The detective nodded. “It’ll take a couple of minutes to process the paperwork, if you don’t mind waiting.”

“Not at all, if we have a decent place to wait,” Havec answered, speaking up for the first time. He had been convinced they would arrest him on sight an hour earlier, but he seemed to have adjusted already to being a figure of universal respect. Qanath looked at him and wondered if she could ever manage the self-assurance that came with consequence. It was one of the things that drove her mad about him, the way he knew instinctively that he stood out in any crowd, but also one of the things she loved.

He nodded at the open doorway, adding, “We’re going to go take a seat in the common room and have a drink, if you want to send them over when you’re done?”

She bowed her head. “Of course, Avat. It would be my pleasure.”

They made their way back outside into a dying day, a few scattered snowflakes drifting down from the lowering sky. It had slowed for the time being, but those clouds showed no sign of blowing off. While they passed the still-packed café, her companion asked, “Did you believe a word of that?”

She sighed. “I don’t know what to think.” She wanted to express her convoluted feelings about her mother’s shocking intervention but couldn’t find words. Maybe she didn’t need to.

“If he’s supposed to be helping you, why did he make contact but then ride by?”

“That’s a good question,” she said slowly.

“You think the bit about your mother is real?”

She put her hands to her mouth, huffing hot air onto her chilly fingers. “Why would it not be? The only important thing about me is her. I don’t think anyone would think to get at her through me, fishing after information or something. Not after the way she’s acted all these years.” She knew none of the woman’s secrets and had hold over very little of her heart. This ought to be obvious to anyone who cared enough about her mother to pay attention to her private life, be they enemy or hanger-on.

They let themselves into the common room, wonderfully warm and rich with the welcoming scents of tea and dinner in the works. They took a seat at a rectangular table in the far corner by the stairs, an out-of-the-way space where they could talk undisturbed. Feeling reckless, Qanath ordered them one of the nicer bottles of wine. It was presented and poured out, and after the maid left again, they stared into their drinks.

She noticed Havec was as worried as she’d ever seen him. “You don’t trust him.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who was more obviously a snake in the grass,” he replied. “But why he’s slithering around you? Your guess is as good as mine.”

***

Their new friends arrived not long after their wine, and Havec elected to move around the table so he was sitting at the girl’s side. He found this situation unsettling, although he had yet to come up with a theory. He didn’t like the idea of sitting beside one of them, which would leave one or the other at all times unobserved.

Smooth Guy pulled out a seat, but before he sat, he passed that folded-up square of paper over. While they settled themselves, Qanath unfolded it, holding it so that he might read:

The bearer of this letter, Hotu Amril Arp, acts in my service and the service of the Empire. I have commanded him to remain at all times within the bounds of the law.

Senator Nembe Ameel

Terse and to the point, about what he had expected of Qanath’s mother, who didn’t seem to have much room in her heart for anything but her job. He loved that she had qualified her support for the man, that was a nice touch. Laying the groundwork for distancing herself from her accomplice if she later found the need to cut him loose. Did that mean she, too, had reservations about Smooth Guy’s trustworthiness? Or was she just a jerk?

Qanath passed the letter back. “Suddenly my mother cares terribly for my wellbeing?”

“Maybe she was concerned about the company you keep.”

Smooth Guy’s eyes had drifted onto him, and as they met one another’s gaze, Havec discovered he wasn’t the only one who was certain the two of them would never become friends. “Her mother doesn’t know I exist. Until this girl showed up at our door, no one but Xar and his servants did.”

Even as he said it, he realized it wasn’t true. Talak knew about him, and so did Qanath’s father. Talak wasn’t likely to confess what he had done, though, especially not to someone in the government. If he was acquainted with Qanath’s mother and their relationship was such that he had been frank with her about kidnapping foreign minors and selling them into the sex trade, Smooth Guy was the least of their problems.

As for her father, he might very well share the story of his visit to an Avatethura Academy with the mother of his children, but the timing was wrong. Three days the girl had been in the house before those assassins arrived; the man would still have been on the road, walking back to Nizerh. Even if he’d headed south to Saintianos, the closest town, and bought the services of a courier, he couldn’t have gotten a letter to the capital in time to have Smooth Guy waiting for them.

“Anyway,” he added, “‘maybe’ is a weasel-word used by worms to distract people from their lies.”

“Weasels and worms,” Smooth Guy exclaimed, voice as sharp as Havec’s swords. “I’m overwhelmed by this conversational menagerie.”

“You’ll be pretty overwhelmed if I punch you in the face. Which would you prefer?”

“Havec,” Qanath said warningly.

“Girl,” he said right back, matching her serious tone and raising her a firm look. He gestured at the man across the table from them. “This greasy prick is up to something, something more complicated and unfriendly than watching your back. You can tell because every time we ask a question, he tries to pick a fight. Knowing what I am, he would rather get his ass kicked than give you a straight answer.”

“I’m not the one threatening to punch people,” the guy retorted coolly.

“No, but you are deliberately pissing me off in hopes that, in the midst of all the furor, these pesky questions,” he waggled his fingers, “evaporate.”

The girl looked at him, wheels spinning, before turning back to their new friends. “He certainly seems to have a point. And you really need to stop baiting him. If you do manage to get under his skin, his fuse is,” she snapped her fingers. “Then you end up back in jail with a broken bone in the bargain, being asked these questions by people who aren’t as nice as me.”

There was a brief silence, then Smooth Guy shifted slightly in his chair as if to put Havec out of his line of sight. “I was sent by your mother to help you and ensure that you’re safe, I told you as much already.”

“Why did you ride past the first time we met?”

He hadn’t expected that question, but there was no flinching, no licked lips or anxious swallows, no visible rearranging of thoughts. Just a very still silence before he talked. It wasn’t a sign that he was being honest but that he was a practiced liar, Havec thought.

“I was instructed to find you at the school. It was strange to find you not at the school, so I rode on.”

“You went to the school. You lied to the detective,” Havec noted. Less because he cared about lying to detectives than because he wanted to be sure Qanath took note of how readily this man bent the truth

Smooth Guy heaved an aggravated sigh, keeping his eyes on the girl. “When I got close to the house, I found it swarming with politzqa, bodies being carted out. If you have a problem with me covering that up,” his voice grew hard, although he addressed the words to Qanath, “why don’t you look at it from my perspective? I had no idea what was going on, but I knew it was bad and Siva Qanath might have been involved.”

“Hota,” the girl corrected. “I’m Pemets, did she not say?”

He cleared his throat, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Your mother instructed that I was to defer to you in all things.”

“Oh?”

“My mother is an addict and my father sells sex, so bending the knee to the daughter of a cobbler isn’t actually a stretch.”

This gave birth to a tense silence, the two of them trading looks. Havec had never understood the Tabbi class system and looked away, waiting for the meaningful conversation to resume. It was then that he noticed Hair-On-End watching him, eyes fixed provokingly on his face. He had only just wondered what the devil he thought he was looking at when the man blew him a kiss.

Because he had never been hit on before and had no idea how to react, he went with a skeptically-cocked brow. He had found that cynicism was like the color black: it went with everything. Hair-On-End made a pouty face, then ran his tongue along his upper lip.

Its tip was forked.

Havec stared at him, wondering what he was. He realized he was breathing heavily, and it wasn’t anxiety but rage. He wanted to scream and scratch the thing. It took every ounce of self-control he had to remain motionless in his chair.

It couldn’t be instinct: he hadn’t grasped when first they met that The Thing was anything other than a man. Then it struck him: the anger must belong to Kebbal. He hadn’t known it could communicate with him, but he was certain the dismay he felt was Kebbal’s and not his. It didn’t want this thing anywhere near him.

It took him a heartbeat to decide to let Kebbal have this one, then he braced a foot on the front of Hair-On-End’s chair and shoved. The chair shot back a good four feet, where it bounced off the wall. The Thing flew from its seat while the chair was still rocking, dissolving before its feet hit the ground into a raven that let out one angry caw.

It didn’t come for Havec but landed on Smooth Guy’s shoulder. It cawed again, then spread its wings and opened its beak, turning its head to one side to fix him with a beady eye. He had no idea what this pantomime meant in Demon Bird, but knew in his bones that it was lewd.

Crossing his arms, he said, “Nice trick. It my turn?”