The knock came at the hour when decent visits have already ended.

Feby was at the little table with her one good blouse laid out over the chair back, pressed twice and inspected three times, and a borrowed almanac of New Avalon's great firms open to the chapter on the Regent Group.

She had read the same page four times without retaining a word of it. Tomorrow sat

in her chest like a swallowed coal — bright, secret, hers.

She had told Alex nothing. He had asked nothing, which was its own kind of

noticing.

Three knocks. Softer than Wilhelmina's, more certain than a stranger's. Feby knew the hand before she reached the door.

"Mother."

Adeline Rydell-Steinmeyer entered the way she entered everywhere - perfume first, apology never.

Her eyes made the same slow circuit of the flat that Wilhelmina's had, arriving at the same verdict by a politer road. Then she stepped aside, and the doorway filled with

a man.

Tall. A charcoal traveling coat with silver thread worked through the collar, cut by someone who charged by the stitch.

A chronometer chain crossed his waistcoat, and at the end of it, when he moved, swung a watch of pale gold with a sliver of captured moonstone in the face - old imperial work, the kind of piece that cost more than the building they were standing in and was worn precisely so that everyone would know it.

"Febyella." He smiled with excellent teeth. "It's been too long."

"Wendell Ashcombe," Feby said. It was not a greeting. It was an identification, the way one names a draft coming under a door.

"Wendell insisted on coming," Adeline said, glowing, arranging herself beside him as though the two of them were the portrait and everything else in the room was the frame.

"When he heard about your situation — Febyella, he came the same evening. The same evening."

"My situation."

"The document, sweetheart. The thirty days." Adeline's voice dropped into the register she used for funerals and money. "Everyone has heard by now. Your uncle made sure of that—you know how he is when he's won."

Alex sat at the counter with a fundamental basic of magic book he did not close, marking his page with one finger. Wendell's gaze passed over him the way a lamp passes over furniture, and moved on.

"May I sit?" Wendell asked, and sat. He set his gloves on the table beside Feby's pressed blouse, one atop the other, unhurried, a man planting a small flag.

"Febyella, I'll be direct, because I respect you too much for anything else. The condition your family set is not a condition. It's a joke with a legal seal on it. A manager's post at the Regent Group in thirty days - there are clerks who have waited in that tower's queue for ten years. Sons of good Houses. Certified level-four magicians. You are -" he paused, and let the pause do the insulting for him — "an uncertified young woman with a rented room and no patron."

"You've counted my assets very thoroughly," Feby said.

"Someone should." He leaned forward. "So forget it. Forget the inheritance. It has been poisoning your life for four years, and your family will spend another four inventing conditions faster than you can meet them. Walk away from the whole rotten game.

"His voice warmed. "Marry me."

Adeline made a small sound, the kind other women make at fireworks.

"Marry into House Ashcombe," Wendell went on, "and the question of your father's money becomes what it should always have been — trivial. You would want for nothing. And your family —" his smile sharpened - "your grandmother, your uncle, all of them — would spend the rest of their lives bowing to you at the door and hoping you'd forgotten how they treated you. I'd make certain you had ample opportunity to not forget."

"He's offering you a life, Febyella," Adeline breathed. "A real one."

Feby said nothing yet. Alex turned a page.

The small sound seemed to remind Wendell that the furniture was listening. His eyes went to Alex at last, and stayed there with the particular attention a man gives something he has decided to step on.

"And you would be the fiancé," he said. "The one who unloads crates."

"That's me," Alex said pleasantly.

"Mm." Wendell turned back to Feby as though the exchange had concluded itself.

"There's more, and I'll share it because it concerns your future either way. The trade rows are full of it this week — the Regent Group is preparing something enormous. A new line. An expansion the likes of which this state has never seen, and with it, publicity contracts that will make and unmake fortunes."

He touched the moonstone watch,

idly, the

way other men touch a talisman. "House Ashcombe has

supplied Regent's distribution

vel

notices for years. When those

—

third

contracts open, we will take a third of them at minimum. A third, Febyella. And if you were sensible - if you were mine — I'd carve a firm out of it and put your name on the door. Something of your own to play with. You'd have in a month what

your father's estate wouldn't give

you in a lifetime of begging."

"That's remarkable," Alex said. "I didn't know House Ashcombe stood so close to the Regent Group."

"Everyone knows it," Wendell said, without turning. "Everyone who matters."

"And the third of the contracts. Is that promised, or hoped?"

Wendell turned then. He looked at Alex for a long moment, and something in his

face performed the transition from ignoring an insect to deciding to remove it.

"Let me offer

er you some advice,

crate-boy," he said. "A frog at the bottom of a well thinks the sky is a coin. You are the frog. Febyella is the sky. A man like you cannot give her a life you can only be the weight she drowns holding. If you cared for her at all you'd let let go of her tonight go of and save her the trouble of prying

your fingers loose later."

"Wendell," Adeline said, delighted, in the tone of a woman pretending to object.

Feby stood up.

She did it without haste, and the room reorganized itself around the motion the way rooms did around her lately, which was new, and which Alex noted.

"I'm going to say this once, and I'd like both of you to carry it home intact," she said. "I'm not walking away from my father's estate. I'm not marrying you. And the man you've been talking past all evening is not a weight, and not a frog. He is my fiancé. Mind your mouth in my home."

"Your home," Wendell repeated softly. He looked around the flat - the narrow kitchen, the mended curtain, the blouse pressed for an interview she hadn't mentioned

and

laughed once, a small, clean sound of genuine amusement. "This isn't a home, Febyella. It's a waiting room. I'm offering you the exit."

"The answer is no."

The amusement went out of his

—

face all at once, the way light goes out of a lamp completely, and revealing exactly what the lamp had been decorating. "You'll regret this," he said. "When the thirty days are gone and your family is laughing and this one is still hauling boxes do not come to my gate. I withdraw the offer the moment I cross that threshold."

"Then cross it quickly," Feby said. "It's late."

Wendell collected his gloves. At the door he paused, because men like him always paused at doors, and looked back at Alex.

"Enjoy her while the money's interesting," he said, and was gone.

Adeline stood frozen a half-second, then went after him - "Wendell! Wendell, she's overtired, she doesn't mean—"— and the stairwell swallowed both voices. When she reappeared in the doorway her face had completed its own transition, and it aimed itself at Alex like a drawn pin.

"You," she said. "You sat there. He comes with House Ashcombe on his card and a future in his hands, and you sat there with your book and let her throw it away. What can you give her? Rent money? Crates?" Her voice climbed. "God gave me a dead useless husband, and my daughter went out and found a more useless one on purpose!"

"Mother," Feby said. "Go home."

Adeline drew a breath for the second act. Something in her daughter's face canceled the performance. She gathered her wrap, produced a sound that managed

to be both sob and verdict, and left without closing the door gently.

The flat was quiet.

"I'm sorry," Feby said finally. "About all of it."

"You've nothing to apologize for." Alex closed the book. "You should sleep.

Tomorrow matters."

She looked at him sharply. "What makes you think tomorrow matters?"

"Any day can matter," Alex said, and took his tea to his room.

Behind the closed door, he sat on the edge of the narrow bed and drew out his

identity tile. The message he composed was nine words long, addressed to the top

floor of Regent Tower.

House Ashcombe: excluded. All dealings, present and future.

The reply came back in under a minute.

Understood, Chairman.

Alex put the tile away. He did not know, and did not particularly care, how powerful

House Ashcombe imagined itself to be. He knew one thing about its future with the Regent Group, which was that it didn't have one.