“It’s been so long,” Elody said, playing with a curl of her hair. The henna she used for dye left it thin and fragile, but she could never stop playing with it. “Why didn’t you come back sooner?”

Malden smiled at her but made no answer. When he left, when he’d grown too old to be a baby of the house, when the previous madam of the place shoved him out in the streets, she’d not been unkind but was firm. There was no place for him there any longer. The house that had been his only home when he was a boy had suddenly seen him as a seed between its metaphorical teeth, and spat him out into the streets of Ness with as little ceremony. He could still remember the look on the faces of Elody and the other “girls” that day. They’d fought with themselves not to show him any pity. And they’d won.

For a while afterward, while Malden tried to find honest work—and then when he began his life of crime—he’d sworn to himself he would never return.

Now, seeing how Elody received him, he realized what a fool he’d been.

The madam patted his hand and let his silence go. She filled it with her own words instead. “So much has happened that I must tell you about. Wenna had her baby, she’s a pretty little thing, and Gildie actually made good on all her promises, and bought out her contract, and is living with a wood-carver now, she’s an honest woman at last. She who was the most scurrilous of commodities once, as you’ll no doubt remember.”

“Really? I thought she was all bluster, that one.”

Elody laughed. “Nothing stands still for long these days. Even old baggages like me can change our ways when the wind blows—oh, and have you heard the latest? It’s all the talk today. The Burgrave’s tower fell down! It seems a wonder, even now when I’ve had time to grow accustomed to the notion. Eight hundred years it stood. They say it was lightning that done for it.”

“I hadn’t heard,” Malden said.

“You must be the last.” She squinted at him suddenly. Malden tensed, thinking she might guess he’d had some hand in the tower’s collapse. She was a shrewd woman, Elody—one had to be to get to run a bawdy house in Ness. Could she see it written all over his face? “There’s something different about you,” she said finally.

“I’m the same as ever,” he protested.

“No. What is it? What do I sense here?” Her face opened wide with a bright smile. “You’ve met a woman! You must tell me all, at once!”