“So you grew up in a city. Where?”

“Here. Well, across the bay, to be precise, in the outer city. A place called Wharfside. Not a very nice place.”

“Ah. So your family was poor, then?”

He hesitated. He wanted to agree, to make himself seem as admirable as possible. Since he couldn’t pass for nobility, he could at least be the opposite, someone who had lifted himself up from dire misery by bravery and brilliance.

“Truth,” she reminded, seeing him hesitate.

“Most in Wharfside are poor, yes, but we were better off than the largest part of them. My father was a tutor to the children of some of the merchants. We could have lived better, but my father was…he wasn’t good with money.” But good with spending it on drink, and a little too forthcoming in his opinions as far as some of his employers thought, Tinwright recalled, not without some bitterness even with the old man now years dead. “But we always had food on the table. My father studied at Eastmarch University. He taught me to love words.”

Which was not exactly the strict truth, as promised—what Kearn Tinwright had actually taught him was to love words enough to be able to talk yourself out of bad situations and into good ones.

“Ah, yes, words,” said Elan M’Cory, musingly. “I used to believe in them. Now I do not.”

Tinwright wasn’t sure he’d understood her. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I mean nothing.” She shook her head; for a moment the brittle look of ordinary social cheerfulness crumbled. She looked down at her needlepoint work for the span of several breaths. “I have kept you too long,” she said at last. “You must get on with your day and I must get on with ruining my sewing.”

He recognized a dismissal, and for once was too gratified to try to tug loose a little more of something he coveted. “I enjoyed speaking with you, my lady,” he said, and meant it. “May I hope to have the pleasure of doing it again sometime?”

The shrieks of the girls playing ball rose up and filled the long silence. She looked at him carefully, and this time it was as though she had retreated behind a high wall and peered down at him from the battlements. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “If you do not hope too much. My company is nothing to hope for.”

“Now it is you who does not tell the truth, my lady.”

She frowned, but thinking, not disagreeing. “It is possible that some afternoons, when it does not rain, you may find me here, in this garden, at about this time of the day.”

He stood, and bowed. “I will look forward to such days.”

She smiled her sad smile. “Go on and join the living, Matt Tinwright. Perhaps we will meet, as you say. Perhaps we shall.”

He bowed again and walked away. It took all his strength not to look back, or at least not to do so immediately. When he did, the bench where she had sat was empty.