Dearest Diary,

As of this afternoon, I have a drawing of myself screaming and in the act of falling off a horse. Like many great men that came before me, my greatest moment has been immortalized in art, and I have posted it over my bed so that it might inspire me in my future pursuits even as I dream. Some might consider it a low moment, but I have two arguments against this. First, as each is an individual, we must not all be judged by the same metric. Second, if I choose this as my best moment, I feel almost certain to surpass it someday.

For emphasis, and in case my future self should read this, I did include an almost.

The first letter from Peeta arrived two days later.

K -

Mrs. Carren noticed my interest and provided a list of everyone she has seen leaving C's house in the last month. She also said that a Mr. Snow might be of particular interest. He visits only at night and on no clear schedule. I saw Snow leaving yesterday evening and felt immediately suspicious of him. I do not know if there is a reason behind this suspicion and know nothing more of the man. In case Snow is not his real name, or should you encounter him, I have included a sketch.

I cannot help but feel that Mrs. Carren could put an end to the war in a week if given the opportunity.

- PM

"Who is your letter from?" Katniss pulled it in closer when Prim tried to read it over her shoulder. "Is it from Hawthorne?"

"No."

"And I know it's not Haymitch, so don't try to tell me that. Who is it? I didn't know that anyone else wrote you."

She glared at her younger sister. "Can I not read a letter in peace?"

Prim didn't bother to answer. "I wager it was Mister Mellark. You don't smile like that when you're thinking about Hawthorne."

Katniss frowned. She hadn't really been smiling, had she? No, of course not. Treason was a serious matter, and she approached the situation with the gravity it deserved.

Her sister mistook her silence for agreement. "It was, wasn't it?" She beamed. "Katniss, that's wonderful! Is he going to start calling on you again? He is so much more interesting than Hawthorne."

She really had no argument on that last point, so she chose to ignore it. "Mister Mellark is my friend." If it were only that simple. "And considering that he is only my friend and nothing more, and we see each other quite often at various functions, I doubt that he will be calling on me anytime soon." She turned back to the letter, hoping Prim would take the hint.

Instead, because Prim was a younger sister and therefore had an extra sense for exactly the action that would annoy her older sibling the most, Prim sat down next to her. Katniss responded by clutching the letter to her chest.

"You're confusing." If one were to judge from her voice alone, what prompted this statement must have been obvious to even the most casual observer. Except Katniss, who was very much an active and engaged participant in the mess her life had become, had no idea what she was talking about.

She counted fifteen heartbeats before she allowed herself to ask. "Are you planning on elaborating?"

"You don't even like Hawthorne, but you spend all your time with him." Katniss opened her mouth to argue, but Prim wasn't finished. "And then there's Mister Mellark, who you are obviously very friendly with, and yet you spend half your time pretending that he doesn't exist. You must admit that it looks a bit strange."

"Hawthorne and I enjoy each other's company very much."

Prim snorted. "I know you were stepping on his toes on purpose. Even you don't dance that poorly."

Katniss really wished she could argue with that.

"Please, Katniss, just tell me what you're thinking. Just a few weeks ago, you would have balked at even the mention of marriage. Now, the odds at Heavensbee's are that you'll be engaged within a fortnight."

"They're betting on me at Heavensbee's?"

"More on Hawthorne than you, really. He is a lord." Prim shrugged. "And you never answered my question."

"I can't believe that's acceptable." Betting on her future as though it was as inconsequential as a horse race. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, but those self-absorbed, spoiled, pompous little princes that called themselves men didn't have an ounce of shame between –

She pushed the thought away. No point in it now. She could give the participants a piece of her mind if any of them were ever foolish enough to reveal their involvement. For now, she needed to get her younger sister off her tail, a far more delicate and less satisfying task than bashing in the heads of a few supposed gentlemen. The truth, that as long as she was allied with Hawthorne, very few would dare to deny her anything, wasn't the sort of thing one could admit to her mother. "I find him tolerable."

"Tolerable," Prim repeated, her voice flat.

"Pleasant." Yes, that sounded much better. "Are we going to talk about your suitors now?" she added before Prim could press the matter further.

Prim's eyes, usually so warm and inviting, went stony, and the temperature in the room dropped to below freezing. "I think we are both aware of your thoughts on that matter."

"And now that I know your thoughts on Hawthorne and Mister Mellark, I will consider the matter settled." Katniss picked up her letter again, sure to hold it close enough to her face that Prim could not read it over her shoulder. The letters blurred together at this distance, and she could already feel the first swellings of a headache at the front of her skull, but this wasn't about reading. A point needed to be made here, and make it she would.

Instead of accepting defeat the way any reasonable woman would, Prim simply leaned forward to look at the back of the paper. "Oh."

Katniss frowned.

"That's incredible." Prim's eyes never left the sheet. "Did Mister Mellark draw that?"

Confused, she flipped over the sheet. In an instant, she knew the man before her. Not personally, for while Katniss thought him familiar, she felt certain they had never been introduced, but she knew him. His intelligence, how his cruelty lurked beneath a mask of smiles and kindness, all of it laid bare before her. She had seen technically excellent drawings, and this was not one of them. Snow's sparse white hair curled in a way she had never seen in nature, and his lips had an unnatural fullness. But despite its flaws, she had rarely felt such an immediate connection to a drawing. With just a few strokes of his pencil – or charcoal, for though she ought to, she wouldn't know the difference – Peeta conveyed the entirety of a man.

"Who is he?"

"Hmm?" Katniss' eyes did not leave Snow's.

"The man Mister Mellark drew. Who is he?" Prim prompted. "He seems very real."

"Oh. Yes, I suppose he does. Perhaps he is real. Maybe not. I don't know."

Prim rose an eyebrow. "He might have mentioned him in the letter."

"No." That came out too quickly, but now she was committed. "I think he must have not noticed that there was a sketch on the back of the paper when he started writing. I'm sure it's all a mistake."

"A pleasant one, though."

"True." She folded the letter and stood. "I forgot something upstairs."

"Of course you did." No seventeen-year-old should be able to sound so patronizing. "Do let me know if you find out who the man in the drawing is. I'm very curious."

Katniss managed a nod and a smile. Not a convincing smile, but a smile.

Once upstairs, she made sure to seat herself facing the door so that should Prim ever-so-innocently happen to come in, her sister would not see what she was doing. As neatly as she could, she copied down the list of Cranes visitors. Some of the names were familiar. Plutarch Heavensbee owned the gentlemen's club that Crane frequented. Her father had once employed James Cray, a solicitor, and reviewing the Everdeens' accounts following Father's death, Katniss felt sure the man had been siphoning off money for his own use from the day he'd been hired. She would not warn Crane about the man. The snake deserved whatever Cray took and more. Others she had never heard of. Katniss would have to find out what she could about them. Mother paid better attention to these matters than her. Perhaps she could help. Prim might know even more, for she and Crane had to talk about something during all that time they spent together, but Katniss would keep that as a last resort. She had no urge to repeat her walk in the rain.

With her list complete, she had no excuse to keep Peeta's letter any longer. Prim would surely go through her things at some point, and while a list was ubiquitous enough that she could safely leave it with her stack of Peeta's calling cards, Katniss doubted her sister would respect her wishes and not read the letter. She spent a long moment gazing at the sketch before she shut her eyes and tore the paper in half. The second rip came easier, and the one after that hardly hurt at all. She would put the scraps in the fireplace later today. For now, she had a letter to write.

P –

Thank you for your letter. Your work is greatly appreciated. I agree that this Mr. Snow is of great interest. I believe I have seen him before, and I will find what I can about him and C's other associates. Your drawing was incredible. It held a great deal of personality. My sister Primrose extends her compliments as well.

I am glad that you value your country so much over your personal comfort. It would be terrible if you had to give up your cheese buns for Britain.

- KE

"There's no need to limit oneself to a three-dimensional Cartesian space, even it is what we can easily see and understand. The same mathematics works on a much grander scale. Using the same algorithm, we can reduce any set of vectors down to a basis which we can then use to uniquely characterize any vector within the space." Katniss might have found the lecture interesting if she had not spent the last quarter of an hour hearing the two and three-dimensional cases described in detail or had more than a vague idea of what precisely constituted a vector. Or if she had requested a lecture. Or if she felt like her input was welcome in any way and Hawthorne was not just using her as a convenient excuse to hear himself talk.

She dared a glance out the window. The clear sky beckoned, the warm sun cloying and so very tempting, everything begging her to leave Hawthorne behind and join them out of doors, but she was trapped with half a cup of room-temperature tea and the human equivalent of the dry mathematics texts she read only in her nightmares. At least Mother had her embroidery to distract her. Katniss took a gulp of tea and wrinkled her nose. Awful.

"I am sorry to interrupt –"Lies told for the common good were perfectly excusable "- would you like another cup, Gale?" Theirs was well past the point of being fit for human consumption, but she needed him to be quiet for a moment.

He looked down at his cup as though he had forgotten its existence. Which, she supposed, he very well might have. Hawthorne did have a rather amazing ability to focus on a single subject at the cost of everything else. The man was destined for eccentricity. Katniss did not doubt that for a second. But his confusion passed quickly. "Yes, please. Thank you."

She took the cup and refilled it, reveling in the moment of silence the action provided. Katniss hated to spoil it, but she had to take her opportunities when they presented themselves. "Do you know a Mr. Snow?" It sounded forced. At some point, she would have to perfect the art of the offhand mention. Then again, once this nasty business was over with and she returned to the Seam, she doubted she would ever have any need for it.

"The name is familiar." Gale frowned as he took a sip. He was too polite to mention that the tea had long since gone cold. Thank goodness, for she didn't trust herself to apologize nicely when he was the one who had droned on for ages, drawing out this teatime far longer than she had anticipated. "But I couldn't match it to a face. Where did you meet him?"

"Oh, I haven't," she added much too quickly. Yes, she definitely needed to practice her false small talk. Her conversation skills in general could use some brushing up, if she was being honest with herself. Because she couldn't resist the urge to dig an even deeper grave for herself, Katniss continued, "I recall someone mentioning him a few days ago, is all. I thought it might have been you."

"I'm sure it wasn't." Another sip of the tea. Either he had already forgotten how vile the stuff was or Hawthorne had a masochistic streak in him that she never would have suspected. In either case, Katniss was about to thank God and all of his angels for their mercy when he spoke again. "This doesn't have anything to do with Crane, does it?"

For once, she remained quiet. Her own tea was starting to look rather inviting. Mother looked up from her embroidery and met Katniss' eyes, and she blushed.

Hawthorne noticed the exchange. "I told you to forget about it. Crane is not the first man to do business with the French, and I doubt he'll be the last."

"I can't just forget about this! He's committing treason!"

Mother was pointedly not looking at them. Not for the first time, Katniss envied her. She would give almost anything to not be embroiled in this right now.

Hawthorne frowned. "I did not say I approved of his actions."

"And I never said you did."

He spoke over her. "What I did say is that his personal business transactions are none of your concern. Let it be, Katniss."

She was losing him. Had probably already lost him, but maybe there was still some hope left. "Gale." Katniss put a hand on his arm. "He's courting Prim." Now he was at least looking at her. "Surely you understand as well as anyone. Imagine if it were Posy. Could you sit by and allow someone you had concerns about to pursue your sister?"

He flinched. "Gale, please."

She saw the exact moment he changed his mind. Hawthorne ran his fingers through his hair. "She will not listen to your advice?"

Katniss shook her head.

Ever the logical sort, he proceeded in the next obvious direction. "And hearing the same advice from me would have no effect as well, I presume."

"No." Katniss remembered what had happened when she had offered Prim her opinions on Mister Crane. She wouldn't wish her mud-soaked, rage-fueled walk through a London thunderstorm on anyone. Well, almost anyone. She preferred to keep all options available for those days she was feeling less than generous towards the rest of humanity.

"Difficult like her sister, then." He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. "I could speak with him, if it would reassure you."

It was a small step, and she rather doubted that Crane would admit any wrongdoing to Gale, but it was a step. The first step made the second easier, which, made the third easier, and like Gale's vector bases, if one took enough of those steps, they could explain anything.

At least, that was how Katniss understood it. She had never been very good at maths.

The letters flowed in over the next three days. As soon as Peeta's letter was safely destroyed, Katniss had begun drafting requests to her father's old business associates, each with questions about one or two of the names on her list. The first replies had arrived the next day, and her list morphed into a chart as she filled in information about Crane's associates. One or two letters had come each day since.

Today, she had a treasure trove of six. She sifted through them quickly. One came from Haymitch. As much as she didn't like putting off anything to do with the Seam, it was the only one she could reply to with Prim in the room, so she left it for later. Mother and Prim had said they would be gone most of the afternoon, but one could never be certain with those two. A pleasant spark went through her when she saw Peeta's beautifully scrolling handwriting on the second letter. She set that one aside as well, a treat for later. The rest, she went through, carefully noting everything on her chart, which was now growing quite crowded. She would have to make a new list after reading Peeta's letter.

Katniss grinned as she tore open the final letter. Her eyes only grazed the list of names at the top, instead settling on Peeta's note below.

K –

I'm glad you enjoyed my drawing. I hope you appreciate this one as well.

Thankfully, it's my brother's cook that makes the cheese buns. I am not sure what I would do if faced with the choice of losing either Britain the bait for my Everdeen traps.

- PM

She was going to kill him. It didn't matter that the information Peeta gave her was incredibly useful, or that his letters were a bright spot in the tedium of her days, or that his smiles were surely made of sunshine. She had never made that face and she was going to murder him. Katniss wouldn't hang for it, either, for the jury would surely find her actions justified. How had he thought it appropriate to send her an image of herself desperately hanging onto Daring and screaming for dear life? Never mind that she had escaped the incident without harm. He had turned it into a comedy, with her hair blowing out in a giant cloud around her as she wailed and her toes practically grazing the ground. And Daring, the monster she was, had gone from demon to unimpressed pony that gazed up as though asking God to relieve her of her terrible burden.

Daring's face might have prompted a giggle. Not a very big one, though. It certainly wouldn't be enough to save her master.

She stuffed the letter beneath her leg when Prim tore the door open. "Katniss, I can't believe it! How could you?"

"Pardon?"

Tears ran down her sister's cheeks, but her eyes burned with anger. "You told him to, didn't you? You set him on this bloody inquisition."

"Primrose, language." Mother looked far more calm about the matter. Katniss tried to meet her mother's eyes, hoping she could tell her what had made Prim so upset, but Eileen shook her head. "No, I won't be involved in this. The two of you need to discuss it between yourselves."

Prim's nostrils flared at that, but she did take a deep breath before speaking again. "You're the one who sent Hawthorne to talk to Seneca." Katniss didn't like that he was Seneca now instead of Mr. Crane, but she didn't comment on that. Prim was already angry enough. "You don't trust him. Moreover, you don't trust me to make my own decisions. Why must you always judge him so harshly? He's done nothing to deserve the way you treat him."

She thought Crane deserved rather more than she had given him, but Katniss knew better than to say that out loud. "I merely thought that Mister Crane and Hawthorne should become better acquainted. It does seem that they might be spending quite a bit of time together in the future."

"That's not why you did it. You don't trust him."

"I trust very few people." Katniss silently begged her mother to step in, but Eileen instead left the room, shutting the door behind her. She was trapped.

Prim didn't acknowledge their mother's departure. "But regardless of your personal feelings towards him, you should trust me. I trust Seneca, and I love him, and I want him to love me in return. And instead of letting me handle my own matters, you decided to send Hawthorne after him. You do realize that he now thinks I'm suspicious of him, don't you?"

"I do apologize for that." She spoke slowly and chose her words with the utmost care. "I didn't realize it would put you in such an uncomfortable situation." Katniss thought she had done an admirable job of staying calm throughout this exchange, but her patience was wearing thin. If Prim did not stop soon, there would be two shouting Everdeen sisters, and no city could prepare for that.

Thankfully, her words seemed to mollify Prim somewhat. "I apologize as well. I shouldn't have shouted." Her sister sighed and dug something from her sleeve pocket. "Here, he wanted me to give you this." Prim handed her a folded piece of paper, and Katniss accepted it. "Said he found it on the floor of the ballroom and kept forgetting to return it when he saw us. I told him it was no matter, that you don't keep your dance cards the way I sometimes do, but he insisted that I give it to you."

"That was very kind of him." After that, Katniss tuned out Prim's chatter. She really had no interest in near word-for-word retellings of Crane's conversations – unless of course they related to France or could land the man in prison. Those, she found very interesting indeed. She looked down at the paper, unfolding it.

The Trinket ball. It was her dance card from the Trinket ball. Katniss' breath caught. He knew. He had to know.

Prim did not notice her discomfort. "Seneca never speaks ill of you, you know. I think he rather admires your reluctance about him. He said he was glad to see a sister so protective of her younger sister. Rather admirable of him, wasn't it?"

She obviously expected a reply, but Katniss did not trust herself to speak.

Prim frowned, but she pressed forward all the same. "Well, he's certain he can clear up any misunderstandings as the two of you become better acquainted, and he is throwing a dinner for us next week for just that reason."

Katniss' heart stopped. "Dinner?" she asked weakly. "I'm not sure I can –"

"Mother's already accepted the invitation for all of us."

She felt acid burning at the back of her throat, and she closed her eyes, wishing it all away. A clever spider hardly moved from his place in the center of the web, allowing the fly to trap itself before wandering over to enjoy its feast.

But the scene playing on the back of her eyelids was not one of a spider biting down a Katniss-shaped fly. She had wanted from the beginning to go through Crane's office. Peeta had convinced her it should be their last resort, that they should learn as much they could through less dangerous channels before attempting anything so risky. That had been before. Now, they were in far greater peril.

"Katniss, are you all right?"

Her eyes snapped open. "Do you think you could ask Mister Crane to invite Peeta?" She saw the confusion in her sister's eyes. "To the dinner party. Peeta lives a few houses away from Mister Crane. I think it would be very neighborly to invite him."

Her sister smiled. "You want him invited because it would be neighborly. You're certain you've no other reasons?"

Katniss scrambled for an excuse. "Oh, erm, I-"

"Of course I'll ask." Prim winked. "In the spirit of being a good neighbor."