The quiet shattered as Frostpine swept in, carrying a drift of outdoor cold with him. He went immediately to one of the big chairs beside the hearth and fell into it. Jory scrambled to her feet and left the room.

Frostpine glanced at the fire: the logs, which had been crackling peacefully, roared into active flame. Daja set three more chunks of wood on the blaze. As she brushed off her hands, she looked at her teacher and raised her eyebrows. “Done,” he replied to her silent question. “Arrested, the whole pack enjoying the governor’s hospitality. They don’t have heat in the cells, either. Though I doubt they’ll be there long enough to really suffer. The governor wants this ended.”

“Now that it’s done, will you let us know what’s kept you out until all hours?” Matazi asked, choosing a fresh length of scarlet silk for her work. “Or is it still secret?”

“Check and mate,” Kol told Daja. She grinned and shook her head. She had a long way to go before she mastered chess.

“I’ll tell you later,” Frostpine said with a nod at the twins. “For now, you may rejoice that I am among you again.”

Daja rolled her eyes. “If you’re going to be saucy, I’m going upstairs,” she told her teacher. She relented enough to kiss his cheek. “Congratulations,” she whispered. “Good work for an old man.”

She was preparing the washes she would need to set the gloves on the iron forms when one of the maids knocked on her door. “Excuse me, Viymese Daja, but Ravvot Ladradun is here and asks if he might see you. He says he knows he is late-he just came from his business-but asks if you would grant him the courtesy.”

Daja corked the bottle she was about to empty into a bowl. “That’s fine. Show him up, please.”

“Viymese!” the maid cried, shocked. “A man, in your bedroom? The impropriety!”

Daja raised her brows and waited for the woman to remember she was not exactly a Kugisko maiden. Mages weren’t held to the rules of merchant propriety, even young ones. Tris had once remarked crossly that people thought mages had the morals of cats.

The maid looked down. “Viymese, forgive me,” she said “I’ll bring Ravvot Ladradun right away.”

Daja picked up a few things and moved her tools around, though it wasn’t necessary. She always kept her room neat. She also lit more candles. As she put down the taper she’d used to light them, the maid showed Ben in.

“Shall I bring tea, Ravvot?” she asked him. “Cider, pastry?”

“Nothing, thank you,” Ben replied. “I won’t stay long.”

The maid curtsied and left the room, leaving the door open an inch. Daja noticed; her mouth twitched with a smile. It seemed the Bancanor servants meant to look out for her reputation even if she didn’t. Her amusement faded when she looked at Ben-he seemed weary. Part of that was fire and candlelight. They cast his face in sharp relief, making its lines deeper, his expression harder.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier,” he confessed without looking at her. “I wanted to make sure you were all right before this, but the fire wasn’t out till dawn on Moonsday. I was helping with the victims until almost noon on Starsday. Someone did tell me you and your teacher were fine.” He looked at her with concern. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course we are,” Daja said hurriedly, in the grip of a sudden wild thought. “Ben, who hates you this much?”

He looked at her, his face oddly still. “Why do you say that?”

Daja sat on her workstool to work the idea out aloud. “You told me you saw it on your way home. I bet if you’d gone home you could have watched it from your upstairs windows. I have to think maybe these fires are being set to hurt you. To, I don’t know, destroy your name in the city, to make people think your firefighting ideas don’t work. Maybe even to drag you into danger.”

“Daja, that’s a tremendous leap of logic,” he murmured. He sat in one of her fireside chairs.

“I’m not so sure. Well, I’m a mage, and they teach us not to believe in coincidences, you see. You’ve met this person, that’s my guess. Can you recall meeting someone who just seemed evil to you? Someone who made your skin crawl? Some you crossed?”

“Evil?” he asked.

“Only an evil person would harm others to get at someone else,” Daja said flatly.

Ben ran his fingers through his thinning curls. “You honestly believe there are people who are either good or evil?” he asked. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” she said, frowning. “What has my age to do with this?”

Ben shook his head. “This is the second time I’ve heard you talk like a young person. Usually I forget you aren’t my age. People aren’t that simple, Daja.”

“Of course he’s evil,” she said, impatient with typical adult shillyshallying. “Look at what he does. Or maybe it’s a she-” She stopped, abruptly. Morrachane? His own mother? Teraud’s wife had said she whipped her servants… no. Morrachane Ladradun would never do something that would mean crawling into houses or walking icy, windswept clifftop roads.

So involved was she in thinking, then discarding, the possibility, that she had missed the start of what Ben said now. “-someone tired of being ignored, tired of others trampling on him. Perhaps some rich person treated him with contempt. At least, with Jossaryk House, people will know he did something that no one will forget. He would be less, less evil and more-besieged.”