“Wow,” Claire breathed. Her mind reeled with all the new information as well as bright images inspired by Sophie’s tale. She longed for her set of oil pastels, so that she could try to capture them, the way she usually did at home. All those magical objects! And among them, maybe even the Hammer Tine.

She was just about to ask Sophie, Nett, and Sena if they had seen something that looked like the point of a crown, when Thorn spoke up.

“Sophie, would you please pass the sugar?”

But Sophie didn’t seem to have heard him, and so Claire handed the bowl to Thorn, who accepted it with a small nod. Clutching her silver goblet, purple steam rising up from it, Claire couldn’t help but stare at the shelves in the secret room.

Once, they’d been crowded with illegal magical objects, sagging under the weight of such things as chokers and mirrors that revealed the gazer’s greatest weakness. But now the shelves were full of nothing but dust.

There was no Love Knot Tine here, stolen or otherwise.

“It’s all been sold,” Scythe said, answering Claire’s unasked question as he stomped by her and toward Sena.

“All the black-market objects sold?” Claire repeated Scythe’s words, surprised and also a bit uneasy. There had been so many of them!

“Guild tensions have been rising for some time now,” Scythe said, and settled himself next to Sena. He was much larger than his three-legged stool, and it creaked under his weight. Hunching over, Scythe pulled out a large file and gestured for Sena to give him her hand.

“In dangerous times,” Scythe said as he carefully cradled Sena’s golden fingers and began to file the metal, “people seek dangerous solutions. Desperate ones—such as untested jumbled transformations made of dangerous substances like Spyden silk.”

Thorn, who’d taken a quiet sip of his sugary tea, spluttered a bit at that. His ears, back to their normal large size, turned pink as he wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Sir, how could you tell we weren’t the Malchains?”

Scythe snorted and continued over the soft scritch of the file on gold. “Aside from the fact that Anvil looked terrified of his own ax? A few things. Like the fact Aquila hasn’t called me by my first name since I once rented out a treasure she wasn’t quite ready to part with—”

“You mean,” Sena interrupted with a raised eyebrow, “you stole it and sold it.”

“I prefer ‘long-term rental,’ ” Scythe said. “Don’t move while I’m doing this—you don’t want me to accidentally file off a finger! The other giveaway was that Nadia told me about the Malchains’ actual rubified condition.” He shook his head. “Haven’t heard directly from her in nearly ten years, and then two weeks ago, he showed up.”