As I listened to Werlyle the Defeated carry on about marveled history and a homestead agreement with Nilghorde, my ears picked up a noise. I am in no regards easily spooked—choosing to live in that duplex on Red Wolf confirms that! Wind on the headstones, the rustle of faraway branches, the slave’s distant chores: they were the cause of such noise. But scrapes and certain shuffles were not always so easy to dismiss.

“—so after generations, Snier, the Rogaires cleansed all the nightmares emergin’…right off the face of the world.”

I paced about, nodding whenever he paused. I found a windblown sycamore writhing next to the base of the balcony, but it made no contact with the wall.

What fiends could have once thrived in the woods a strong arrow shot away? Few nights into my stay, when a full moon cast down from a cloudless sky, I’d seen the skulking and slinking of unaccountable shapes out on the lawns. A cold breeze caressed the balcony, and maybe that was what made me shiver.

“It’s a shame. What you think, Snier?”

“Sir, it really isn’t my place.”

“Nonsense,” he snorted, “a butler can answer a question when asked. You’re no whipped slave putting away pots. You don’t think it’s an atrocity the Rogaire ruling this house is an evil-eyed brooch bag? One whose connection here is by name only?” I looked at him for a moment and then back into my long-since-emptied glass. He was of the annihilated house of Qell, and his clinging to the name Rogaire was a desperate and powerful attempt to forget that.

“What of Rinmor? He will come of age soon enough.”

Werlyle looked away and bent far over the edge. Scanning from left to right—did he hear noises too?

“Look, Snier, I am going to tell you somethin’ you mustn’t let get out.” He belched into my ear. “Rinlot told me somethin’ right before he died, and I honestly believe it led to it. That boy is not going to sit as head of this house. Not fer long. That big-boobed bitch and her melon-headed spawn are going to the bottom of the Black Tongue.”

I sat my glass on the ledge.

“Snier, you never got to meet Rinlot. Looks nothing like Rinmor, or should we say Morden.”

We? And I had surely seen Rinlot, not as much as I would have liked, but that little secret would have to stay with me.

He was right, though; Rinmor looked little like his father. Rinlot had a head like a statue of a Pelat god. Rinmor’s was bulbous. The boy’s frame was more like my own, and he didn’t possess the healthy skin color.

That didn’t really cause a big conundrum, though. Children can take after either mother or father; some display features that weren’t seen since the days of their great-grandparents. Morlia’s desolate beggared family could have worn any and all of the boy’s features.