Chatham smiled as if he didn’t believe her. “Yes, well, I’m glad you finally decided to drop by. It certainly felt as if fate was trying to bring us together.” He poured the tea—the bee flitting from the teacup to his shoulder. “So … if you don’t mind … might I have a proper look at your butterfly?”

Nervously, she drew it out from under her clothes—a little embarrassed at how it felt warm from her pocket. She hesitated for a moment, holding it in her hand. I have to do this if I want to know what it really is, she told herself. She took a deep breath and passed it to Lord Chatham.

He pulled his small magnifying eyeglass from his top pocket and started to inspect the thin, cylindrical body. He hmmmed.

Lena sipped her tea, but it was far too sweet. Chatham must have added sugar to the pot. She set down the cup and waited. After a few long seconds of silence, she asked, “So … did you make it?”

“But of course.” He appeared to be surprised by the question, glancing up at her. “The question is, who did I make it for? And why is it no longer working? All my inventions are guaranteed for thirty years—longer than I’ve been operating this business. But we can find out. Here, I marked it with a serial number—027.”

Lord Chatham stood up, leaving the butterfly on the table, and walked to one of the walls, the bee buzzing gently over his head. He rolled a ladder along the shelves and climbed to the top, into the shadows, where he slid down a leather-bound tome.

“I mark every creation with a number corresponding to one of my ledgers,” he explained, climbing down the ladder. “In here, I record the details of every commission. Rather dull, but sometimes extraordinarily useful—especially when they are from this long ago.”

“How long ago?” Lena asked.

“This ledger was my first, and I started the business around … hmm … twenty-two years ago. I was a mere boy—sixteen years old. Imagine! I set up shop in the commercial district, would you believe. It was difficult for a time … My line of work wasn’t respected in those days and the temples were absolutely determined to brand me a Rogue and absorb me into their ludicrous system. But I had a few allies among the nobility—my family, you see, is rather important—and had already developed my own way of controlling my powers. It was a system based on old wisdom, wisdom I’d drawn from texts written long before the gods.” He sat down again, sipped his tea, and opened the ledger on his lap.

“Before the gods?” Lena asked.

“Oh yes. The temples will tell you that the gods have always existed. But the temples themselves were only established two thousand years ago.”

Two thousand years sounded like a long time to Lena.