The room at the top of the Golden Dragon's second landing had been, before recent events, a working room. The overturned mattress, the dresser, the thin-legged desk and chair. All of it evidence now.

Dareth stood sweating in the doorway in full Magistrate garb and took inventory. Blood in the sheets — a significant quantity, suggesting the initial wound opened here. More blood near the wardrobe. The wardrobe itself, which Hornbach's men had opened reluctantly once, then avoided a second look. Nellie, as the patrons kept calling her below, had been removed and prepared. The wardrobe's doors remained open.

Two junior Bluecoats worked along the far wall, bagging sections of sheet fabric. Headquarters had alchemical methods that would tell him for certain. He needed empirical evidence.

Was he truly alive, or was the blond figure simply a clever Zyrellian tactic? A lure to keep the Seer away from the chessboard, distracted. Dareth had still not decided which outcome was most welcome.

"Witnesses from last night remain touchingly consistent," Hornbach reported from the corridor beside him, his frame too tall for the slanted room, tricorn in hand. "The Zyrellian — gold hair, slim build, unusually slippery, their words, not mine — was present in the tavern below from approximately the ninth hour. During that frame there was a significant—" A pause, the sound of a laugh being repressed. "altercation."

"Define significant," Dareth said flatly, watching his team work.

"Most of the furniture, my lord."

Dareth let out a scoff. He searched the floor for any trace they'd missed. Overlapping footprints heading from the bed to the chair. Slim feet, the size of a woman's. He knew those feet. Tryggve's feet, not Hjordis's or the dead working girl's.

"And the Helmbane girl?" He continued, sensing Hornbach awaiting further commentary.

"Five witnesses place a woman looking just like the working girl in a red dress leaving through the back. Knocked out cold by a Magistracy horse, the Zyrellian escaped on her back, then south on a barge according to the owner."

Dareth turned in the doorframe, hand on his beard.

"Have we received reports of a stolen Magistrate horse?"

"No sir. Would that information be of interest to your holiness?"

Dareth winced at the formality he could tell Hornbach applied just to tease him. Or mock him.

"Quite." He muttered, then went on, voice levelled. "The Helmbane girl is heading south alongside Beardaughter wearing a dead woman's face. She is not the predator in this scenario. Bear that in mind when you issue the descriptions."

Hornbach wrote something down casually against the wall. Then Cornelius appeared lumbering at the steps, stopping by Dareth's shoulder, large and warm and smelling of pipe tobacco. He peeped into the room. At the prepared body on the bed, modestly covered. Then a meaningful look at Dareth.

"Are you ready, old friend?"

Last chance, Dareth thought quietly. He exhaled, thought of Cora. The good south road from here. His own bed by Solarday eve.

"Yes. I am quite ready," he said, adjusted the sleeves of his frock. "Clear the room, would you. I'd prefer the privacy." Then added low enough for only Cornelius to hear, "Hornbach's men are unfamiliar to me."

Cornelius raised a hand to clap Dareth's shoulder, then stopped himself and returned it to his side. Dareth lowered his gaze, thankful for the one man who understood his peculiarities.

He waited until their footsteps had gone down the stairs before he removed his outer cloak and his gloves. He folded them carefully over the chair, back to the dead woman. The room turned quiet, muffled voices floating up from the establishment below.

The room was searing — a south-facing window, the day warming outside, and a body that had been here long enough for the fragrant oils used in quantity to begin their delay. He moved one candle closer to the bed. Blew the others out. The light through the small open window was grey and sufficient.

He stood there and looked at her for a moment before he began. Red hair. Good luck, according to Coran superstition. Dareth scoffed at the irony. The smooth expanse of her forehead stretched down to her chin in a blank slate. The lack of features should have made this easier; instead it had the opposite effect. The strong smell of magnolia oil and lavender tickled like acid in his nose. He sneezed into a handkerchief and thought at once of Tryggve Beardaughter.

Not deliberately. He never had a choice. It arrived the way Tryggve would enter a room — without announcement, taking up the space he required. The angle of his smile when he watched Dareth write his name in Zyrellian runes for the first time, and Dareth had sneezed, upsetting the ink. Tryggve had laughed, ink spots on his face. Dareth had been eight or nine and had filed the grin in the endearingly ugly category. He categorised them the way he did his mineral specimens — by composition, by refraction, by what light they admitted and what they absorbed. Back then, Tryggve seemed to admit more light than he absorbed.

Dareth looked down at the great Magistrate crest of solid gold weighing down his neck, the single candle reflecting brightly in the metal. He touched it gently. Sighed.

Enough sentiments.

Dareth took out his wand. Turned it once in his hand. Took his pocket watch from his breast pocket, noted the time to the second, and placed it open on the table beside her. Adjusted his cravat from habit, placed his fingers at either side of the smooth blank face, and closed his eyes.

He reached.

The electricity was faint. Blue-thin lines, barely maintained, thin like strands of hair, but more than he'd expected. The violence had been sharp and recent. It left its mark on the space between the living and the not-yet-finished dead.

He let the current find him rather than reaching further. Professional restraint. He had made this error before — pulling too hard, getting pulled in return, spending three days afterward forgetting the names of minerals he had known since childhood. Silver streaks in his raven hair.

The life arrived in increments.

A man's hands working leather at a tanning bench, the smell of it — animal and chemical and the warmth of an indoor fire in winter. A small child watching those hands, a warmth that meant safety. Graywell market, summer, the press of bodies and the smell of dried fish and someone selling bolts of indigo cloth from the southern ports. A first hanging — she had been perhaps twelve — the crowd, the platform, the feet. She had looked at the feet. The way they hung. The particular angle of it.

Dareth's breath shortened. He had looked at feet too.

He directed himself toward the recent memories. The older ones were pulling, wanting to establish their full weight, but he deflected them gently, the way one redirects water.

The red dress arrived. Hjordis Helmbane's face in candlelight, Oskar's strong jaw, the dark eyes — but then her face melted, eyes and mouth closing, and the dagger was there and her feet moved. Toward her. Toward him.

He nearly withdrew then.

He didn't. He held, and the current held with him, and the images shifted. Dareth's fingers cramped on either side of the woman's head.

A boy of nineteen. Dark hair, olive skin, strong and broad in the way of men who have worked outdoors since early adolescence. The eyes were blue. An unusual blue, very clear, the blue of a feldspar he'd found once in the northern provinces and never again.

The boy was smiling. Making some joke, the kind that required the face to do most of the work, and the face was doing it well — a good face for jokes, for warmth.

The memory had no sound. There was only the face.

The face looked at him.

Father, the boy said, without sound, directly at him, and Dareth's hands tried to pull back and found they had locked.

It's you. I wondered all me life who'd ye be. And it's you.

The boy's face was his face. Twenty years younger. The nose, the jaw beneath the whiskers he would never grow long enough to call a beard. The blue eyes that were just like his — arrived here, in this room, looking at him through a dead woman's last tethered memory with a recognition Dareth had not been ready for and could not now undo.

Father.

"Let go of me," Dareth said, through his teeth. Sweat at his temple. "Let go. Now."

The boy's smile went uncertain. The recognition shifted to confusion and then to quiet hurt.

Yes, the boy said. Sorry, Father. I'll stop.

Dareth jerked his hands back.

He stood at the side of the bed with both hands at his sides and his breath coming in intervals that he managed individually, one at a time, as a deliberate professional exercise. He looked at the open pocket watch.

Four seconds. He had been under for four seconds.

He clicked it shut.

He gathered his cloak from the chair. Drew on his gloves, the left first, then the right, smoothing each finger with the opposite hand. He crossed to the small grey-lit window and looked at his reflection in the imperfect glass.

Found it, as he had known he would. Another white strand among the black, at the left temple where the grey had been making its slow advance for two years now. He counted what was visible.

Seven.

He straightened his cravat. Turned from the window.

The taproom was tired. The barmaid moved between overturned tables, sighing and picking up debris. Two of her men dragged a warped bench back to the wall. Three Bluecoats stood near the bar taking statements from a patron who kept interrupting himself. A broken fiddle lay across the cold hearth. No one looked up as Dareth passed through.

He pushed out the back door into the lane.

The boy's face. He couldn't determine it. A demon working the residual, shaping what the dead left toward whatever the target lacked. Experience told him as much. Demons harvested grief, fed on wanting, built rooms inside whatever door they found. A man with blue eyes, assembled from a dead woman's last impressions. Father. The word placed where it would land hardest.

He had not disclosed the full danger to Rothwell. Not the part that mattered. Five seconds was safe. Ten was the edge. Past that, the body aged forward to meet the mind's overreach. He'd watched Tabitha's hair go white over one long read. She never recovered. He'd said nothing to anyone and kept his own readings under seven seconds since.

He drew out his pipe and packed it from the tin in his breast pocket — fresh tobacco, sharper than his usual. The routine settled him. Thumb to the bowl. The minor charm. The first long draw.

Hjordis Helmbane. He made himself think about her legally. The transfer hadn't been her intent — which mattered, and which was also inadequate. The statutes on changeling possession were unforgiving by design. A lenient law invited false claims. Blood on the hands was blood on the hands, whether or not the hands had been willingly directed.

Only the High Maester could issue pardons. Rothwell, whom he'd served eleven years, had never once issued one that cost him politically.

And Dareth was Tipstaff. His function was the maintenance of law. It held no provision for what he was now considering — which was why he was considering it in a lane behind a broken tavern rather than at his desk.

He drew on the pipe. Reached into his coat.

The wanted poster was folded twice. He'd drawn it himself in the wagon from Arable, coal on good paper, from a twenty-year-old memory that proved reliable. The peculiar nose. The set of the jaw. Alive and whole, Rothwell had specified. He smoothed the paper with his thumb.

The smell had got into his throat — canal rot, kitchen grease, the sweetish beginning of something dead. He needed different air. He walked with no destination, which was unlike him, down the lane and then a narrower one off that.

He noticed his error at the third turning. No lamps. A rat the size of a cat at the gutter, a shape asleep or dead in a doorway. He was a man in Magistracy chains carrying a visible fortune at his throat, alone, in the dark, in Graywell.

The voices reached him before the boots.

"Ay. What's this here. Itty-bitty Bluecoat all on his lonesome."

Four spread across the lane behind him. Bruised — last night's brawl, and they hadn't finished counting the damage. A fifth held back at the corner.

He turned.

"Please leave." His voice was flat. Mildly annoyed. "Before you sustain more damage than you already have."

"He's got a mouth on him, this one. Look at him. Standing there like he owns the muck." The nearest grinned. Oily cap, bad teeth, a knife he'd drawn with more confidence than the blade deserved. "Them rings, lads. One of them rings'd set me up proper."

"I require the rings for my work," Dareth said. "Leave now."

They laughed. The careful one at the corner did not.

The shove came from behind — the fifth, circling round, which was careless of him to miss. His right shoulder took it. The shoulder that had been wrong since before memory, that he protected without thinking in every doorway. He went into the wall, cheek to brick. A hand closed on the chain at his throat and yanked, the metal biting his neck before the clasp held.

"Not so clever now." Sour ale at his ear. A hand patted his coat, found the watch, pulled it free. Moved lower, groping, taking inventory with the deliberate rough touch of men who knew of no other form of emasculation. "What else's a fancy magistrate carrying."

Dareth held still.

His face gave them nothing. Not struggle, not fear. His mind was already cold and three steps ahead, finding the shape of the incantation. His right arm was pinned and useless. It didn't matter. His left hand had found the wand the moment his cheek hit brick, and his fingers had closed on the grip, and that was enough. The wand needed no flourish. Only his will, the moonstone in its core, and his hand around it. He had all three.

"Beg us nice and we might leave ye yer teeth—"

Dareth let his will down through the grip.

The lane came up.

Cobblestones tore from their mortar in a wave that started under his own boots and rolled out, the ground snapping like a shaken sheet. The man at his back flew off him. A cobble took the oily cap from below and shut the jaw beneath it with a sound like a dropped log. Another stone found a kneecap, crushed it. The earth sorted through them, sending them over, on their back.

The chain fell down on his throat. The watch hit the stones and he caught it on the fob, an idle motion, his attention elsewhere.

Two breaths, and it was done. They ran — all four, then the fifth, last and fastest, who'd understood a moment sooner what they'd walked into.

Dareth straightened his cravat. Rolled the bad shoulder once. No worse than usual. He returned the watch to his pocket and picked a flake of mortar from his sleeve.

The pipe had gone out. He relit it with a minor charm and stood among the settling dust until his pulse returned to a rate he found acceptable.

His prejudice regarding the northern provinces, he reflected, continued to find regular confirmation. He would not be mentioning this evening to Cornelius.