"Welcome to my home, Vix. Adhere to my few simple and reasonable rules and you need never worry about the Lapis-Crowns again," Rook the Shadowbroker said with a quirk of his lips - unsaid was that he might leave me to my fate if I ran afoul of him. "Come. I'll show you to your bedroom."

'Bedroom' was accurate only in the technical sense that it was a room and had a bed, which is more than I can say about my lodgings with Uncle Horantz, where I slept on a creaky divan that had seen better days in a time well before my birth. My bedroom at Rook's was a closet that accommodated a child-sized bunkbed, a chamberpot, a very small dresser, and enough open floor to take perhaps one and a half steps before my nose touched the door. Its lone window was a tiny porthole about the size of a dessert plate. The hallway it was in had thirteen doors, at least nine of which opened into virtually identical chambers. Suffice it to say, I spent as little time as possible in the bedroom.

My time at Rook's wasn't so different from the month I'd been with Uncle Horantz, except instead of being cooped up in the house most of the time, I was cooped up in Rook's substantially larger house all of the time. When there was nobody to look after me, which was about half the hours in any given day, I was locked up in Rook's third-floor library. It was fortunate that I enjoyed the place, because there was little chance of escape - Rook casually informed me that the door had a magic lock that would shock me if I tried to fool with it. In my privileged young life, I had never even attempted to pick a lock, and the thought had honestly never occurred to me before Rook brought it up. I certainly wasn't going to try it under threat of electrocution.

The library was lavish, its carpet a royal maroon trimmed with gold and amazingly soft, its many polished drakewood shelves chock full of books - the collection was several-fold bigger than mother's library and hundreds of times the variety of Horantz's single dingy bookshelf, which the old man had managed to fill about two thirds of the way during his five decades of life. Rook had books on everything, including one book on clockmaking (one that Horantz did not possess), four books on unarmed combat, a copy of the Asuranad, and a history of mythical beasts, which included a chapter on unicorns. That book was a lot less interesting than I'd thought it would be because the author was under the mistaken impression that mythical beasts were… well… mythical. As in not real. Seven-year-old Vix didn't believe it for a moment. Unicorns were definitely real! Beyond the books, the second level had a balcony overlooking the lower floor. A balcony bounded by a wrought iron rail that was great fun to climb along… my father would have had an aneurysm if he'd seen me dangling from the bars twelve feet above the sea of soft maroon carpet, but I thought it was great fun.

Rook spent a lot of time reading, too - on most days, he spent two or three hours in the library, each time with a different book. I spent most of my time in the library when Rook was there, not because I wanted to read - I was cooped up by myself for six or seven hours and had plenty of time for solo reading. So why on Terre would I want to be in there when I could be literally anywhere else in the house? The answer was quite simple: Rook was usually accompanied by his carrafin, Trismegistus.

If you're from Perdita, you may be unfamiliar with carrafins, though you've almost certainly heard of their much larger cousins, the gryphons. The carrafin is almost identical to a gryphon - only, instead of being a behemoth lion-eagle hybrid, you've got an adorable housecat-kestrel mix that weighs around one stone. Trismegistus had an orange back and a white belly with little black stripes and a speckle pattern on his upper back that resembled the symbol for the ancient triune symbol for alchemy, divination, and magecraft (hence his name). I've heard it claimed that carrafins aren't particularly clever creatures, but Rook claimed that Tismegistus would respond to over thirty verbal commands or hand signals, and I personally heard the creature squawk out a dozen different words with reasonable clarity, some of them not repeatable in polite company.

While Rook read, Trismegistus liked to sit on the balcony's wrought iron railing and survey the library below, as if a dormouse hors d'oeuvre might peep out from between the shelves at any moment. I would perch up there with him, petting his soft feathers and fur and trying to figure out which of Rook's hand commands meant what, since the carrafin wouldn't respond to my high-pitched child's voice.

"If you fall from the balcony, I'll not waste a healing salve on a foolish little girl," Rook sighed.

"You let Trizzie perch up here," I countered.

"Trismegistus has wings, Vix. You do not."

"You're not my dad."

"Correct," Rook said, his expression ambivalent. I wasn't quite sure who'd won that exchange.

That's how I spent most of a week in Rook the Shadowbroker's abode - reading in the library, climbing in the library, and fawning over Trismegistus in the library. At night, I slept in the small but comfortable bedroom, which had a two-mattress bunkbed but only one child (me, obviously). And a little purple-painted dresser, which I'd filled with books I'd borrowed from Rook's library. In the evenings, after the officer's pub closed downstairs, Rod let me loiter in the kitchen with him and he taught me how to make Barsoan-style fish cakes, a recipe that I can recite from memory to this day, and he let me try a sip of wine, which I did not care for.

"This is disgusting! Why would anybody ever drink this?" My only other experience with wine was the sweetwine that Selenites drink on Varlineve (and occasionally let the children sip).

"Most don't drink it for the flavor," Rod said. "Now flip that cake before it goes burnt."

For most of my time at Rook's, it was just me, Rook, and the various guards and informants who had access to Rook's abode. Then, two days before I left for Floria, I was joined at Rook's by another recruit - a grubby street boy named Aldo who Rod demanded take a bath in the outside facility before he would let him set foot in the kitchen.

"Don't know how, sir," Aldo mumbled, clearly embarrassed.

Rod huffed, thinking the boy was teasing him. "You don't know how to bathe, boy?"

"Don't know how to use the, um…" Aldo pantomimed the water spigots.

"Go show him, Vix."

"Do I have to?"

"Yes."

Aldo was about my age - a few months older, actually, since I was only seven years, two months old and he was nearly seven and a half. Aldo was very proud that he knew his birthday - apparently, quite a few street urchins couldn't claim that much…

"But you're not," I said.

"How do you mean?" Aldo asked.

"You're not an urchin anymore. We're both headed off to the big school in Floria."

"Huh…"

"Come on." I gestured him forward. "I'll show you the laundry tub in the courtyard."

Aldo and I were both being recruited to go to school at the Collegium, the big school in Floria. I found the prospect pretty exciting, dampened only by the fact that I'd be thousands of kilometers from my family. But, as Rook had pointed out when I asked whether he could help me find them, my parents might be imprisoned in the fortress down the street from us, and I'd have exactly the same chance of seeing them if I was on the other side of the world. Rook said he could find out where they were… but information like that didn't come cheap, and I didn't have a tollo to my name. So Aldo and I would be headed to Floria. I'd never even been off of Barsoa before, and this would be a whole different country.

"…so I figure Floria might not be so bad," I finished explaining my thoughts as I demonstrated how to adjust the hot and cold spigots to Rook's big outdoor tub, the one usually used for linens. "You need to unscrew the heating block or nothing will go through, and the more you unscrew it, the less hot it'll be."

"Fancy," Aldo said with a nod. He cocked his head to the side. "Hey… what do they speak in Perdita?" Then he stripped down in front of me as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and I had to be embarrassed for both of us.

I turned away, blushing, and had to restrain myself from yelling at him - the poor boy didn't know any better. "Um… what do you mean what do they speak?"

"I mean, like… we speak Gionian? They speak that in Floria?" I could hear him splashing around in the water.

"I don't know," I admitted. "I figured they'd speak Gionian. Or maybe Kronojic?"

"Why Kronojic?"

"Because those are what I know. And Selenite. And a little Classical Turan…"

"Is that all?" Aldo chuckled. "Might be you'll have to learn another. We should ask Mister Rook, yeah?" He splashed at the water playfully. "Hey, you want to get in?"

"Um… no. It wouldn't be a good idea," I muttered, blushing even more furiously and wringing my hands against the hem of my shirt..

"Why's that?"

"Because…" how did you explain to somebody that it was improper for boys and girls to bathe together? Why even was it improper for boys and girls to bathe together? My mother had taught me plenty about the rules of propriety, but I'd never quite got to the underlying theory behind Selenite gender norms. "Because you're so dirty I'd only get dirtier if I bathed in your water. I'll show you how to drain it and take my own bath later…" I knew that wasn't the real reason, but I'd have to think on why later.

"Fair enough."

Unlike my distinctive Selenite features, Aldo's looks were typical of a native Barsoan's: dirty blond hair, earth brown eyes, a subtle nasal bridge, and medium-olive skin about two shades lighter than my own golden brown. His expressive lips had a cupid's bow that might have looked feminine if it wasn't for the pale scar that stretched from just below his lower lip up to just below his nose. His eyes were intense in the same way mine are (or so I've been told), always flitting about, assessing the situation, taking in the room… he came across as a bit skittish, like a cornered carrafin.

After his bath, I practically dragged Aldo along. "Wanna see Rook's library? It's really big?"

"I guess," he said. It hadn't occurred to me that Aldo might not be a reader.

Speaking of carrafins, Trismegistus did not care for Aldo. Trismegistus sat perched upon his accustomed railing the second time I took Aldo to Rook's library. I'd promised to teach Aldo his letters after my earlier faux pas at assuming every child had been taught to read (Aldo recognized most of the letters but didn't quite know what to do with that information), but the prospect of a reading lesson was quickly overshadowed by the possibility of playing with a miniature gryphon. Unfortunately, Trismegistus did not care for Aldo. Whenever the boy approached too near, the carrafin would make a vocalization between a hiss and a shriek and snap its beak. The first time, he even lunged at Aldo and drew blood, and not just a bit. Rook, after a bit of grumbling, had gone to get his healing salve. As he applied it to the gash on Aldo's pointer finger, the Shadowbroker was quick to point out that the stuff cost him three octavos a tin. Three!

"I didn't think he'd bite me!" Aldo said.

"Don't feel too bad about it," Rook told Aldo. He blotted the blood from around the boy's wound and ran a line of the goopy white salve along the cut with a long, bony finger. "He snaps at everybody. Trismegistus just doesn't like people."

"Trizzie likes me," I pointed out. In fact, the carrafin was currently perched on my shoulder and glaring at Aldo as his master saw to the boy's wounds, the carrafin's beak repeatedly tapping shut in what had to be a warning to stay away.

"Yes, well…" Rook regarded me with his onyx-dark eyes. "There are exceptions. I suppose. Carrafins are mercurial."

"Mercurial?" Aldo and I both said.

Rook nodded. "Like the element, mercury. Fluid, quixotic, and toxic… or in Trismegistus's case, venomous."

"Venomous?" Aldo yelped.

Rook nodded. "I doubt he'd have poisoned you with a warning bite, but I've added an alchemical agent to his food that greatly weakens the venom."

"My brother, Chansone, had his carrafin's poison glands removed. I bet you could do that…"

Rook's thin lips wrinkled in distaste. "Perhaps - and then what would happen if I ever had to let Trismegistus fly free, he'd be defenseless against both raptors, which can fly better, and felines, which are more robust. What do you suppose happened to your brother's poor pet?"

I started crying when he said that - Rook's flippant question summoned both my memories of that terrible night and thoughts of a poor, defenseless (but for the beak and claws) carrafin struggling to survive in the wild. In all likelihood, Aquilea the carrafin had been butchered for her meat - carrafin flesh is considered a delicacy in much of Gionia.

Rook sighed. "I'm sure your brother's pet is fine," he said without much conviction.

Two days after Aldo arrived, Rook brought in a third child - another girl, but I didn't see much of her at Rook's. One of the guards brought her in late in the evening while Rod was giving Aldo and me instruction in how to make Barsoan country stew down in the pub kitchen and, more pertinent to Aldo's interests, how to do knife tricks without cutting yourself. The girl was brought upstairs to chat with Rook and, by the time Rod escorted Aldo and me upstairs to our little bedrooms, the girl was already holed up in one of the little bedrooms across the hall, bawling like a baby and crying out for her mother.

Aldo and I quietly returned to the bedroom we now shared - I have no idea why Rook made us share a room when he had so many available, but I didn't mind having somebody to bunk with. I felt so sorry for the girl crying across the hallway that I started to cry in sympathy, remembering my own mother as she was dragged across the courtyard by the Lapis-Crowns.

"Don't be like that," Aldo said. He squeezed my shoulder and pulled me into a hug. "We're goin' to Floria tomorrow, and we'll have lots of friends."

"Yeah," I said, sniffing back tears and feeling a bit embarrassed for myself. "I'm going to sleep."

He agreed and I tapped the glowglobe to shut it off. It didn't even occur to me that, just a week ago, I'd never invigorated or disinvigorated a glowglobe before and I'd have had no idea how to go about it. After the first few times, though, it felt as natural as breathing. I wondered why other folks made such a big deal out of it.

As the light snuffed out, I closed my eyes, but the image of my mother in that fiery courtyard remained in my mind. The image of the duke's dark-masked goons chasing after our carriage as we fled into the night. The image of my baby brother beaten and carried off by those same thugs. Tonight, those men were probably settling into their beds, warm and safe, their consciences as free as an autumn afternoon. But some day, maybe many years from now, I would come for them, and then they would know terror and pain.