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“I suppose you need to know where to stab.”

“Exactly,” said Mordaunt. “Also, don’t insult me by calling it a copy; it’s an original edition. About three hundred years old—”

Mordaunt cut himself off. He had just caught sight of Aurienne’s forearm, where Scrope’s literal manhandling had left a mark. His eyes, usually heavy lidded with insouciance, real or affected, flew open. His face lost all cynicism. His slouch disappeared. His scar became a vivid white line across his lips.

A second later, it was over. He fell back into his slouch, veiled his eyes, regained his cynicism, and said, “Pity Scrope’s already dead. Could’ve had a bit more fun with him. Are you hungry? I’ve asked for tea and things. Or will you have something stronger?”

Aurienne healed the marks on her arm. “It’s gone half three. Let Mrs.Parson sleep.”

“Mrs.Parson can still handle the occasional nighttime adventure,” said Mrs.Parson, entering the room with a tray of silverware and porcelain.

“How do you take it?” asked Mordaunt, pouring a cup of tea. “A splash of milk?”

“No, thank you,” said Aurienne.

“Sugar?”

“No.”

“Nothing fun. I ought to have known.”

Aurienne watched Mordaunt pour approximately two cubic feet of milk into his teacup. “Fun? Is that what you call that debauchery?”

“We all have our vices,” said Mordaunt, heaping in an equally grotesque amount of sugar.

Mrs.Parson set out a pile of biscuits and a bowl of fruit, and left them to it.

“Pomegranates,” remarked Aurienne.

“Yes,” said Mordaunt. “They’re a metaphor.”

Also in the bowl flopped a large, slightly flaccid banana. Aurienne did not ask if the banana, too, was a metaphor.

She left the tea, the pomegranates, and the flanana untouched.

“What happened to Mrs.Parson’s hand?” she asked.

“Her hand? Oh, that. An accident with a meat grinder when she was a girl. She does an amusing pantomime about it; you should ask her.”

Aurienne did not find such accidents amusing, but she set aside the subject instead of launching into a moral lecture. “We need to talk about tonight.”

“We do,” said Mordaunt. “It was stupid of you to come out. Kindly preserve your idiotic costume escapades for after you’re done healing me. I won’t care what happens to you then.”

“That’s not what we need to talk about,” said Aurienne. “But my idiotic escapade got me the information I needed.”

“You don’t even know if it’s good information.”

“And I may never know, because you—speaking of idiotic—killed our source. Which is what we actually need to talk about: the trail of cadavers we’re leaving in our wake. This isn’t how I conduct business.”

“It’s how I conductmybusiness,” said Mordaunt.

“Well, we can’t do it your way anymore.”

“I’m not telling you to do it my way. I’m telling you to do it right.”

“There is nothing right about fork-induced thoracic trauma resulting in death.”

A glove was waved Aurienne’s way. “You make everything so unpoetic.”