“Oh—ouch. Very good indeed,” Myste laughed. “That should do the trick.”

They finished dinner quickly; so much time spent out in the cold used up a lot of energy, and he was wolf-hungry.

Only after they had cleared the dishes away into the hampers did it occur to him to wonder why she had come there tonight. It couldn’t have been because she wanted his company—could it?

At that thought, he got a very odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. Not unpleasant, no, but—fluttery. It disconcerted him. It disconcerted him so much that he just blurted out what was in his head.

“Why are you here?” he heard himself saying, and could have hit himself for how it sounded.

But she didn’t seem to take offense at his words or his tone.

“Well—” she began, and hesitated. “Mixed motives, actually. I wanted to find out what you’d done with the youngsters. I must say that the ones who had gotten your lesson were nicely subdued for my classes; it was only the ones that hadn’t gotten to ‘play’ that were wound up like tops. And, um—” another hesitation, “—I, um, enjoy your company. And one other thing—” she added, hastily, before he could decide if she was blushing or not. “Keren slipped a little. Well, she didn’t really slip, so much as I browbeat it out of her when she brought me a dress, of all things, to mend for her.” She laughed. “I mean, Keren? In a dress? Please! That was odd enough, but a dress that looked like that?”

“Like what?” he asked, unthinking.

“A dockside whore,” she replied, with cheerful bluntness, and it was his turn to flush. “She said she didn’t want to take it to the Collegium seamstresses, because it was supposed to be a secret, and then tried to backtrack. Well, needless to say, I got the whole story out of her.”

“So you know?” he asked, feeling a little guilty that he hadn’t told her before this, seeing that he’d been thinking about asking for her help anyway.

“Hmm. I guessed, before this. Too many evenings when you weren’t here in the Complex, too many times when you knew things you shouldn’t have about parts of Haven you weren’t supposed to have ever visited,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean, I can put two and two together—and unlike some of our colleagues with some rather lofty ideas about Heraldic duties and honor, I know a bit about the practicalities of life. Anyway, I just wanted you to know that if I can help, without getting in the way, I’d like to. Keren might fit in some of the wilder parts of Haven, but I know the craftsmen’s districts inside and out.”