Gareth glugged down half the glass before him. "I cannot see power fall into the wrong hands..." His brow was set and his mouth was pursed, but not for long, for pure salt followed after a brief moment of silence. "...In the face of battle, it is the side most competent that wins. It is not the skill of a single swordsman, or the might of a fearsome brute..." He paused once more, taking another drink. Just as he seemed to calm down, his voice came down ominously again. "...and we need composure, not recklessness. The king is in more danger now than he was before [i]her[/i] death, for we have no intel on our enemy beyond a bloody billfold meant to lead us on a goosechase." If there was anything else he noticed during that trial, it was the ridiculous nature of that particular piece of evidence. 'What foe would be blind enough to leave the names of their command on a single officer? What foe would leave such an obvious taunt? No,' Gareth thought, 'it was certainly a ruse.' "The investigation is doomed because a bloodthirsty knight decided to abandon standard protocol and enter the interrogation room alone out of incompetence." The Order could've held her prisoner and obtained key information from her. By a more thorough investigation of Lexine, the Order might've been able to learn more about the oncoming assassination plot. "There are others of her kind here, and God knows where they are or who they are, and we'll be damned if that billfold spells out their names for us." He knew it wouldn't. That sort of document couldn't possibly have the right names written on it. It wasn't true, no it wasn't. It didn't matter that it appeared to be an official Arcarti script, it was there to fool the Order into looking in the wrong places for the wrong people. The names of Arcarti officials printed there, even if they could be verified, wouldn't be the names they'd use in a foreign land they were plotting war with. Who would be so naive? Gareth kept up this internal dialogue as he grew silent, intermittently sipping his drink after his rant, wherein he spilled his entire summary of the situation with Lexine, came to a close. Being one who feared the imbalance that would come with the king's death, he couldn't let the joke continue on. He didn't want to serve a bad leader, he didn't want the output of the recent string of events being the king's fateful end, and he didn't want defeat in war.