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“Should I be afraid of you, as everyone else is?”

“No,” he said. “But I’m not entirely myself. Not anymore.”

I chewed on my lip. I felt a stab of impotent hatred towards the Rivenwood, that it would change him—that it already had changed him—sweeping away his awkwardness and prickles and replacing them with something cold and other. “Is there no other way to obtain magic?” I said, frustrated.

“One can repurpose it from existing Artefacts. But such magic loses some of its essence and is useful only for simple spells.”

Why not content yourself with simple spells, then? I wanted to say, but it would be to no purpose. I knew him well enough by now to know that it would be like telling a hawk to stay out of the sky.

Instead I said, “What was Valérie like? Before, I mean. When you were growing up.”

“She—” A moment passed before he finally shook his head. “She was there. It was just us, for a long time. And she was always there, whether I needed someone to tend to me when I was ill or protect me from other children at school. She came into her power much younger than I did, and I was sometimes a little frightened of her, even as I loved her. She always seemed—” He stopped again. “Like one of the heroes in my books.”

We sat in silence for a moment, listening to the embers crackle. Banshee wandered back into the room with a silent yowl, no doubt hoping to cadge an early breakfast, and collapsed dramatically at Havelock’s feet.

“I don’t know if I should ask,” he began slowly, but I didn’t need to hear the rest. I recognized the tone well enough. It was how everyone sounded when they asked the question.

“What happened to Robin, you mean,” I said. “I’m afraid it’s not a very interesting story. He didn’t die in a blaze of magic, nor was he caught up in anything scandalous.”

He drew one leg up and leaned against it. “If you don’t wish to discuss it, please forget I brought it up.”

I shook my head. I didn’t mind telling him; part of me was even relieved he’d asked. “It was his heart,” I said. “He was thirty years old. Whose heart gives out at thirty? The doctors were astonished.” I gave a huff of laughter. “ ‘Exceptionally rare,’ they said. ‘One in a million.’ His heart was too small—or too small in one spot, a bad spot; I still don’t understand it exactly. I don’t know how nobody noticed it. But then, they said that even if someone had, there would have been no difference. There wasn’t anything—”

I was beginning to ramble, and stopped myself. I watched the embers breathe in the hearth, realizing that it had been some time since I’d spoken about Robin. It was an odd feeling, as if I were unearthing something that, in the time since I’d last checked on it, had been covered over by a layer of moss and fallen leaves. Not gone, but no longer as stark as it once had been.

“It was sudden,” Havelock said.

I let out my breath. “He’d gone to pick up our laundry. I told him not to stop at the baker’s. He was always spending too much at the baker’s.” My hand tightened on my knee. “That was the last thing I said to him. A lecture about bread.”

I stopped, because the memory was nearly as painful as what had come after—it was something I could blame myself for, unlike Robin’s death. “I’ve always wished I’d said something else,” I finished at last.

Havelock shifted, resting his head against the stones. “Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said, forcing my hand to relax. “Perhaps you and Valérie can still make amends. After she no longer has this Artefact to obsess over.”

“No,” he said, watching the flames. “She’s often said I’ve spent too much time in the Rivenwood. But in truth, it’s taken more of her.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. I didn’t know what was worse—to lose someone suddenly and without warning, or to be losing someone always, a continual process, as magic wore away at the person they were.

“Why hasn’t Valérie attacked again?” I said. “You moved the shop back. She knows where you are now, and she got past your wards once.”

“Because she’s plotting something. Even if she could attack again, she would never be so uncouth as to be predictable.”

I watched him. He was leaning against the fire-warmed stones, fingers woven together over his knee, looking more at ease than I’d ever seen him.

“Where have you been disappearing to?” I said. “Have you been spending all this time in the Rivenwood?”

“You must think I want to turn myself into a monster. No—I’ve been tracking down Valérie’s apprentices and undoing their enchantments. I stopped the fire at the chocolatier’s from spreading any farther than it did. It was enchanted flame, not something humans could have put out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, delighted, because this was exactly what I had guessed he’d been up to. “I didn’t quite catch that. Surely you didn’t mean to imply you’d done anything so public-spirited, but meant to say that you stood by and gloated as the shop burned and chaos spread through the city, as a proper dark magician would.”

“Even dark magicians need a place to live,” he said. “This is my city. I won’t have them burning it to the ground. You shouldn’t look at me as if I’ve been off rescuing kittens for you. I’ve killed a dozen of her apprentices.” He played absently with one of his rings, a frown forming between his eyes. “Most of her followers are little more than husks. Spectres wearing human skins. The weaker the magician, the more easily they’re consumed.”

If he had been trying to dampen my glee, he succeeded. As much as he mocked my moralizing, I didn’t see much reason to condemn the deaths of those so careless about the lives of others; the whole business only seemed insoluble and terribly sad. But anyone whose line of work exposes them to the range of mistreatment inflicted upon living creatures, human or otherwise, is used to cohabitating with this feeling, and getting on with things anyway.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t the world end three years ago?”

He stilled for a brief moment in the act of placing another log on the fire. “Perhaps my spell failed—isn’t that what most people think?” With a flick of his fingers and a murmured word, flames leapt up from the embers. “I was spectacularly obtuse at nineteen.”