Within minutes of hanging her new "Yes, we're OPEN" sign on the door, Fuyo heard a knock, a creak, and a familiarly creaky voice calling, "Hello!"

She bustled out of the office to find the young gate-keeper of the executive branch. He stuck out his hand awkwardly and said, "Um, hello. I remember you from yesterday. I'm Bentwick."

Fuyo shook it with more enthusiasm than he was prepared to accept. "Fuyo. My colleagues Shigure and Sagiri are in the back, and I'd introduce you to our surveillance expert if he ever kept regular business hours. What can we do for you?"

"You're detectives, right?" He bit his lower lip. "I mean, of course you are, sorry. It's on your sign. Do you investigate, um, missing things?"

"Thoroughly and discreetly, and at very reasonable prices!" Fuyo steered him to a chair, where he perched on the edge of the cushion, and sat opposite him with a fresh notepad and a pencil. "What's gone missing?"

Shadow-silent, Sagiri slipped out of the kitchen and set a cup of tea in front of Bentwick. He glanced uncertainly at it and kept his hands in his lap. "Well, it's a little weird, I guess. We used to get rats in the executive branch, big mean ones. Pretty sure they were coming up from reparations, since they don't always clean so well down there. Anyway, I put poison out, and that took care of them for a while. In our branch, at least. That was... three months ago? Four?"

Fuyo wrote down both estimates, for the sake of keeping her hand moving while Bentwick wended his way to the point.

"Anyway, I heard scratching noises in the basement yesterday, like maybe rat noises. They're really filthy down there in reparations, you have no idea. So I went to get the poison and nip the rat problem in the bud this time, only when I checked the cupboard, it was gone."

Fuyo tapped her pencil against the notepad. "Did you check whether the reparations department borrowed it?"

He shook his head. "They can't. It was in our locked cupboard, and only executive branch people have keys. So I asked around, and nobody said they took it." His fingers knotted together. "I mean, maybe it's nothing, but it makes me a little nervous."

An image of Alvan, a bottle of poison, and Luserina's lunch flashed into Fuyo's mind. "Have you told the mayor about this?"

"No, she's all stressed out about the water supply situation. And it might be nothing, right? It could have gone missing a while ago, maybe." Bentwick worried his lip again. "I kept it in the back, and it's not like I checked on it every time I opened the cupboard. Sometimes you just need paperclips, you know?"

"I know." Fuyo passed him a business card. "But don't you worry! We'll get to the bottom of this in no time. That's our daily rate on the back. Keep in mind that we offer accommodating payment plans and waive the deposit in cases of hardship or emergency, so don't fret about your finances."

Bentwick reached into his pocket and came up with ten potch and a crumpled paper.

"We'll just get started investigating," she said gently, folding his hand closed, "and we'll worry about that sort of thing later, okay?"

He rose, thanked her, and scurried off back to work. As an afterthought, Fuyo leaned out the doorway and called after him, "Tell your wealthy friends about us!"

When she returned, Shigure was examining her clipboard critically. "When do we start taking cases that aren't a complete pain in the ass?"

"Don't be difficult." Fuyo reached over to brush his bangs out of his eyes, eliciting an annoyed grunt as he slipped out of range. "While you're snooping on Alvan, just snoop a little more thoroughly to see if there's rat poison anywhere suspicious. And don't take Mr. Mouse along for this one," she added, in response to whiskers twitching urgently at her ankle.

Sagiri emerged to retrieve the teacup, posture slipping in a very subtle show of disappointment when she saw that it was still full. Her gaze flicked up abruptly enough to give Fuyo half a moment's warning before the door burst open.

"Morning," said Raven. Sagiri let him take the teacup as he strolled past; he frowned briefly at the coolness of it, then took a sip anyway. "What's for breakfast?"

"It's mid-morning," Fuyo replied. Undeterred, he headed into the kitchen and began noisily to scavenge. "Don't you have anything to report? From your stakeout?"

"Nah, all's quiet in Rainwall. Nobody even tried to assassinate anybody." He found the grapes that Fuyo had been saving and helped himself. "Mission accomplished, time for a nap."

"You realize you're going back tonight," said Sagiri.

"Eh, I can accomplish a mission more than once. Look, I'm contributing." He worked a grape seed out of his teeth and began whistling.

Fuyo narrowed her eyes. "You're awfully chipper for someone who's been up all night."

Raven stopped whistling long enough to say, "Satisfaction of a job well done, right? I'm taking pride in honest work, ah ha ha ha ha!" The end of his laughter slid into a happy humming sound, which lingered on the air even after he closed the bedroom door behind himself.

Shigure sighed heavily. "You're going to ask us to follow him tonight."

Fuyo nodded. "Just find out whether he's doing anything even close to a proper stakeout."

"How about I save us the trouble and just tell you he isn't?"

"Professional pride," said Sagiri. Sometimes her smile made it difficult to tell to what extent she was teasing. "We should go soon; Alvan's coworkers won't interrogate themselves."

Shigure packed tobacco into his pipe. "Lemme finish smoking first."

Before Fuyo could take issue with his use of "finish," another knock came at the door. She brightened. Eventually, someone with money had to come along.

Her greeting reworked itself as Euram slipped inside. At least he was a paying customer.

"Have you exposed that blackguard for the violent menace he is?" he asked, hands clasped eagerly. "Are you ready to drag his dark plots into the merciless light of day?"

Fuyo aimed for diplomacy. "We've found him very unpleasant, but we're still gathering evidence."

"'Unpleasant'? The man is devoid of redeeming qualities! He oozes malevolence! He—"

"Can't investigate him," said Shigure, without bothering to take his pipe out of his mouth, "while you've got us here complaining about him."

Euram took a deep breath. "Yes, of course. I just wanted to check in. You haven't accrued any, ah, expenses, have you?"

"None so far." Fuyo smiled and patted his shoulder. "Don't worry. We won't let anything happen to your sister."

"Thank you." Euram attempted to smile back. "If I may, I have another small request for you: please don't alarm my mother. She's doing much better now, but she's still frail, and I fear that any shock might drive her back into seclusion."

As Fuyo reassured him that her agency guaranteed discretion, Shigure lowered his pipe and said, "Wait, she's out of her room? Where other people can see her?"

"Well, yes, of course." Euram looked a bit flustered. "I'm sure you noticed that we donated the manor to the public good."

"Hmph." Shifting in his chair, Shigure pulled a handful of potch from somewhere on his person and held it out to Sagiri, whose smile appeared genuine. "Guess you were right."

Fuyo shot them both a glare before distracting Euram with a turn toward the door. "Anyway, we have some leads to follow up on today. We'll get to the bottom of that guy in no time, so just count on us!"

Once Euram had been coaxed outside, Fuyo flipped the sign to "Sorry, we're CLOSED," shut the door, and leaned against it as she exhaled.

"Still pretty sure he was talking to a skeleton in a wig and a dress," Shigure muttered.

Sagiri jangled her potch. "Don't be a sore loser. Luserina would have told us if that were the case."

"You sure? She's a little weird, too."

Fuyo exhaled slowly, to a count of five, before saying, "All right, that's too much speculating, not enough investigating. Go find out if Alvan's been up to any suspicious behaviors, and see if you can track down that rat poison."

Once they were gone, she settled in at her desk for a soothing round of filing. She'd just gotten into a good rhythm when there came a knock at the door. What was the point of a nicely painted sign if no one read it?

She answered anyway, because business was business, and found a young woman with a jaunty little hat and a sack full of envelopes, one of which was proffered. "Letter for you, ma'am," said the girl. "Tips appreciated."

Shigure had called breaking into Alvan's office, and Sagiri didn't fight him for it; she'd just won a long-standing bet, after all, and she tended to have more patience for questioning than he did. She played lookout as he scaled a tree outside the windows of the executive branch hallway, then strolled around to the mansion's intended entrance.

Over the course of an hour, she worked out that most government employees knew Alvan, and none particularly liked him. "Social skills of a wounded boar" proved a popular complaint. No history of violence or threats emerged, however, and several workers who took the time to chat expressed a grudging respect for the man's work ethic.

"I don't think he sleeps," said one of the security guards, without a hint of hyperbole. "I try to check in when folks work late, see if they're all right, and everyone else says, 'Good evening, Miss Sasha,' 'Doing just fine here, Miss Sasha,' 'Can't believe I fell asleep at my desk again, Miss Sasha,' that kind of thing. Expect him. He just looks at me like I'm something he scraped off his boot. Don't think he blinks, either."

"He never says sorry for bumping into you," said one of the messenger boys. "This one time, he yelled at me 'cause he tripped me with his dumb cane."

"Always gets his forms in on time, and never a mistake," said one of the clerks. "So that's nice. Outside of paperwork, of course, he's a complete ass."

A few people speculated that he had to be blackmailing Luserina to maintain his position, but everyone who dealt with his work directly seemed to have no trouble accepting that he was, in his own unpleasant way, essential to the daily functioning of Rainwall's new government. Which was, in Sagiri's unprofessional political opinion, something of a mess.

Having uncovered nothing damning about Alvan, she headed down to the reparations department and asked the least grouchy-looking employee about the rats.

"We don't have rats," he replied.

Sagiri sniffed. The basement smelled like a variety of unwanted things, but the blend contained no unambiguous notes of rodent, rodent waste, or rodent poison. "So you've taken care of the infestation?"

He glowered at her and bit off each word: "We. Don't. Have. Rats." Her steady smile almost certainly wasn't helping his mood.

The next person Sagiri tried to question brandished a pen at her, so she sidled off to investigate the dark corners of the room. None of the employees seemed to care what she did, as long as she wasn't social, and the citizens queuing up in the apparently vain hope that someone would assist them had no attention in anyone without a stamp and an air of authority.

She found plenty of filth but no recent evidence of rats, dead or otherwise. An incongruous sack of potatoes showed no signs of gnawing.

"No rats in basement," she recorded dutifully in her notes.

Shigure was waiting for her outside, dozing on a tree limb with his pipe dangling from his lip. His eyelids parted slightly as she climbed up to join him. "Hey."

"Hey." She sat down beside him. They had a nice view of several executive branch windows from here, including the one in Luserina's office. Luserina herself appeared utterly absorbed in a stack of papers. "Did you find anything interesting?"

He snorted. "Guy couldn't be more boring if he tried. Not a damn thing in that office but files and pens. Almost enough to make me think he's a little suspicious after all."

"No rat poison?"

"Found an empty bottle in one of the cabinets, but it was obvious someone else put it there. Like, stupidly obvious. Everything else is spotless, and then the guy just crams a dusty bottle back in the corner? Right."

Sagiri swung her legs idly in the air. "No one likes him, so you've got your pick of who might want to frame him for the very serious crime of stealing the rat poison. There aren't any rats in the mansion, by the way."

"Riveting stuff, huh?" Shigure scratched his back against the bark. "This is the stupidest case."

"Stupider than that missing person case in Haud?"

"That was a different kind of stupid."

Through the glass, Sagiri watched one of the messenger boys appear in the doorway with a steaming kettle. Luserina nodded, measured tea leaves from a tin on her desk into her little teapot, and went back to reading as the boy filled the pot with water. As he finished, Alvan arrived and swatted the boy out of his way with his cane, earning what looked like a scolding from Luserina.

"I'm surprised no one is plotting against him," said Sagiri. Shigure shrugged.

As the tea steeped, Alvan sat down opposite Luserina's desk and read to her from a clipboard in tones too muted to carry through the glass. She interjected occasionally, prompting him to make quick marks with his pen. After what Sagiri considered a ruinously long steeping period, Luserina poured herself a cup of tea and held up an empty cup to Alvan.

He shook his head, and she raised her cup to her lips. A split-second later, fast enough to shake through Sagiri like a flashback, he swung his cane into the cup and sent it shattering against the wall.

Shigure flitted to the end of the branch. "What the hell?"

Luserina mouthed a similar sentiment, then jumped again as Shigure forced the window open. Sagiri gripped kunai between her fingers and held them to catch the light. For an instant, Alvan flowed into a defensive stance, but his right leg buckled and left him jabbing his cane into the floor for balance.

"Poison," he said, chin stiff and lip curled halfway to a sneer. "Test it if you don't believe me."

Kunai still in hand, Sagiri slid through the window frame and took the lid off the teapot. The signs were subtle but unmistakable: a pale sheen on the surface of the tea, a bitter scent covered almost entirely by over-steeping. Inside the tea tin she found minuscule white crystals nestled nearly imperceptibly among the dark leaves.

She looked up at Luserina. "Someone who has access to this tin tried to kill you."

"I—I keep it in my desk." Luserina had the distant, rattled look of one who was having trouble with the transition from mundane workplace stress to attempted murder. She settled shakily back into her seat. "Only Alvan and the security guards and I have keys. Someone must have picked the lock."

Sagiri nodded and shook the tin, watching the crystals wink. If this was indeed the missing rat poison, Bentwick's approach to pest control was far past overkill. "This leaves a residue. Check the hands of every security guard who's entered the building since your last cup of tea yesterday."

"Who are you to give orders here?" The cold formality of Alvan's tone began to crack: "Why are you smiling?"

Shigure bristled. "None of your damn business. And you have a real eye for poison, don't you, you—"

"Please." Luserina thumped both palms on her desk as she rose. "Let's not waste time fighting. Alvan, round up security, then pull yesterday's paperwork. I need to know if anyone unusual was in the building. Shigure, Sagiri—you should probably talk to Fuyo."

This was her mayoral tone, and it didn't invite debate. Already her blood had begun to stir beneath her pallor.

Shigure slipped back out the window with Sagiri just behind him. When they reached the ground, she caught his eye, inclined her head, and saw her own thought reflected: Nether Gate.

The door opened without anyone knocking first, and Raven was still snoring in the bedroom, which meant that the detectives were home. Fuyo bounded out of her office, letter in hand, and said, "I heard from Talgeyl, and Alvan's definitely shady. You won't believe—"

"He's ex-Nether Gate." Shigure flopped into a chair. "Also, unless he's playing a stupidly complicated game, he's not the one trying to kill Luserina."

"That would be the one who put an extremely potent poison in Luserina's tea leaves," Sagiri added, perching on the armrest of the sofa. "Someone who knows that she does terrible things to tea and wouldn't notice the smell or flavor."

Shigure added, "And someone who thought we're the kind of detectives who fall for obvious frame jobs. Seriously, I'm insulted."

Fuyo's initial surge of petty disappointment didn't last long. "Oh, my," she managed. "Is Luserina okay?"

Sagiri nodded. "Alvan saved her life. Imagine how much more insufferable he'll be now."

"Ugh." Shigure grimaced as he lit his pipe. "Now she'll never fire that bastard. Should've left that bottle in his office for security to find."

"Can we go back," said Fuyo, trying with difficulty not to yell, "to the part where someone is trying to kill Luserina?"

"Of course," Sagiri replied. "Luserina was rounding up security when we left, but I doubt they'll find anything. Whoever did this was clever enough to attempt a frame job."

Fuyo took a long, quiet moment to clean her glasses on her skirt. She took a deep breath as she set them back in place. "All right, then. All in favor of doing the job Euram wants rather than the job he thinks he wants?"

This got her a nod from Sagiri and an especially fat smoke ring from Shigure, so she considered the motion passed. "Good," she continued. "It doesn't matter as much now, but I did get a letter from Talgeyl. He said that the frog cane rings a bell because he almost caught the thief who stole it from Lord Rovere's mansion just a few months after Rovere's death. Wounded the guy badly in the leg, he says." She folded up the letter. "And now he's Nether Gate, too. Quite a résumé this one has, huh?"

"Yes," said Sagiri mildly. "And who would ever hire assassins and thieves for honest work?"

It was still hard to tell when she was teasing and when she was genuinely hurt. Fuyo was spared erring on the side of caution when Sagiri added, "At least this case is less stupid now, isn't it?"

Shigure grunted at her. "This just makes it stupider. Why'd Oboro even go to Nagarea when the Nether Gate family reunion is in Rainwall?"

This was never a good place for the conversation to go. Fuyo redirected it with, "Does he look familiar at all, now that you know he was in the organization?"

Sagiri shook her head. "If he wasn't in our division, we might never have seen him."

Fuyo considered this. "Do you think he can tell about you two?"

"Yeah, probably," Shigure replied. "He saw us in action, and Nether Gate doesn't raise fools."

Murderers and maniacs and heartless husks and broken children, but never fools. Oboro didn't like to share stories, but he'd alluded to enough to break Fuyo's heart several times over. "All right," she said, pushing those thoughts aside. "I want you two searching for clues that can lead us to the real assassin, and I want you to keep an eye on Luserina. Just because Alvan saved her life doesn't mean I trust him to do it again. If Crow's slacking off on the job, take shifts on the stakeout and I'll deal with him tomorrow."

They left after Shigure had completed his usual ritual of insisting that he be allowed to finish smoking his pipe, balking when he was denied, and complaining long enough to smoke half of it. Fuyo sat down with her files on Alvan and arranged them around Talgeyl's letter.

Stealing a distinctive cane from a dead man only began to make sense in the context of a plot to claim a false connection, and Alvan didn't so much as hint at ties to Lordlake. If he'd stolen the cane for money, he'd had years now to sell it. In a different case, she might have suspected a superstitious motive or a desire to offset injury with a trophy, but Nether Gate didn't nurture sentiment.

Had he thrown in his lot with the Godwins' secret revival of Nether Gate? Or had he moved on to aimless petty thievery when the Queen disbanded them? Oboro would have been able to tell; he blended Shigure and Sagiri's observational skills with a perspective on Nether Gate that almost no one else could claim.

Too much speculating, not enough investigating.

Fuyo became aware of sunset when Raven sauntered into the kitchen, yawning and stretching, and began to ransack. Somehow, his snack-making process tended to require getting all the knives dirty. "I'll give you a three hundred potch advance," she called, "if you eat out. And go straight to work afterward."

The boat was quiet again in short order, and the cutlery was spared an unnecessary washing. Fuyo pulled every file she could think of that might mention Rovere.

At long last she found something worthwhile, buried in an old case of senatorial adultery. Sagiri had dutifully paraphrased a conversation she overheard while staking out one of the lovers' favorite rendezvous spots; it involved a fair bit of gossip about the young man newly serving as Lord Rovere's assistant, who performed his tasks in precise silence and blended into a room like a moth into tree bark. Polite, reliable boy. Unnerving. Anyone's guess where he'd come from, since on the rare occasion he spoke to anyone but Rovere, his accent perfectly mimicked that of the person addressing him.

Oboro must have realized at the time, but what was the point in interfering with a former child of Nether Gate who, all things considered, seemed to be adjusting well?

There was something here, Fuyo was certain—something tangled up in Rovere and the Barows and the bleak fury of losing the person who put a broken world back together. Rovere inspired sentiment. She could follow the claiming of the cane, the infiltration of Rainwall, and the deep bitterness, but keeping Luserina alive didn't fit at all neatly.

Fuyo's stomach growled. Lunch seemed like a distant memory, so she took a break to go through the leftovers in the kitchen and see how many containers were not victims of Raven's penchant for eating all but the last bite. He'd left her two grapes, probably so that he could claim not to have left her only one.

She had cobbled together an acceptable sandwich when the door opened amid stomping and Shigure's shout of, "I don't want to talk about it!"

"Talk about what?" Fuyo abandoned sandwich and hastened out to intercept him. Neither he nor Sagiri appeared to be bleeding, at least. "What happened?"

"Shigure's traumatized," Sagiri replied, and Fuyo hadn't the faintest idea whether she was teasing. "We found out what Raven's getting up to."

"Would you just shut up about it?" Scowling with the full intensity of someone who'd had to work for his facial expressions, Shigure slumped in his favorite chair.

Sagiri beckoned Fuyo closer and whispered, "He's sleeping with Luserina."

"He's what. He's with. What!" Those words wouldn't form questions, or even sentences, so Fuyo tried others: "You're sure that's what you saw?" When Sagiri nodded, she let out a series of unhappy little noises and said, "You're really, really sure that—"

"Yes! Damn it! Stop talking about it!" Shigure pressed the heels of his hands to his ears.

Sagiri patted him on the back. To Fuyo she said, "Yes. Very sure. We got a lot of practice being sure with all those senators."

"Oh, how could he?" Fuyo rubbed her temples until she forced out another line of thought. "Isn't there any way that this might have been a misunderstanding?"

"If it was," Sagiri replied, "it was an enthusiastic misunderstanding."

Shigure glared at her through his bangs. "I can still hear you."

Chewing on her lip, Fuyo tried to envision a scenario in which Luserina had been hit with some sort of curse that caused the disappearance of her clothing as well as the clothing of anyone looking directly at her, and if Fuyo was willing to suspend her belief from threads that tenuous, then surely she could stretch them a little thinner and assume that this curse also put Luserina's life in immediate peril unless she...

Unable to find a predicate that kept her belief from plummeting, Fuyo sighed. "Oh, dear."

During the ensuing pause, Shigure lowered his hands, stuffed thin shreds of tobacco into his pipe, and took advantage of his fire rune. He puffed purposefully before saying, "We're never going to talk about this again."

"Well, certainly never with Euram."

That, Fuyo decided, was teasing.