I sighed, but picked up the book and held it out to him. I winced as he cocked his arm back. He threw the book at the wall, the sharp edge denting the canvas right where someone had painted Magnus’s father’s throat. The book flipped, slapping messily against the mantel then to the ground. Jember murmured something that included a swear and the word colonizer as he left the room.

I followed at a safe distance until we were in the game room.

“I have a feeling you know the man in the portrait,” I said carefully.

“Never met him.” Jember chose the chair by the fire, so I put the basket of supplies on the coffee table before taking the couch across from him. He snatched a disk of silver from the basket. “But that boy has the same face.”

“Really? I think Magnus looks more like Saba.”

He flinted his pen violently. “That little jackass does not look like Saba.”

I smirked at his defensive tone and leaned forward to watch him work, but he waved me away. Right. Don’t watch. Just feel. I sat back in my chair again.

“I never wanted you to have to learn this sort of thing,” he said, a few strokes in.

“Then why did you start teaching me to cleanse Manifestations in the first place?”

“At first? Because constructing amulets kept you out of my hair for hours at a time.” He shrugged. “You were good at it. Excited about it. And I liked teaching you. Besides, when I took you with me to see clients they would always tip you.”

“And then I stopped being lucrative because I wasn’t cute anymore.”

It wasn’t just growing older and longer, my face morphing out of its cute little baby features into something more plain and awkward. Jember had stopped bringing me along about the same time I’d gotten my scar. The quick memory reminded me it was there, and my arm instinctively lifted to cover it, trying to make the gesture look casual by pulling my knees up on the chair and folding my forearms on top, shielding my mouth and cheeks.

I don’t know if Jember noticed what I was doing, but he said, “That’s not true. You stopped being lucrative when you became a little dick.”

I let out a breath of laughter. “Kind of like you.”

“Yes, but I had already built a reputation. It has a different effect when you’re previously an endearing angel.” He leaned back, propping his legs up on the table between us. “You’d never been beaten up like that before, so the attitude was understandable. But I like that you grew out of it. You have to find the survival habit that works best for you, and you operate better on optimism.”

“Maybe you should try it.”