Alice found him on the fifth morning.
She had been looking for three days — not conspicuously, the way a person searches when they are afraid of being seen searching, but with the particular sideways attention she had developed during a decade of academic investigation, where the thing you needed was rarely in the place you were supposed to look.
He was in the palace chapel.
She almost missed him. The chapel was dim at that hour, the morning service over and the space emptied of its official population. A few candles still burned on the altar. The smell of incense hung in the cold air, sweet and sharp. Alice had gone in to collect her thoughts — an old habit from before she had stopped believing in anything specific — and she had been standing near the back when she saw the man in the black robes kneeling in the front pew.
His head was bowed. She could not see his face.
