what he had been given, and Lira had never seen him treat the servants badly. He even took the time to thank them when he was served his lunch.

She had occasionally wondered, however, what he would have done if he had been assigned to Prince Kavard instead of Prince Lyth. Would he have helped Thadwick bury the bodies? No... That was an unfair assessment of his character. Henry had never shown any sign of cruelty. If anything, he had consistently been kind and almost brotherly toward Lyth. The man genuinely cared. Henry was not her enemy. Even if he seemed to think of her as one, or, at the very least, suspected that she was.

That morning, when Lira had noticed that Henry was missing, she had thought she knew exactly where he would go. She had abandoned her medical research, finished the few remaining duties she had, and made her way to the place she believed he would eventually visit. She had even cast Divine Location, and the spell had pointed vaguely toward this region, confirming her suspicions. So here she was, standing atop a building, clad in all of her magical obfuscation enchantments, staring down at the street below.

Across from her stood the place she had once called home, with a front door leading to her father's shop and an upper floor where they used to live: the Velora Scriptorium. Lira stared at the familiar sign for a long moment. The years had not been kind to the place. The paint was flaking off, one of the windows was boarded with an old vellum sheet instead of glass, and the door looked like it could use some varnish. Honestly, she barely recognized the building anymore.

She had been so young when she had last seen it. Six years had passed, and even her memory spell showed a much warmer and more welcoming place than this dump. She sighed. Was this trip a waste of time? She had been certain Henry would come here. When Grandpa Waxy had revealed her true name, she had immediately realized the danger. A man like Henry would have to investigate it.

He was too dutiful to let a potential spy near his charge, and a librarian using a fake name with access to two of the three princes was not something to leave to chance. So once he had learned the name "Velora," there was only one obvious place to begin looking. Perhaps she had been too confident in her understanding of him. Lira was starting to question whether she should leave and start looking for him elsewhere when she saw him. Henry was carrying a piece of paper in one hand and looked thoroughly confused.

He stopped at one storefront, glanced at the sign, then looked down at the paper again. He continued down the street, checking each shopfront as though he were struggling to navigate the area. Lira blinked. Had she actually beaten him here? Well, that made sense. He probably needed to do some research before finding the place. A few questions in Harwin's bookkeeping tower would have given him a rough idea of where to find businesses with the Velora name.

Then he would have to either investigate them one by one, looking for a young girl named Lira, or narrow it down further by asking guild unions, the city watch, or street informants. It wasn't as though her family was the only Velora in the city, nor was their shop a pillar of Haltar's society that everyone would know about. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. She watched with growing curiosity as Henry finally stopped in front of the correct building.

His face visibly relaxed. He folded the paper and knocked on the door. A few moments later, the door opened, and Lira's gaze immediately hardened. Her uncle stood there. The only blood relative Lira had left in the world. She watched him greet Henry, bowing deeply and repeatedly like a sycophant, her expression growing colder. Seron Valora was a vulture pretending to be a man. That was the only description she could give him.

He had missed his brother's execution because he was busy picking the bones clean from his corpse. Her father, Gareth, had always tried to shield her from the uglier parts of their lives. He had been protective of her, perhaps excessively so at times, and had made every effort to keep her from knowing about the disputes and hardships that had plagued the family. Unfortunately for him, Lira had always been a curious child.

More importantly, she had always had a penchant for reading anything that happened to be written down. Her father could keep conversations away from her, but he could not keep her away from his correspondence. When she was younger, she had secretly read through many of the letters her father had exchanged with his brother. So she knew exactly what had happened between the two of them. Her uncle had been a failed scribe who had never possessed any real passion for the craft.

When their parents had died and the Scriptorium had been inherited, the shop had been divided between the two brothers. Gareth had wanted to keep the family business alive, while Seron had wanted his share of the money. When Gareth refused to sell the ancestral business, his brother had threatened to sue and have a magistrate force the sale of the shop so he could get his share of the money, and every request Gareth had made to postpone the payment had been denied.

In the end, her father had been forced to take out a loan and pay him for his half to keep the Scriptorium within the family. It had nearly ruined him. And what had her uncle done with the money? He had wasted it. After a year of partying and gambling, he had come crawling back to Gareth, asking for more... He said that it was unfair that Gareth got to keep a successful business and live in their family home while he had nothing.

Lira remembered reading those letters as a child, sitting somewhere she knew her father would never look. She had not understood everything at the time, but she had understood enough. Her uncle was not a man who could build anything. He was simply someone who wanted to take what her father had built. And now Gareth was dead, and Seron stood inside the Velora Scriptorium as though he had every right to be there, as though the shop had always belonged to him and her father had merely been keeping it warm for him.

Lira hated him... She hated him enough that, as a child, she had trusted a criminal like Pallan more than she had trusted her own uncle, and that was saying something. At least Pallan recognized her talent from the get-go and had compensated her handsomely. She doubted she would have been paid a penny if she had stayed with her uncle. As Henry was led inside, Lira cast Focused Hearing.

"Pika. Cipos. Hishar. Kaldris. Velar." The spell sharpened her hearing until every word from inside the shop reached her clearly.

"My lord, what can I do for you? Do you need a book copied, or perhaps something more artistic?"

"No. I am sorry, but I am here to ask about someone called Lira Velora. I read in the Magister's office that custody of her passed to you after her father died." Seron's voice changed immediately. The friendly, sycophantic tone disappeared, replaced by nervousness.

"I am sorry, my lord, but she is not here. She was having a difficult time after my traitorous brother was executed and refused to speak with me. Then, one day, she simply vanished." Lira couldn't believe what she was hearing. He was claiming this after kicking her out, barely an hour after her father's death.

"Don't lie to me," said Henry, his voice sharpening.

"I can tell when you are lying."

"My lord, she... she refused to answer me, so I might have kicked her out of the house..."

"You did what?" Lira could hear Henry standing.

"I went looking for her shortly after, believe me, my lord, but she was nowhere to be found."

"What do you mean?" asked Henry.

"A child does not just disappear."

"I suspect she didn't make it. You know how it is in Haltar. Children on the streets die all the time."

"Are you insinuating that the leadership of the city is to blame for your poor guardianship?"

"Not at all, my lord! I would never! I am sorry, my lord. I made a mistake and tried to fix it to no avail. I am sorry." Henry did not stay long after that, and when he finally left, he looked furious. Lira looked at her uncle as he watched the knight walk away, his face filled with worry. For a moment, she considered doing to him what she had done to Thadwick. Then she heard a small voice behind him.

"Daddy, who was that?" A little girl, perhaps four years old, poked her head through the doorway. She had orange hair, just like Lira's own, tied into a messy braid. A woman followed next, with brown hair and kind features. Lira's anger suddenly lost its momentum. She looked at the little girl, at the woman, then back at her uncle. No... He was not worth it. She had more important things to worry about. Henry was still looking for Lira Velora, and now she needed a way to kick him off of her trail.