“Indeed. The gravest kind.” Geryon paused. “One of my colleagues is dead.”

Alice had picked up enough to have an idea of how serious this was. Geryon’s “colleagues” were the small group that Alice thought of as the old Readers at the top of the hierarchy of the magical world. They were all ancient—avoiding the perils of old age was apparently small potatoes for a sufficiently skilled Reader—and engaged in a complicated game of negotiation, alliance, and betrayal that stretched back through the centuries like a tangled spiderweb.

Alice had devoted some thought to this, in the small hours of the night. She was a Reader too, which presumably meant she could live forever, the same as Geryon. It was a difficult concept to get her mind around. She had a hard enough time imagining herself at twenty, let alone two hundred or two thousand.

In any case, the death of an old Reader was an event that would shake the delicate arrangement of relationships to its core. It was a given that he’d been killed, of course. There was no other way for an old Reader to die.

“I . . . see.” In other circumstances, Alice might have asked if the dead man had been a friend of Geryon’s, but the old Readers did not have friends, only tools and allies. Instead, because it was the kind of thing he liked to hear, she said, “Does this affect us?”

“Very much so, I’m afraid. The colleague I refer to is named Esau-of-the-Waters, and he has—had,” he corrected himself, “close ties to me and several other Readers of my acquaintance. And the manner of his death . . .”

Esau-of-the-Waters? Alice sat up a little straighter, fighting hard to keep her expression neutral. Could that be a coincidence? Esau, as Vespidian’s master, had been her only remaining hope of finding out what happened. The thought that she might never know for certain if her father was truly dead filled her with panic. She clenched her fists until her knuckles went white.

She couldn’t tell if Geryon noticed her agitation. He seemed distracted, scratching his cheek with one finger and then smoothing out the whiskers again. He paused for a long time, but Alice knew better than to prompt him.

“The manner of his death,” the old Reader said again, “is disturbing. As best we can tell, he was murdered by his apprentice.” His eyes found hers, and a faint smile played at the corner of his mouth. “You seem shocked.”

Alice took a deep breath and calmed herself with an effort. “It’s just hard to imagine, sir.”