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settle and tend his nursery.” He cast that steel-hard eye on his only son and then past him to the flowerlike beauty of his daughter to be. “Though what with the clothing for him for this precious rite, and horses of this color and that color, and all those candies and trinkets that need to be flung out, and hiring maskers and learning dances and meantime the corn factors are cheating us out of our eyeteeth every chance they get and two ships down this autumn… Two ships! There's witchery in it, I tell you…”
    “Nonsense,” Kyra said, while her father—who was a corn factor—only glared.
    “You say nonsense, girl,” the mayor snapped testily, while Lady Earthwygg signaled a footman for more wine for her daughter. “But you can't tell me it's coincidence that two of my ships went down and none of Dutton Droon's did, any more than you can tell me that great storm two winters ago that wrecked the entire fleet wasn't cooked up by dog wizards in the pay of those whose ships survived! Not to mention all that talk of ruin and abominable things just a year ago! And you should know more about that, miss, than anyone at this table!”
    “Father, there's no proof—”
    “You stay out of this, Spens!”
    Master Spenson looked as if he would say something else, but his father had already turned away.
    Gordam Peldyrin, red-faced with mortification, glared at Kyra as if by his will he could make her disappear, and Lady Earthwygg turned to Binnie Peldyrin with some piece of gossip from the Court to distract her from the powder that Esmin was rather clumsily dropping into the wineglass she held.
    “If I know anything about it,” Kyra said calmly, “it's only as a matter of academics. Real wizards—those trained by the Council, as I am—take a vow not to meddle in human concerns, and most dog wizards don't have the training to call enough power to sink a ship. You might ask his grace. The Church has wizards working for it.”
    “The Magic Office is strictly advisory,” the Bishop grated.
    “Well, why does it need to be?” she asked. “Why can't each guild have its own wizard as a consultant in matters such as this?”
    “They shouldn't have it at all!” the Lord Mayor stormed. “Nor that worthless Inquisition, paid a fortune for doing nothing but poke and pry! Waste of public money, I call it!”
    “Oh!” Esmin made an exaggerated grimace over her wine. “What a strange taste.”
    “Perhaps,” the Bishop majestically—and politically —said, ignoring both Esmin and the Lord Mayor, “because the guilds are formed under the aegis of the Church and its saints. Wizards, having been born without souls, as agents of illusion and evil—”
    “Really, you can't believe that if you follow the advice of your own wizards.”
    “You keep a civil tongue in your head, girl!”
    “Would you try this, Master Spenson, and tell me if you think it's all right?”
    Esmin started to hand her blown-glass goblet of wine to Spenson behind Kyra's back. Kyra had only to jerk her elbow back to knock it spinning from the girl's grip, shattering it in an explosion of shards and Chablis.
    “Oh, dear!” she said, springing to her feet. “How terribly clumsy of me. You—er…” She still couldn't recall the footman's name. “We need a towel here.”
    The fast, despairing glance Esmin threw to her mother wasn't lost on Kyra, but Lady Earthwygg had gone back to her quail without a blink.
    Alix looked as if she was about to cry with mortification and stress. As the meal progressed, Kyra became increasingly aware of the nervousness that underlay her sister's flood of talk. Not that Alix wasn't a chatterbox under the best of circumstances—Kyra had almost forgotten her capacity for nonstop discourse on fashion, Court events, and the lives of the people around her. But the speed of her words, the restless fussing of her hands, spelled a subtext of unhappiness readable only by the woman who had grown up in the same room with her,