A smack of sound against the windowpane startled me; someone was throwing pebbles at our room. I got off the bed and peered down to the street. With clouds overhead, no moon or starlight limned the street, and although the houses on this lane had night lamps burning on their porches, not a single flame now illuminated the dark. I recognized the shadowy form from the drape of his winter coat over his shoulders. Alarm leaped like a deer bolting from the scent of wolves.

“It’s Vai!”

I crept downstairs, unbarred the door, and let him in. In the back of the house the fire in the kitchen stove, sealed for the night, groaned with a resigned huff as the presence of a powerful cold mage sucked all combustion from the flames. We tiptoed upstairs.

“Andevai!” Bee whispered as he shaped a spark of cold fire into the shape of a candle. “Why are you here? What went wrong?”

He shook off the coat. He was wearing a rough workingman’s jacket and trousers we had smuggled into Five Mirrors House as cushioning for the cacica’s head, which he had pulled on over his other garments.

“I told them it wasn’t the first time you had run away from me, which statement has the added benefit of being the truth. I spent all day nagging at them to find you, thinking that would relieve their concerns about me. Then they paraded four women in front of me and asked which one I wanted in my bed.” He sank down on the bed and rubbed his head as if it hurt. “They were so insistent, reminding me of how every magister owed it to the vigor of the Houses to do his part. The only way I could get rid of them was to reduce them all to tears by enumerating their flaws and shortcomings at length.”

“That can’t have been difficult for you, Magister,” said Bee with a sting in her smile.

He looked up so quickly I thought he meant to cut her with an edged retort. She braced herself, ready to give back what she got.

“For over seven years I worked to become the magister they would accept in Four Moons House, so I could prove I was more powerful than them, smarter than them, better than them. It was so easy to become him again. But I don’t want to be that man.”

Bee’s mouth parted in astonishment. Mercifully she said nothing, for above all things I could not imagine Vai accepting sympathetic platitudes.

“Then you won’t go back, love,” I said.

He looked away. “None of that matters,” he went on in a curt tone that another might have heard as a rejection but that I knew came from pride. “As I was leaving the parlor after getting rid of the women, I saw a messenger wearing the colors and badge of Four Moons House.”