Apparitor was here, as noisy, insolent, and difficult to kill as a flophouse full of orphans. As he smiled at me he made the Incrastic gesture against evil, hands washing each other before his face.

He’d brought my brother home for trial.

I’d been so certain that Olake would be safe with Hu. Hidden in the Wintercrests beyond the Masquerade’s reach. How had Apparitor caught him? He hadn’t been gone for nearly long enough.…

And who was this fourth person?

“Ah,” I said, casting a deshabille-thin veil over my contempt. Tests in the Cold Cellar found that prisoners responded powerfully to nudes behind thin veils. I always thought that was fascinating. The suggestion of nakedness stronger than the truth. “The wool-merchant Cairdine Farrier. I had no idea. You’re the Itinerant?”

“Your Excellence Durance!” He beamed at me. He had very good diction, and excellent pace of breath, and beneath that cultish charisma an ass-clenching sense of manic control. “I hear that ne’er-do-wells in Treatymont have been turning themselves in just so they can see you’re really gone from the courtroom. The vigor of their hate. Incredible!”

I bowed my head. “I always did wonder why Cattlson deferred to you, Farrier. I just assumed it was an idiot’s respect for a master idiot. How good to be wrong.”

And then I forced myself look straight at Baru.

Hesychast’s verdict still blew hot in my ears. He had run his tests, and judged her compromised, most terribly compromised, by Farrier’s process. Did she understand at all what had been done to her? How her ideas of happiness and fulfillment had been shaved down into the certainty of grief and loneliness? Hesychast had detected Farrier’s influence in the very flicker of her eyes and the smallest confusion of her tongue … but I wanted to make my own judgment. I was not, in my heart, as wholly Hesychast’s disciple as I pretended.

I’d imagined, last time I’d seen Baru, that she would die in the snow. Her hot islander blood—that impatient, stalking, fidgeting way she had about her—she lacked the constitution for the wolf winter. But I’d been wrong. She’d lived, and my brother hadn’t been safe, and Tain Hu—

Where was Baru’s hostage?

Where was Tain Hu?

Baru flinched away from my eyes. She whirled on Apparitor. “You told me Xate Olake was dead. ‘Burned out of his hole.’”

“Sorry.” The boy shrugged. “Did you think I’d just say, oh, yes, we took him as a hostage against Xate Yawa? Hello, Yawa, pleasure to see you again in the flesh, if that’s what we’re calling your ghoulish wreckage. I see Olake’s not bearing up well. Have you finished your draft of his defense?”