“You’re not getting rid of me that easily.” I pulled out a chair from in front of his desk. It was piled high with books, and I lifted them, intending to dump them somewhere so I could have a seat. “I’m parking my butt right here, and I won’t move until you tell me about my father.”

“Don’t touch those!” Ballos barked, his paper-white cheeks reddening. He spoke a Word, waving his hand, and the books levitated out of my hands. I sat down on the chair as he guided them over to a patch of empty space on one of the other desks. When he turned back to me, he looked half-resigned, half-resentful. “I read about your engagement to Lord Iannis in the papers, and perhaps I should have expected some repercussions from that. But I did not expect you to have the audacity to show up on my doorstep yourself.” He looked down his hooked nose at me.

“Yeah, well, I guess you haven’t heard the stories about me,” I said, resisting the urge to be belligerent and kick my feet up on his desk. “I’m pretty audacious.”

“Clearly.” The old mage sniffed, then looked above my head at Rylan. “I suppose you won’t leave until I tell you the sordid tale, but this young man must wait outside in the parlor. I do not wish for him to overhear our conversation.”

I turned in my chair to meet Rylan’s scowling face. “Go,” I told him. “I’ll fill you in later. He’s more likely to open up if we do as he says.”

“I feel like this is becoming a pattern,” Rylan grumbled, but he nodded, then left the room. The butler closed the door behind him, leaving Ballos and me alone in the messy study.

Ballos carefully rolled up the parchment and returned it to its storage tube, then set it aside so he could sit down. “All right,” he said, meeting my gaze. “Ask your questions.”

“What do you know about my father’s affair with my mother?”

“Not very much,” the old mage said stiffly. “Haman was—and still is—a young mage. He was only fifty years old when he came to study under me. So it was not surprising that he spent his evenings gallivanting about the city. I always thought he was socializing with other young mages in society, seeing as how he is of noble birth, but as it turns out, he was spending time in the seedier areas of Solantha.”

I gritted my teeth at that, unsure if he was implying that my mother was a whore, or that everything outside the Mages Quarter was ‘seedy’. But I decided not to press the issue, or point out that he had no room to talk with the dilapidated state of his own house. Doing so would only derail the conversation and make him less likely to want to talk to me.