“I see.”

“This is our lot, son,” Lord Harms said, standing. “To be lord of a house requires certain sacrifices. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see Lord Alernath over at the bar and I think I’ll grab a nip of something harder with him before the main course. If I don’t go before Steris gets back, she’ll bully me into staying. I shouldn’t be long.” He nodded to the two of them, then waddled toward a group of higher-built tables off to the side, next to an open bar.

Waxillium watched him go, idly thinking and rolling Wayne’s note in his fingers. Previously, he’d assumed Lord Harms had driven Steris to be as she was, but it appeared he was more under her thumb than vice versa. Another curiosity, he thought.

“Thank you for your defense of me, Lord Ladrian,” Marasi said. “It appears that you are as quick to come to a lady’s aid with words as you are with pistols.”

“I was merely stating the truth as I saw it, my lady.”

“Tell me. Did you really shoot off a dog’s tail when aiming for his… er…”

“Yes,” Waxillium said, grimacing. “In my defense, the damn thing was attacking me. Belonged to a man I hunted down. The aggressiveness wasn’t the dog’s fault; the poor thing looked like it hadn’t been fed in days. I was trying to shoot it somewhere nonlethal, scare it off. That part about the man I hit in the eye was fabricated, though. I wasn’t actually aiming for any body part in particular—I was just hoping I’d hit.”

She smiled. “Might I ask you something?”

“Please.”

“You looked crestfallen when I spoke of the statistics dealing with lawman ratios. I didn’t mean to offend or downplay your heroics.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

“But?”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure if I can explain it. When I found my way out to the Roughs, when I started bringing in the warranted, I started to… Well, I thought I’d found a place where I was needed. I thought I’d found a way to do something that nobody else would do.”

“But you did.”

“And yet,” he said, stirring his soup, “it appears that all along, the place I left behind might have needed me even more. I’d never noticed.”

“You did important work, Lord Ladrian. Vital work. Besides, I understand that before you arrived, nobody was upholding the law in that area.”

“There was Arbitan,” he said, smiling, remembering the older man. “And, of course, the lawkeepers over in Far Dorest.”

“A distant city and with a short reach,” she said, “which had a single capable lawman to serve a large population. Jon Deadfinger had his own problems. By the time you had built things up, Weathering was protected better than those in the City—but it did not start that way.”

He nodded, though—again—he was curious about how much she knew. Were people really telling stories about him and Wayne all the way over here in the city? Why hadn’t he heard of them before now?