Cyrus and Rilien were both up bright and early the morning after their intriguing meet-and-greets with Julien and Kestrel. Frankly, Cyrus found himself with a range of rather personal questions for Estella, mostly about things she had not mentioned in her letters to him over the relevant time period that he was now rather certain she should have. He'd read names of her friends and new acquaintances, of course, and had some indication of who each was, but without faces and impressions they did tend to blur. Still, now he found himself wondering what this part of her life had really been like, with so many rather... interesting people in it.
But all of that was a discussion for a later time. At the moment, their task was considerably more urgent, and he and Rilien were meant to be tracking down some evidence and the man who'd testified in a court to its authenticity. It wasn't difficult in the slightest for Cyrus to believe such experts could be bought, especially if they might have their own secrets to hide. But it would be impossible to know without understanding more than he did about the man himself and the documents in question, which he was hoping to get a look at today.
“So what's the story with this Mage du Sang?" He put the question to Rilien, walking next to him down one of the main thoroughfares in the commerce district. It was a lively market; they managed to stand out even in the crowd, perhaps due to the obvious lack of masks on both of their parts. He wondered if he shouldn't procure one, if the investigation proved to require speaking with someone who was likely to care. A question he'd leave for a later date.
Rilien glanced at him from the corner of an eye. “Not a literal blood mage." The clarification wasn't entirely necessary; Cyrus could see the pun already. “For a fee, this person can procure or forge the documentation necessary to prove noble ancestry, assuming some basic conditions are met."
Such as being human, or able to pass for one, no doubt. “But surely only so many long lost cousins of whatever house can show up before it's utterly ridiculous? If it were that easy, there would be competing businesses, and work from any of them would be near-meaningless."
“It is not as outlandish as it may initially seem." Rilien shook his head fractionally. “The ordinary practice is for Orlesian noble families to be quite large. The prevalence of assassination as a method of settling disputes makes that necessary. The Game, as it is called, could not exist if the players were too few, given the finality of exclusions. Thus, any given noble has as possible heirs not only their children and children's children, but also siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Sometimes entire branches of families end up little better off than commoners, due to lack of inheritance. Sometimes branches die off entirely. When the entanglements are so many and complicated, the discovery of obscure second cousins and the like is not difficult, nor difficult to falsify."
Cyrus supposed that was fair enough. His own family was small; his mother had had no siblings at all, and his grandfather only one sister, who had died long before he was born. His few living relatives were quite distant, descendants of his grandmother's brother or something of the kind. In Tevinter, where lineage itself was the matter of greatest concern, having too many children was almost a bad thing, as it in some sense 'cheapened' the heritage of each. Not to mention increased the drain on resources necessary to train them all in their magic. The attitude Rilien was describing was baffling, but perhaps that was only because Magisters only rarely outright killed each other. Or at least, comparatively rarely. Humiliation and disgrace were much more common—they had at least that much respect for the precious gift they all shared. Or so they were likely to say. More honestly, it was that magic was rare, and the political and economic structure of the Imperium demanded that there be enough, but not too many, mages.
“If there would typically be so many competitors anyway, why bother with claiming such a distant relation? Surely not many have ever come to inheritance because of this person's bureaucratic conjurations." The aim of such a thing was difficult to see, from where he looked.
Rilien lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “That may depend on how poorly one's family is losing, so to speak. Also, even those nobles not set to inherit have opportunities commoners do not. The most prominent of those is the ability to join the chevaliers. One can live quite comfortably as one, with or without other sources of income. Various legal protections apply to nobility that do not apply to others as well, though those are of dubious worth, as the present case demonstrates." His tone remained invariant. Cyrus supposed he should have been—would once have been—unnerved by the elf's tranquility. But somehow, he simply... wasn't. He elected not to think about why.
It wasn't long after they left the bounds of the market district that they reached their destination: the address Kestrel had given them belonged to a modest, if stately enough townhouse, grouped next to several more of the same along the side of a broad, bricked street. Their knock at the door was answered by a young girl apparently in her late teens or so, with dark hair that spilled over her shoulders in abundant curls. She was dressed conservatively, though masked like most everyone they'd encountered, the color of the accessory evenly divided between black and white.
Dark blue eyes swept over them, a quick assessment that lingered on Cyrus's visible weaponry and the lyrium brand visible on Rilien's forehead. She pursed her lips and sighed. "This way, please." Oddly enough, she did not seem to feel compelled to ask after their identities or the purpose of their visit; on the contrary, she seemed quite satisfied with whatever she'd gleaned from her initial inspection. Perhaps unusual visitors were commonplace here. "Eugène, we have guests!" She called the words down the house's narrow entrance hallway, triggering a rather abrupt set of shuffling and banging noises.
Within a few more moments, a disheveled head of ash-grey hair appeared from one of the doorways, the man it belonged to looking first the wrong way down the hallway, and only then turning to face them. "Visitors? Ack!" He must have dropped something he was holding, because it clattered to the ground a moment later, the impact sound muffled by the thick rugs underfoot. "Ah—just—come in, I'll only be a moment." His head disappeared back through the doorway.
Cyrus lifted both eyebrows. Julien's remark about an odd little man, or whatever he'd said along those lines, made quite a bit more sense in context. His eyes slid to the girl; he tilted his head at her. “Is he usually like that?" Rilien had already started towards the door Lefévre had invited them through, sliding his arms into his sleeves.
She shrugged. "More or less, yeah." With a gesture, she urged him to follow Rilien, then brought up the rear of the procession herself.
The room they'd been ushered into was surprisingly large; most likely it had originally been two rooms, and the wall between them had been removed. Not entirely unlike Cyrus's atelier, it was lined with bookshelves, many of them gathering dust. The shelves at chest height and the row beneath were less dusty, evidence of an organizational system that used some criterion other than author name or subject to sort the material for retrieval.
There were several worktables in the area, most with wooden stools set near them. The one nearest the room's large window was occupied by small planters, holding, it seemed, varieties of herb both poisonous and medicinal. Nightshade, mugwort, monkshood, hemlock and darkspawn ivy, among others. Each was attended by a mechanism involving glass tubing, seemingly designed to drip water into the planters at fixed intervals in precise quantities. Another table looked like a more conventional alchemy station, if not quite as elaborate as Rilien's setup in Skyhold. Still another looked exclusively dedicated to documentation of whatever sort, stacked neatly into piles of roughly-equal size.
Lefévre himself was grimacing at a bent compass, probably the item he'd just dropped, but he set it down on the table in front of him when he noticed they'd entered. There was a mask there, too, a more elaborate version of the girl's, and edged in silver, but he didn't put it on. "Ah, hello gentlemen. Eugène Lefévre, at your service." He sketched a hasty bow, an awkward smile on his face, leaning back against the desk. For a moment, his eyes, one of them aided by a monocular lens, drifted behind Cyrus and Rilien to the young woman, but then he returned them to his guests. "How might I help you?"
“We are here about the D'Artignon case." Rilien answered the question directly, leaving Cyrus free to make a better inspection of the room. Rude though it might be, he did so, heading over to the bookshelves. He had to bend a fair bit to get at the lower of the two most-used shelves, crouching so he could scan the titles.
Rilien, of course, did a rather spectacular job of not behaving as though his actions were anything out of the ordinary, and he suspected their host would follow suit. But he wanted a sense of who this man was, and there were few quicker ways to get that sense then knowing which books he'd liked enough or found important enough to put front and center on his shelves. The system was probably a relevance-based one, after all.
There was a bit of a pause before Lefévre's response, no doubt due to the fact that he was trying to decide what if anything to do about Cyrus's obvious break from the conversation, but in the end, he indeed chose not to mention it, replying to Rilien instead. "I see. I actually had another visitor recently about the same thing. I take it you're interested in seeing the evidence? I can repeat my testimony if you like, but I assure you, I haven't found anything different in the last few days." He shuffled about, presumably to retrieve the items he was referencing, but as Cyrus was facing the wrong way, he couldn't see exactly what was going on.
The titles on the bookshelf seemed to be primarily scholarly in nature: there was a copy of Dussard's, the definitive botany tome, and a much-used three-volume set of Greenwood's, the classic in humanoid anatomy. Several less-seminal treatises and textbooks were present as well, along with what appeared to be a modest collection of epics and bard's tales.
"Looking for something in particular?" The girl leaned slightly sideways into the bookcase, her arm fitting neatly into the space between the shelf's edge and the books themselves. Her eyebrow was arched, just visible over the top of the mask.
Cyrus hummed, flashing her a smile. “Interesting collection of books. I'd thought the system was organized by relevance, but that doesn't explain the more fanciful elements. It would be rather odd for a man of science to be so often struck by flights of fancy." Never mind that his bookshelves looked quite similar—his taste was as much magic as concrete empirical study. But he was beginning to wonder...
“I don't believe I ever caught your name. Cyrus Avenarius, if you'd like mine first." He tilted his head to the side, flicking a glance at where Rilien was speaking to Lefévre. The tranquil was asking about the copying process for the documents, it seemed.
He held out his hand for her to shake, rising from his crouch in the process.
From the glance he'd taken, it seemed Lefévre was surprised by the question. "I'm afraid magic is not my field of expertise," he admitted, shuffling a few of the other papers around on the desk. "But I've worked from copies made in this way before, and have never noted any discrepancies with the originals."
"Gemma." A small, callus-worn hand closed over Cyrus's much larger one. "Gemma de Santis. I'm... Eugène's ward, I guess you could say." She shrugged. "Mostly, I just make sure he doesn't forget what day it is." It looked like she was attempting an exasperated smile, but she didn't quite seem to manage it. "But you should go look at that letter, if it's what you're here for. That Kestrel woman seemed pretty interested in it, too."
He supposed it was what he was here for. A small doubt niggled at the back of Cyrus's mind, but for the moment he let it stay there, reintegrating himself into the conversation the others were having. It seemed Rilien had begun inquiring about the nature of handwriting comparisons.
“What are the criteria for an affirmative match between two documents?" The elf was looking down at what must have been the letter in question; when Cyrus joined him, he handed it over.
"Well, that depends on the situation," Lefévre replied. "It's a new discipline, and still in development, something I was careful to mention in my testimony, mind you. But when the sample is small, like this, the key is to find... particularly characteristic letters and strokes." He blinked rapidly a few times, stepping up closer to Cyrus and pointing at a 't' in the first line. "See here? Different people make that stroke differently. It's characteristic. And I found the same stroke in the journals the court furnished for comparison."
The character he pointed to did seem to be rather uniquely-shaped; it seemed to have been made without lifting the quill from the page at all. Likely, most people used at least two strokes for a 't.'
Cyrus squinted at it for a moment, tilting his head and raising a hand to his chin. His calluses scrubbed against his jaw. The observation was fair enough, perhaps, but... “Are you certain that's the right comparison? The handwriting I use for my notes is entirely different from what I'd use if anyone else was meant to read what I'd written." He'd never bothered with a detailed comparison, but he was sure at least a few of the letters would be markedly different. If so, it wouldn't actually make sense for the two sources to be such a close match.
"What? Of course I'm certain." Lefévre sounded offended, now, his brows knitting. He wasn't a very tall man, but the comment prompted him to straighten his posture, almost like a bird puffing itself up to appear larger. "Fledgling science it may be, but I am the one who invented it."
“He is deceiving us." Rilien's eyes flicked to Cyrus's for a moment. “I cannot be sure about how much, but the last statement in particular was certainly false."
Cyrus wasn't exactly sure how he knew that, but then it was part of his job to be able to tell things like that. It only confirmed something he'd been increasingly-suspicious about. This was very strange. On a hunch, he glanced at Lefévre's hands. There was a bit of ink on them, but no calluses—they were as soft as those belonging to most gentlemen of the peerage. But that wasn't right. The kind of work that went on in this room was not the kind that left one's hands completely soft. The amount of writing alone would produce small ones on the sides of the fingers. And that wasn't to say anything of the alchemy or the horticulture or any amount of the empirical research necessary for the job that he supposedly had.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “This man isn't a scientist in the slightest." He tilted his head, then turned halfway behind him, fixing his eyes on Gemma. “But I'm willing to bet you are."
"Don't be absurd," Lefévre sputtered, at the same time Gemma sighed heavily.
She held Cyrus's eyes for a moment, then shook her head. "Give it up, Eugène. They clearly know what they're talking about." She crossed her arms, though her body language suggested resignation rather than hostility. "I'm curious, though. What gave it away?"
Cyrus glanced between them, blinking once and then shrugging with exaggerated nonchalance. “The books, for one. The shelves are better-organized for someone of your height than his. And it is a relevance system, which means the person concerned with the relevance quite likes bards' tales and works of epic fiction. That could have been either of you, but it didn't fit the character he was playing very well."
He glanced at Eugène for a moment. “And it is a character. As someone who resembles it more often than not, I can tell you you overdid it. Besides, a scientist would have been much more excited to get into the technical minutiae of the brand-new field he'd invented, rather than speaking in the broadest of generalities. It's a sure sign that you don't know what you're talking about outside of a script. She's obviously coached you, but only thoroughly enough to survive a standard deposition in front of people who also don't know what you're talking about. Like barristers and judges."
“So it is you we should be talking to about this." Rilien concluded the explanation by focusing his attention on Gemma. “And no small secret that we have discovered, which I believe gives you more incentive than necessary to cooperate to the extent of your capabilities."
She pushed a heavy breath from her lungs, shifting her weight uneasily. "We will. Of course we will. Just don't—please, don't tell anyone about this. You're right: Eugène's an actor. A public face for the work I do. But he's also my friend, and my warden, and someone who gave me a chance to do what I knew I could. I don't want his reputation to suffer for this."
Cyrus looked at Rilien. As the tranquil offered no protest, he assumed he was fine to handle this as he preferred. Very well, then. “We won't." He had no interest in halting their arrangement, whatever deception was involved. They seemed to be doing important work, to him: Gemma in advancing investigative science and Eugène in getting those results accepted more widely by lending it a legitimacy that she sadly likely would not have been able to achieve on her own, being young and, he supposed, probably not noble. “But we do need to better understand the evidence here. And we'd like a copy of the letter, if that can be done expediently."
Gemma nodded slowly. "Well... okay. We can do the copies thing. I had another one made after Kestrel came by. As for the rest of it... you might be right, about the difference between private writings and ones for other people. All I know is, I was given the letter, and the journal pages, and told they were representative of his handwriting. The match between them is about as perfect as handwriting gets, so if it's a forgery, you're looking for someone who was able to forge by accessing his private writings for comparison, rather than other letters or anything like that. Should narrow things down a bit." She pursed her lips.
"If you can bring me other samples, from things he meant other people to see, I could tell you more, but it would take time. Probably more than he has, if I heard right about the sentencing."
“Would you be willing to tell a court that you need more time to make such a comparison, at least?" Rilien slid his hands from his sleeves and lowered them to his sides. “Or send Lord Lefévre to do so on your behalf?"
The two exchanged a look, then Gemma inclined her head again. "Yeah, sure. We can do that. But the possibility that his handwriting might look different sometimes isn't going to be enough to get you a new trial. That judge seemed pretty out to get him, I hear."
"The Duchess more than the judge," Eugène put in. "Her words were elegant enough, but everything she said was some kind of condemnation of the Marquis's character. For what it's worth, there are a limited number of things I can think of that would make someone that willing to publicly destroy another's reputation." Gemma made a face, but she didn't disagree.
That much, Cyrus had already figured, but he noted Eugène's impression of the Duchess's vehemence anyway. It might be worth looking into, if nothing else took them anywhere productive. “Is there anything else you can think of that seemed odd or strange about this case or the people involved?"
Eugène shook his head, but Gemma looked thoughtful for a moment. “One thing I did think was odd... they were saying he'd been cooking the books for a long time. Cheating the Empress out of her taxes and all. Seems like kind of a different crime from sedition, doesn't it? They connected them with that stolen weapons shipment, but no one ever found it. Not on him or anywhere else. Might be that if you found that, you'd be able to see if the link holds up or not. That's what I'd do." She gripped her biceps in her hands.
“Consider that me thanking you. For not telling anyone about this. We'll say the other stuff, if you need us to, but I hope you have more of a case by then. Otherwise, this isn't going to go well for you."
Cyrus nodded. “Duly noted. Thank you Gemma, Eugène." If he'd had more time, he believed he could have spent a great deal of it here, asking her about what she did for a living. Perhaps what the plants were for. But unfortunately, they were in something of a hurry. While they had possibly narrowed the pool of suspects to those who had access to Julien's private writings, Gemma had a very good point about the nature of the crimes he'd been accused of. The connection between embezzlement and sedition seemed thin, and presumably the letter and the missing weapons shipment were the link. They'd do well to refute both. That would take some more work.
For now, it was probably best to meet Stellulam and Vesryn back at The Roost. Perhaps they'd had a bit more concrete luck.
But all of that was a discussion for a later time. At the moment, their task was considerably more urgent, and he and Rilien were meant to be tracking down some evidence and the man who'd testified in a court to its authenticity. It wasn't difficult in the slightest for Cyrus to believe such experts could be bought, especially if they might have their own secrets to hide. But it would be impossible to know without understanding more than he did about the man himself and the documents in question, which he was hoping to get a look at today.
“So what's the story with this Mage du Sang?" He put the question to Rilien, walking next to him down one of the main thoroughfares in the commerce district. It was a lively market; they managed to stand out even in the crowd, perhaps due to the obvious lack of masks on both of their parts. He wondered if he shouldn't procure one, if the investigation proved to require speaking with someone who was likely to care. A question he'd leave for a later date.
Rilien glanced at him from the corner of an eye. “Not a literal blood mage." The clarification wasn't entirely necessary; Cyrus could see the pun already. “For a fee, this person can procure or forge the documentation necessary to prove noble ancestry, assuming some basic conditions are met."
Such as being human, or able to pass for one, no doubt. “But surely only so many long lost cousins of whatever house can show up before it's utterly ridiculous? If it were that easy, there would be competing businesses, and work from any of them would be near-meaningless."
“It is not as outlandish as it may initially seem." Rilien shook his head fractionally. “The ordinary practice is for Orlesian noble families to be quite large. The prevalence of assassination as a method of settling disputes makes that necessary. The Game, as it is called, could not exist if the players were too few, given the finality of exclusions. Thus, any given noble has as possible heirs not only their children and children's children, but also siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Sometimes entire branches of families end up little better off than commoners, due to lack of inheritance. Sometimes branches die off entirely. When the entanglements are so many and complicated, the discovery of obscure second cousins and the like is not difficult, nor difficult to falsify."
Cyrus supposed that was fair enough. His own family was small; his mother had had no siblings at all, and his grandfather only one sister, who had died long before he was born. His few living relatives were quite distant, descendants of his grandmother's brother or something of the kind. In Tevinter, where lineage itself was the matter of greatest concern, having too many children was almost a bad thing, as it in some sense 'cheapened' the heritage of each. Not to mention increased the drain on resources necessary to train them all in their magic. The attitude Rilien was describing was baffling, but perhaps that was only because Magisters only rarely outright killed each other. Or at least, comparatively rarely. Humiliation and disgrace were much more common—they had at least that much respect for the precious gift they all shared. Or so they were likely to say. More honestly, it was that magic was rare, and the political and economic structure of the Imperium demanded that there be enough, but not too many, mages.
“If there would typically be so many competitors anyway, why bother with claiming such a distant relation? Surely not many have ever come to inheritance because of this person's bureaucratic conjurations." The aim of such a thing was difficult to see, from where he looked.
Rilien lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “That may depend on how poorly one's family is losing, so to speak. Also, even those nobles not set to inherit have opportunities commoners do not. The most prominent of those is the ability to join the chevaliers. One can live quite comfortably as one, with or without other sources of income. Various legal protections apply to nobility that do not apply to others as well, though those are of dubious worth, as the present case demonstrates." His tone remained invariant. Cyrus supposed he should have been—would once have been—unnerved by the elf's tranquility. But somehow, he simply... wasn't. He elected not to think about why.
It wasn't long after they left the bounds of the market district that they reached their destination: the address Kestrel had given them belonged to a modest, if stately enough townhouse, grouped next to several more of the same along the side of a broad, bricked street. Their knock at the door was answered by a young girl apparently in her late teens or so, with dark hair that spilled over her shoulders in abundant curls. She was dressed conservatively, though masked like most everyone they'd encountered, the color of the accessory evenly divided between black and white.
Dark blue eyes swept over them, a quick assessment that lingered on Cyrus's visible weaponry and the lyrium brand visible on Rilien's forehead. She pursed her lips and sighed. "This way, please." Oddly enough, she did not seem to feel compelled to ask after their identities or the purpose of their visit; on the contrary, she seemed quite satisfied with whatever she'd gleaned from her initial inspection. Perhaps unusual visitors were commonplace here. "Eugène, we have guests!" She called the words down the house's narrow entrance hallway, triggering a rather abrupt set of shuffling and banging noises.
Within a few more moments, a disheveled head of ash-grey hair appeared from one of the doorways, the man it belonged to looking first the wrong way down the hallway, and only then turning to face them. "Visitors? Ack!" He must have dropped something he was holding, because it clattered to the ground a moment later, the impact sound muffled by the thick rugs underfoot. "Ah—just—come in, I'll only be a moment." His head disappeared back through the doorway.
Cyrus lifted both eyebrows. Julien's remark about an odd little man, or whatever he'd said along those lines, made quite a bit more sense in context. His eyes slid to the girl; he tilted his head at her. “Is he usually like that?" Rilien had already started towards the door Lefévre had invited them through, sliding his arms into his sleeves.
She shrugged. "More or less, yeah." With a gesture, she urged him to follow Rilien, then brought up the rear of the procession herself.
The room they'd been ushered into was surprisingly large; most likely it had originally been two rooms, and the wall between them had been removed. Not entirely unlike Cyrus's atelier, it was lined with bookshelves, many of them gathering dust. The shelves at chest height and the row beneath were less dusty, evidence of an organizational system that used some criterion other than author name or subject to sort the material for retrieval.
There were several worktables in the area, most with wooden stools set near them. The one nearest the room's large window was occupied by small planters, holding, it seemed, varieties of herb both poisonous and medicinal. Nightshade, mugwort, monkshood, hemlock and darkspawn ivy, among others. Each was attended by a mechanism involving glass tubing, seemingly designed to drip water into the planters at fixed intervals in precise quantities. Another table looked like a more conventional alchemy station, if not quite as elaborate as Rilien's setup in Skyhold. Still another looked exclusively dedicated to documentation of whatever sort, stacked neatly into piles of roughly-equal size.
Lefévre himself was grimacing at a bent compass, probably the item he'd just dropped, but he set it down on the table in front of him when he noticed they'd entered. There was a mask there, too, a more elaborate version of the girl's, and edged in silver, but he didn't put it on. "Ah, hello gentlemen. Eugène Lefévre, at your service." He sketched a hasty bow, an awkward smile on his face, leaning back against the desk. For a moment, his eyes, one of them aided by a monocular lens, drifted behind Cyrus and Rilien to the young woman, but then he returned them to his guests. "How might I help you?"
“We are here about the D'Artignon case." Rilien answered the question directly, leaving Cyrus free to make a better inspection of the room. Rude though it might be, he did so, heading over to the bookshelves. He had to bend a fair bit to get at the lower of the two most-used shelves, crouching so he could scan the titles.
Rilien, of course, did a rather spectacular job of not behaving as though his actions were anything out of the ordinary, and he suspected their host would follow suit. But he wanted a sense of who this man was, and there were few quicker ways to get that sense then knowing which books he'd liked enough or found important enough to put front and center on his shelves. The system was probably a relevance-based one, after all.
There was a bit of a pause before Lefévre's response, no doubt due to the fact that he was trying to decide what if anything to do about Cyrus's obvious break from the conversation, but in the end, he indeed chose not to mention it, replying to Rilien instead. "I see. I actually had another visitor recently about the same thing. I take it you're interested in seeing the evidence? I can repeat my testimony if you like, but I assure you, I haven't found anything different in the last few days." He shuffled about, presumably to retrieve the items he was referencing, but as Cyrus was facing the wrong way, he couldn't see exactly what was going on.
The titles on the bookshelf seemed to be primarily scholarly in nature: there was a copy of Dussard's, the definitive botany tome, and a much-used three-volume set of Greenwood's, the classic in humanoid anatomy. Several less-seminal treatises and textbooks were present as well, along with what appeared to be a modest collection of epics and bard's tales.
"Looking for something in particular?" The girl leaned slightly sideways into the bookcase, her arm fitting neatly into the space between the shelf's edge and the books themselves. Her eyebrow was arched, just visible over the top of the mask.
Cyrus hummed, flashing her a smile. “Interesting collection of books. I'd thought the system was organized by relevance, but that doesn't explain the more fanciful elements. It would be rather odd for a man of science to be so often struck by flights of fancy." Never mind that his bookshelves looked quite similar—his taste was as much magic as concrete empirical study. But he was beginning to wonder...
“I don't believe I ever caught your name. Cyrus Avenarius, if you'd like mine first." He tilted his head to the side, flicking a glance at where Rilien was speaking to Lefévre. The tranquil was asking about the copying process for the documents, it seemed.
He held out his hand for her to shake, rising from his crouch in the process.
From the glance he'd taken, it seemed Lefévre was surprised by the question. "I'm afraid magic is not my field of expertise," he admitted, shuffling a few of the other papers around on the desk. "But I've worked from copies made in this way before, and have never noted any discrepancies with the originals."
"Gemma." A small, callus-worn hand closed over Cyrus's much larger one. "Gemma de Santis. I'm... Eugène's ward, I guess you could say." She shrugged. "Mostly, I just make sure he doesn't forget what day it is." It looked like she was attempting an exasperated smile, but she didn't quite seem to manage it. "But you should go look at that letter, if it's what you're here for. That Kestrel woman seemed pretty interested in it, too."
He supposed it was what he was here for. A small doubt niggled at the back of Cyrus's mind, but for the moment he let it stay there, reintegrating himself into the conversation the others were having. It seemed Rilien had begun inquiring about the nature of handwriting comparisons.
“What are the criteria for an affirmative match between two documents?" The elf was looking down at what must have been the letter in question; when Cyrus joined him, he handed it over.
"Well, that depends on the situation," Lefévre replied. "It's a new discipline, and still in development, something I was careful to mention in my testimony, mind you. But when the sample is small, like this, the key is to find... particularly characteristic letters and strokes." He blinked rapidly a few times, stepping up closer to Cyrus and pointing at a 't' in the first line. "See here? Different people make that stroke differently. It's characteristic. And I found the same stroke in the journals the court furnished for comparison."
The character he pointed to did seem to be rather uniquely-shaped; it seemed to have been made without lifting the quill from the page at all. Likely, most people used at least two strokes for a 't.'
Cyrus squinted at it for a moment, tilting his head and raising a hand to his chin. His calluses scrubbed against his jaw. The observation was fair enough, perhaps, but... “Are you certain that's the right comparison? The handwriting I use for my notes is entirely different from what I'd use if anyone else was meant to read what I'd written." He'd never bothered with a detailed comparison, but he was sure at least a few of the letters would be markedly different. If so, it wouldn't actually make sense for the two sources to be such a close match.
"What? Of course I'm certain." Lefévre sounded offended, now, his brows knitting. He wasn't a very tall man, but the comment prompted him to straighten his posture, almost like a bird puffing itself up to appear larger. "Fledgling science it may be, but I am the one who invented it."
“He is deceiving us." Rilien's eyes flicked to Cyrus's for a moment. “I cannot be sure about how much, but the last statement in particular was certainly false."
Cyrus wasn't exactly sure how he knew that, but then it was part of his job to be able to tell things like that. It only confirmed something he'd been increasingly-suspicious about. This was very strange. On a hunch, he glanced at Lefévre's hands. There was a bit of ink on them, but no calluses—they were as soft as those belonging to most gentlemen of the peerage. But that wasn't right. The kind of work that went on in this room was not the kind that left one's hands completely soft. The amount of writing alone would produce small ones on the sides of the fingers. And that wasn't to say anything of the alchemy or the horticulture or any amount of the empirical research necessary for the job that he supposedly had.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “This man isn't a scientist in the slightest." He tilted his head, then turned halfway behind him, fixing his eyes on Gemma. “But I'm willing to bet you are."
"Don't be absurd," Lefévre sputtered, at the same time Gemma sighed heavily.
She held Cyrus's eyes for a moment, then shook her head. "Give it up, Eugène. They clearly know what they're talking about." She crossed her arms, though her body language suggested resignation rather than hostility. "I'm curious, though. What gave it away?"
Cyrus glanced between them, blinking once and then shrugging with exaggerated nonchalance. “The books, for one. The shelves are better-organized for someone of your height than his. And it is a relevance system, which means the person concerned with the relevance quite likes bards' tales and works of epic fiction. That could have been either of you, but it didn't fit the character he was playing very well."
He glanced at Eugène for a moment. “And it is a character. As someone who resembles it more often than not, I can tell you you overdid it. Besides, a scientist would have been much more excited to get into the technical minutiae of the brand-new field he'd invented, rather than speaking in the broadest of generalities. It's a sure sign that you don't know what you're talking about outside of a script. She's obviously coached you, but only thoroughly enough to survive a standard deposition in front of people who also don't know what you're talking about. Like barristers and judges."
“So it is you we should be talking to about this." Rilien concluded the explanation by focusing his attention on Gemma. “And no small secret that we have discovered, which I believe gives you more incentive than necessary to cooperate to the extent of your capabilities."
She pushed a heavy breath from her lungs, shifting her weight uneasily. "We will. Of course we will. Just don't—please, don't tell anyone about this. You're right: Eugène's an actor. A public face for the work I do. But he's also my friend, and my warden, and someone who gave me a chance to do what I knew I could. I don't want his reputation to suffer for this."
Cyrus looked at Rilien. As the tranquil offered no protest, he assumed he was fine to handle this as he preferred. Very well, then. “We won't." He had no interest in halting their arrangement, whatever deception was involved. They seemed to be doing important work, to him: Gemma in advancing investigative science and Eugène in getting those results accepted more widely by lending it a legitimacy that she sadly likely would not have been able to achieve on her own, being young and, he supposed, probably not noble. “But we do need to better understand the evidence here. And we'd like a copy of the letter, if that can be done expediently."
Gemma nodded slowly. "Well... okay. We can do the copies thing. I had another one made after Kestrel came by. As for the rest of it... you might be right, about the difference between private writings and ones for other people. All I know is, I was given the letter, and the journal pages, and told they were representative of his handwriting. The match between them is about as perfect as handwriting gets, so if it's a forgery, you're looking for someone who was able to forge by accessing his private writings for comparison, rather than other letters or anything like that. Should narrow things down a bit." She pursed her lips.
"If you can bring me other samples, from things he meant other people to see, I could tell you more, but it would take time. Probably more than he has, if I heard right about the sentencing."
“Would you be willing to tell a court that you need more time to make such a comparison, at least?" Rilien slid his hands from his sleeves and lowered them to his sides. “Or send Lord Lefévre to do so on your behalf?"
The two exchanged a look, then Gemma inclined her head again. "Yeah, sure. We can do that. But the possibility that his handwriting might look different sometimes isn't going to be enough to get you a new trial. That judge seemed pretty out to get him, I hear."
"The Duchess more than the judge," Eugène put in. "Her words were elegant enough, but everything she said was some kind of condemnation of the Marquis's character. For what it's worth, there are a limited number of things I can think of that would make someone that willing to publicly destroy another's reputation." Gemma made a face, but she didn't disagree.
That much, Cyrus had already figured, but he noted Eugène's impression of the Duchess's vehemence anyway. It might be worth looking into, if nothing else took them anywhere productive. “Is there anything else you can think of that seemed odd or strange about this case or the people involved?"
Eugène shook his head, but Gemma looked thoughtful for a moment. “One thing I did think was odd... they were saying he'd been cooking the books for a long time. Cheating the Empress out of her taxes and all. Seems like kind of a different crime from sedition, doesn't it? They connected them with that stolen weapons shipment, but no one ever found it. Not on him or anywhere else. Might be that if you found that, you'd be able to see if the link holds up or not. That's what I'd do." She gripped her biceps in her hands.
“Consider that me thanking you. For not telling anyone about this. We'll say the other stuff, if you need us to, but I hope you have more of a case by then. Otherwise, this isn't going to go well for you."
Cyrus nodded. “Duly noted. Thank you Gemma, Eugène." If he'd had more time, he believed he could have spent a great deal of it here, asking her about what she did for a living. Perhaps what the plants were for. But unfortunately, they were in something of a hurry. While they had possibly narrowed the pool of suspects to those who had access to Julien's private writings, Gemma had a very good point about the nature of the crimes he'd been accused of. The connection between embezzlement and sedition seemed thin, and presumably the letter and the missing weapons shipment were the link. They'd do well to refute both. That would take some more work.
For now, it was probably best to meet Stellulam and Vesryn back at The Roost. Perhaps they'd had a bit more concrete luck.