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indeed across the property, it would stand out dramatically in certain rooms of the main house.
    Slipping through the kitchen entrance, he paused, letting his vision adjust to the faint light. He avoided the servants’ quarters entirely, for they, as with similar halls throughout Rahariem’s estates, were currently serving as billet to a squad of Cephiran troops. The servants who remained, those who hadn’t been pressed into work gangs, would instead be bunked three or four to a chamber in the house’s guest quarters. In silence born partly of skill and partly of magic—the latter to cover incidental sounds, squeaking stairs, and the occasional pop of aging joints—Cerris crept through those rooms now, and recognized one of the men therein. Sprawled across a sofa, snoring as though Kassek War-Bringer and Oldrei Storm Queen were wrestling in hisnostrils, lay the butler Rannert. In all the days since their first meeting, Cerris had never once seen the old man smile, and even in the depths of what must be a worried sleep, his jaw remained fixed in a look of stiff propriety.
    The intruder stepped carefully away from the sleeping forms to the wardrobe, slipping on a hanging overcoat he pulled from within and leaving his crimson tabard behind. Back to the kitchen, then, to acquire the necessary props to excuse his presence should anyone awaken and challenge him. Finally, now looking very much the household servant—if, perhaps, a somewhat disheveled one—he trod softly up the stairs and along the hall toward the baroness’s chambers.
    Decorum demanded that he knock and announce his presence before entering Irrial’s boudoir, but prudence demanded with far more conviction that he not risk attracting attention. Working swiftly, Cerris lifted the latch and darted inside, allowing the door to click shut behind him.
    It wasn’t much of a sound, but the baroness, perhaps troubled at having enemy soldiers in her city and her house, proved a light sleeper. Snapping open a shuttered lantern at her bedside and grasping a long dirk from beneath her pillow, Irrial bolted upright—and stared. Cerris, a tray of steaming tea held aloft in one hand, gaped back at her. Her hair, tousled and tangled with fitful sleep, hung about her shoulders, and the flimsy nightshift she wore to bed was, put politely, neither as formal nor as modest as the gowns Cerris was accustomed to seeing on her.
    In a single instant, a dozen apologies and excuses, any one of which might have salvaged the situation with everyone’s dignity intact, flashed through Cerris’s mind. So of course, what blurted unbidden from his mouth was, “Wow, that really is a
lot
of freckles.”
    “Cerris!” she protested, flushing hotly. She nearly cut a finger on her dagger as she dropped it, the better to clutch the heavy blankets to her bosom. “What the
hell
…?”
    “Oh! Oh, gods, I … I’m sorry, I …” Stammering like a schoolboy, blushing as darkly as she, Cerris finally had the presence of mind to turn his back, allowing the baroness to haul the concealing blankets up to her chin. It said more for his good fortune, and less for his manual dexterity, that he didn’t upend the tray in the process.
    “You can turn around,” she told him, her tone bewildered and more than a little cold. He did so, to see her sitting upright and utterly concealed, save for her face, beneath the quilts. “Cerris …”
    “I’m
so
sorry, my lady,” he told her. “I didn’t intend to, ah …” He cast about desperately for a way to phrase this. “To startle you like that,” he finished lamely.
    “Startle. Right.” She chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment. “You know, there was a time in Imphallion’s history when you’d have had your eyes put out for something like this.”
    Cerris couldn’t help himself. “It might’ve been worth it,” he said, and he was
almost
certain, when she looked down and growled something, that it was to hide that familiar