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Fia touched the ribbon at her throat, the little gargoyle resting against her chest. She recognized the name of the inn, not that she’d ever stayed there. As close as it was to Thistledown, she assumed it was most often frequented by visiting scholars and research librarians. And apparently one wealthy magician looking to distance himself from his father.

“That’s all the way north in the Glory District. Can you…” She paused, hesitant about where this conversation might take them. “Can you make it back there all right tonight?”

“Are you worried something might happen to me along the way?” he asked with drowsy amusement, that old cabinet possibly the only thing holding him up.

“It will be murder trying to get a coach at this hour, and if you walk”—could he even walk that far when he was this worn down?—“a thief would be into your pockets in seconds.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” he objected. But really, with the way he was tilting, Fia swore a single flick of Finnick’s tail might knock Penbrook right over.

“Maybe not in Fantillian, but here they might,” she cautioned with a sudden fondness for her town, even with all its dark alleyways.

“Hmm.”

She couldn’t tell if he was considering her warning or falling asleep.

Ask the Madbury to stay.

The words tiptoed into Fia’s head as if Grace’s persistence carried on even when she wasn’t there. Determinedly, Fia pushed her friend’s pestering voice away.

“Penn… Penbrook,” she said. “You can barely keep your eyes open.”

The shadow of a smile slid lazily across his face. “You worked me to my bones today.”

She had. Fia hadn’t known how to turn the customers away, and if she was honest, she hadn’t wanted to—all that magic, all the silver it had brought in, all the community—but now she winced. She’d been selfish. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, you won’t be the thing to kill me anyway,” he sighed, and she felt like maybe there was something more to his comment, but she didn’t know what.

Fia was too tired to think about it now. Her eyelids felt heavier just hearing his sleep-heavy voice, and she would have liked nothing better than the soft comfort of her bed. Those pleasant dreams he’d wished for those sisters, she’d take them for herself, whispered right in her ear as she drifted to sleep.

She hadn’t been sleeping well ever since Thistledown, tossing in her sheets and waking at every little sound in the night, haunted by thoughts of those thieves coming to silence her. What if they meant to come tonight?

Ask the Madbury to stay.

“Maybe…”

She couldn’t.

“Yes?”

She wouldn’t.

“Maybe you should stay here.” Her cheeks warmed, both at the way he might interpret those words and how they made her loneliness rush up inside her so obviously. It was strange, that it felt somehow easier to ask him—not that it was easy—than it was to accept the same sort of help from Grace. Her friend just had so much else going on in her life, and when Fia peeked at Penbrook through her lashes, she saw something in him that might hold an equal apartness to her own.

“Here?” he murmured, as if he would have been content to curl up on the floor in the very spot he stood.

“Well, not right here.”

“All right,” he said.

But as soon as he agreed—and so quickly too, after all her agonizing—she didn’t know what to do with him. The idea of Penbrook spending the night under her roof suddenly felt like drawing closer to someone better kept at a distance.

He’ll just be sleeping, she reminded herself. There would be no drawing closer.

“Well,” Fia said, debating. She could offer him the couch in the parlor, which hardly seemed private, or give him the room across from her own, which had once belonged to her mother. But neither option felt quite right—one much too casual and the other much too personal. And too close.

The sofa it was.

“Follow me.” After extinguishing the fire in the shop’s hearth, she led Penbrook back into the rooms of her apartment for the first time, trying to see the uneven wooden floors and vases of dried flowers and mismatched furniture through his eyes. Wondering if he would think it cozy and quaint, as she did, or small and shabby. More likely than not, he wasn’t noticing much of anything with his sleep-bleary eyes.