I stared at him. A wistful gravity had drawn his brows down and sobered the lines of his face. Some quality about him had been nagging in the back of my mind since we met, like a piece of a song I’d forgotten. Something I never saw in my mother’s world of carefully chosen words and courtly glamour. I recognized it at last: vulnerability.

For a moment, I couldn’t think of any words that weren’t stupid, and busied myself fiddling with a loose thread on my jacket.

“Marcello,” I asked at last, “what will we do about Zaira?”

He let out a long breath. “We try again tomorrow. It’s the only thing we can do.”

La Contessa pulled me aside in the foyer of our palace, less than a minute after I’d stepped out of my boat on returning home from the Mews.

“It didn’t go well, did it?” she said after one glance at my face.

“She’s not happy with me, Mamma.”

“I want to hear everything. But right now I have a few of the Council here, to discuss intelligence updates. Wait for me in the library; I’m sure you can amuse yourself there.”

“An intelligence meeting?” I frowned. It wasn’t the usual day, which meant something had happened to trigger one. “Does it have to do with my Falcon?”

“Perhaps. I hope not. Now, go to the library, and I’ll join you there afterward.”

“Yes, Mamma.”

She slipped back into the drawing room from which she’d emerged, as if swept once more into the center of intrigue by a powerful current. I turned dutifully toward the library, though after my ill-fated meeting with Zaira and my mother’s ominous pronouncement, I was more in a state of mind to brood than to read.

My mother’s voice floated after me, through the drawing room door: “Back to the matter of Ardence.”

I froze in midstep, as if she’d said my name. Ardence again. And a matter she hoped wouldn’t involve my Falcon.

It couldn’t be good for the city I’d called home for a year to draw such interest from the Council of Nine, whose attention was rarely healthy even when there was no chance of fire-warlock involvement. But before I could hear more, Anzo, one of our older servants, breezed through with a wine tray, casting me a sideways glance as I hesitated in the foyer. I had no legitimate reason to linger; if I was still here when he emerged from the drawing room, he’d shoo me gently but firmly off.

There was a listening post in the library, though. I hurried on my way.