“Can you find me a job?” he asked, grinning. “I’m broke.” As matter-of-fact as that. With the old glow of fragile confidence you find in people held together by nothing more substantial than affection (and fungi).

“Hello to you, too,” I said, walking back into the apartment to find him a towel, vaguely happy that I would not be asked to scrape mushrooms off him this time.

As I threw the towel in his face, I said, “Of course I can find you a job. There are lots of available positions for a paranoid, discredited, fringe historian with a fungal disorder who has recently been laid off for laying his students.”

Duncan winced. “Student. Singular.”

“Singular. Plural. Does it really matter?” I turned away from him. “So. Should I go or do you want to?” I asked. “Neither of us really has a choice. It’s not like my gallery is going to pay your bills when it doesn’t even pay mine.”

“Go?” He stared quizzically at me for a moment, and then he understood. “You should go. What if he disapproves of me now?”

“You assume he knows.”

“He knows everything. And what he doesn’t know, he finds out quickly. You should go.”

So I went. And that was the start of something altogether different.

Sirin’s office occupied part of the second floor of Hoegbotton & Sons’ headquarters on Albumuth Boulevard. The dull mass of red bricks always smelled of packing sawdust and exotic spices. It had gained a kind of inbred notoriety due to a novel that had used the offices as a prop to its fading plot during its climactic scenes. The building had survived not only that malaprop, but centuries of other challenges—from the Gray Tribes, to Festivals gone bad, to fires set by outraged monks from the Religious Quarter protesting unsavory business practices. (Not to mention the ongoing assault on its editorial domains by a certain pair of increasingly toothless and shrill Shrieks.) “There are only two times not to trust a Hoegbotton: when you’re selling and when you’re buying” was a common saying down at the docks.

Sirin’s office—a haven for culture within the blunt instrument of greed that formed the building proper—had a seasonal quality to it. In the winter and early spring, Sirin’s rosewood desk would be buried in contracts, manuscripts, proposals, financial information, and related books, all in preparation for publication. (Not then, but soon—perhaps even within three or four years—one of those manuscripts would be Mary’s. She truly was gifted at one point. And prolific—positively fecund—once she got started.) As the year progressed, his desk would slough off much of the clutter, until, by autumn, all but the finished books had vanished, and the magazines or broadsheets pregnant with reviews, both bright and dark, had taken their place. Then winter would once again obscure the lovely rosewood of his desk with the weight of things promised and things promising. His office had the most wonderful smell: of parchment pages, of ink, of newly printed books.