“Mama. What I do. It isn’t always safe. You know that. Better than anybody.”

Mama nodded. “You think what I do is safe, boy?”

“Aside from the risk of succumbing to the smell, I do. You get bad paper cuts from those cards, sometimes?”

“I ought to hex that mouth of yours one day, boy.” She picked up her favorite dried owl and shook it menacingly at me, an effect largely ruined by the number of feathers it shed. “Ought to hex it good.”

A knock came at Mama’s door.

I knew the knock, so I opened it, while Mama stroked her mummified owl and glared at me.

Gertriss poked her head in, frowning.

“Mister Markhat?” she said, eyeing Mama’s grim demeanor. “There’s a woman down to your office. She’s got some troubles, so I come to fetch you, seein’ as how she didn’t want to wait.”

Gertriss looked me in the eye. She smiled. It was a big, good-hearted, smile, wide as a country lane, free of guile or artifice. It was a rare kind of smile, innocent and fragile, and easily, permanently slain.

I rose. “Thank you, Gertriss. We’d best get back then. We finders don’t like to waste a client’s valuable time.”

Mama grinned at me, triumphant.

“I’ll have ham and biscuits later,” she said. “If’n y’all finders have the time.”

I closed the door softly behind me and made a solemn vow to march toward the snowy distant north at the very first opportunity.

“So who’s the client?” I said, as we marched toward my door.

Gertriss frowned. “Said her name is Lady Erlorne Werewilk,” matching my own low tones. “I reckon I ain’t no expert on city folk, Mister Markhat, but she seems a might…diff’rent.”

I chuckled. “Gertriss, there’s one thing you’ll need to learn fast, about Rannit.” We got to my door, and we stopped, and I leaned close and whispered in her ear, “We’re all a bit diff’rent here.”

I opened my door, and motioned Gertriss inside.

The Lady Erlorne Werewilk was already standing. Posed in my corner, so that the light from my bubbly glass door slanted down across her. I like a woman with a sense of drama. Especially a woman with a sense of drama who can manage to suggest all manner of things merely by leaning against my none-too-clean office walls.

“You must be the famous Markhat,” she said. Then she took a long inhalation from the tobacco stick she was smoking while she looked me straight in the eye.

“I wouldn’t have used the word famous,” I said. “But since you did I’ll be polite and agree. You are Lady Erlorne Werewilk?”

Another drag of her smokestick, another practiced exhalation. The smoke wandered lazily in the still air. At least it masked the scent of Three-leg Cat’s most recent digestive adventures.

“Have a seat, Lady Werewilk,” I said, motioning her to my famous client’s chair. I crossed behind my desk and in a stunning display of old world manners waited for Lady Werewilk to be seated before I did so myself.

Gertriss shot me a look, and I folded my fingertips together and nodded toward her as if we’d done this same thing a thousand times.

“Gertriss, bring us tea, and an empty saucer for the Lady’s ashes, please,” I said.

Gertriss nodded and stamped out to Mama’s.

Lady Werewilk turned her face to avoid blowing smoke my way.

She had a good face. Not so young as to be girlish, not so old as to remind one of grandmothers or matrons. Her eyes were the grey of boiling summer thunderheads. Her nose was long and just sharp enough to hint at a pixie or two in her ancestry. Her teeth were straight and white, and her skin was pale, but not cadaverously so. She wore a clingy high-necked black dress that reached from her soles to the top of her neck. Lady Werewilk was made for that dress, or maybe it was the other way around, but in either case her slim figure made the visual journey downright epic. Her black-veiled hat, which managed to obscure her eyes, added a hint of well-coiffed mystery.

Her flair for the dramatic extended to her makeup. Darla has taught me a thing or two about the female arts of cosmetic deception, as she calls them, and if Darla was an expert, Lady Werewilk was an artiste. Big soft eyes, high cheekbones, the almost Elvish nose-I stared until she caught me looking and then I smiled.

“I’m rendered speechless, Lady Werewilk,” I said. “But I’m sure you didn’t come all the way to Cambrit Street just to show off your good dress. What can I find for you?”

She blew smoke and lifted a narrow black eyebrow. “Peace of mind, Mister Markhat. I believe someone intends to steal my house from me. This I will not have.”

I nodded. “Good for you.” I opened my desk, pulled out the new yellow-paper notepad Darla had given me just yesterday, and found one of the perfectly sharpened pencils Darla had left right next to the pad. “Tell me about your house, Lady. You’ll forgive me if I’m unfamiliar with your family name.”

She nodded. “Few people know of Werewilk. I prefer it that way. The house is located in the Wardmoor district, south of the old wall. I believe the locals call my neighborhood the Banshee’s Walk.”

I nodded. I knew of it, though it had been years since I’d passed that way. A few old fortified manor houses were all that remained. Each stood outside Rannit’s Middle Kingdom walls. Half the old homes were abandoned, the others lost in woods and treacherous roads and bridges that the country folk often quarried for their granite stones when the Watch wasn’t looking.

Rannit had moved up and away from Wardmoor, even before the War. The big farms were north and west. The new reservoir was east. The only roads I knew of that went south were logging roads, and even those were seldom used, since it was easier to float timber down the Brown than it was to haul it through the woods and the mud.

“I run the House now,” said Lady Werewilk. “I’ve made it an artist’s colony. I house thirty-five of Rannit’s most talented painters and sculptors. One day their works will be known as the single most important body of work since the end of the War.”

I nodded, as if that was of course a widely known fact.

“Do you know of anyone who might wish a different direction for the House, Lady?”

Lady Werewilk frowned. “I do not, Mr. Markhat,” she said. The ashes at the end of her tobacco stick were getting dangerously long, and I hoped Gertriss was hurrying.

“You have family?”

She nodded and inhaled. “I have a brother. Milton. Our parents are long dead, no aunts, no uncles, no distant cousins, no one left. And Milton-well, Mr. Markhat, Milton is simply incapable of plotting to seize the House.”

“We’re very relaxed here, Lady Werewilk,” I said. “I’ll sweep the floor later.”

She thumped her smoke stick, and the ashes fell, and she used those few moments to gather her words. I pretended to scribble notes and gave her some time. No one, rich or poor, likes to be rushed when showing the family skeletons to tradesmen.

“Milton served in the War,” she said. “When he came back, he was…changed.”

I nodded. Some called them changed. Others called them the Broken. You see them all over Rannit, slumped and silent and vacant-eyed, still fighting their own dark battles years after the last bugle sounded. “I served too,” I said. “And I saw a lot of changed men, Lady. I understand.”

She smiled at me, for the first time. It was brief, but bright.

“Milton is not insane,” she said. Her smile vanished. “He is not-what do they call it? Broken. But he has retreated. Into a world of his own making. He has no interest in the House, or anything else, for that matter. He would no longer eat, if I didn’t have Singh sit him down twice a day and force him to chew and swallow.”

“Singh?”

“Butler,” said Lady Werewilk. “He’s been with us for forty years. He amassed a small fortune himself, during the War. His loyalty is without question.”