“You declare me proved?”

“Aye, Susan, daughter of Patrick. So I do. But it’s not what I say that matters. Now... wait... somewhere here...”

She scrabbled along the mantel, pushing stubs of candles stuck on cracked saucers this way and that, lifting first a kerosene lantern and then a battery flashlight, looking fixedly for a moment at a drawing of a young boy and then putting it aside.

“Where... where... arrrrr... here!”

She snatched up a pad of paper with a sooty cover (CITGO stamped on it in ancient gold letters) and a stub of pencil. She paged almost to the end of the pad before finding a blank sheet. On it she scrawled something, then tore the sheet off the spiral of wire at the top of the pad. She held the sheet out to Susan, who took it and looked at it. Scrawled there was a word she did not understand at first:

Below it was a symbol:

“What’s this?” she asked, tapping the little drawing.

“Rhea, her mark. Known for six Baronies around, it is, and can’t be copied. Show that paper to yer aunt. Then to Thorin. If yer aunt wants to take it and show it to Thorin herself—I know her, y’see, and her bossy ways—tell her no, Rhea says no, she’s not to have the keeping of it.”

“And if Thorin wants it?”

Rhea shrugged dismissively. “Let him keep it or burn it or wipe his bum with it, for all of me. It’s nothing to you, either, for you knew you were honest all along, so you did. True?”

Susan nodded. Once, walking home after a dance, she had let a boy slip his hand inside her shirt for a moment or two, but what of that? She was honest. And in more ways than this nasty creature meant.

“But don’t lose that paper. Unless you’d see me again, that is, and go through the same business a second time.”

Gods perish even the thought, Susan thought, and managed not to shudder. She put the paper in her pocket, where the drawstring bag had been.

“Now, come to the door, missy.” She looked as if she wanted to grasp Susan’s arm, then thought better of it. The two of them walked side by side to the door, not touching in such a careful way that it made them look awkward. Once there, Rhea did grip Susan’s arm. Then, with her other hand, she pointed to the bright silver disc hanging over the top of the Cöos.

“The Kissing Moon,” Rhea said. “’Tis midsummer.”

“Yes.”

“Tell Thorin he’s not to have you in his bed—or in a haystack, or on the scullery floor, or anywhere else—until Demon Moon rises full in the sky.”