“It must be important to you,” I said at last, “or you wouldn’t have come. All right. You can take her body back.” I rose and walked up those three platforms to the front windows. Why my crazy partner had wanted it to be so much work to look out at the street was beyond me. I supposed a few other things might have been beyond me, as well. I braced my hands on the window frame and looked, at the empty street sunk in twilight, at the trumpet-fanfare sunset in orange and rose and azure, at the rooftops, at nothing.

A little noise behind me made me turn. I’d left the cupboard door open when I got out the tea things. Vissa stood in front of it, cradling something in his arms, his head bent. It was a moment before I could tell that what he held was a bottle with a brittle brown label. The liqueur, the one Tick-Tick had said was from over the Border, that she’d poured on strawberries and set fire to. Vissa clutched it as if it were a child, and on his face I could see tears standing.

“What is it?” I asked, coming toward him.

He whispered, “This… is from our vines, our cellars. The work of our family, for centuries, is in this liquor.”

My heart gave a little sinking lurch. She’d talked defiance toward her family while she poured it, but still, she owned some, and that seemed to mean something to her brother. He was right, and I didn’t know as much about her as I’d thought.

Then he raised his head. It was the wrong kind of sadness. It was as if she had died long ago, and still hadn’t quite died until now. “I was mistaken,” he said slowly. “I should not have come. Ah, blessed Mab, she did leave, and a curse on us that we hardly knew it!”

“I don’t understand,” I told him.

“No. This,” he nodded at the bottle, “is an unintended message, and only I have the reading of it.”

“Well, can you tell me what it is?”

He smiled, just barely. “She did not decant it.”

I stared, and at last, in desperation, added, “Huh?”

“To use this from the bottle is—oh, our father would have raged to see it done so! It is against all custom, all—you may trust me, it is not thought of, and in my house, had the thought been made a deed, what would have come of it would make you think no storm terrible, no raised hand to be dreaded. But if anyone would scorn the custom, it would be she.