It was well past the middle of the night, and the Baron of Corvana ought rightfully have been sleeping.

    Or perhaps he ought to have been reveling. That was what most members of the gentry were doing at this time of night, dancing and drinking and being seen. Looking for husbands, looking for wives. Long, productive nights of parties, before waking in the afternoon to do it all again.

    The thought made his skin crawl, when he thought of it at all.

    Mostly, he did not think of it. Did not think of anything that did not glow or spark or burn, fire without heat, light without fire. He did not have a dedicated office, because he preferred to keep his desk in the middle of his library, walls covered in shelves. It was like a cocoon of magic, relics and artifacts and books. Pages printed on living wood and stamped in blood and bound in skin, runes carved into bone, metal contraptions that seemed to move of their own accord.

    The desk itself was lit with the glow of crystals, not faint and crude as so many of the lights in Akvero; these were perfect spheres of radiant light, balanced on elaborately twisted metalwork. Here it was easy to lose track of time, despite the many clocks he kept – but then, many of the clocks kept time for different places. It was hard to tell which was local, to look at them.

    Dressed in his usual finery, he looked despite his predilections as if he had just come from a party somewhere. He hadn't even taken off his jacket. Moreover, he hadn't taken off his mask. The way he moved suggested that he was long past being accustomed to the presence of the beak it gave him. His every motion accommodated for its presence as easily as if it were a part of him, not even brushing it with the voluminous feather of his quill.

    His head was, however, drooping. As the night had worn on his back had bent, leaning lower and lower over his desk, nearer and nearer to the paper on which he wrote.

    There were two ways to tell that he had fallen asleep. The first was that his pen had stilled, ink slowly blossoming outward from the nib of his quill in an unsightly splotch.

    The other was that the lights went out.

    Behind his mask, his eyes snapped open.

    His fingers twitched, immediately beginning the motion to reactivate the lights, but then stopped.

    Intruder. Someone in his house that did not belong. The awareness of the unfamilar presence pricked at his skin, a hole in the film that coated his home. No mere animal or waylaid bird, this.

    He did not concern himself with locks or with guard dogs. Why would he? Who would dare? Shortly after he'd moved in, there'd been a run in or two with members of the thieves' guild out to make their name. They had quickly learned the better of it. There'd been no such trouble since.

    Silence enveloped him, magic like cotton wool padding him out and rendering his motions silent. He rose to stand, and the silence thickened to shadow, darker even than the darkness that already filled the room.

    It was possible that he was prone to melodrama.

    Creeping tendrils of magic spread out across the floor from his boots, delicate lines of darkness flitting toward long dormant traps laid long ago. It almost defeated the purpose of a trap to only activate it when someone had already broken in, but the rest of the time they simply weren't worth it. Nuisances and overpriced mousetraps, for all the good they did him. Runes and sacred geometry carefully drawn along floors and walls in invisible ink, now that they were active they'd be an easy enough thing to stumble across. Sticky shadows ensnaring limbs, sparing the trouble of having to search every room.

    Not that he wouldn't anyway. Pinpointing their exact location with magic would be too costly even for him, but not knowing where they were was too irritating to be borne.

    As he recalled those wires of shadow, not wanting to remain stretched thin, he balled his right hand into a tight fist. All at once, the manor shut itself – all the windows and all the doors, slamming shut where they were not already and locking for good measure.

    Someone was going to be made an example of.

    Found.

    The tripped spell all but rang like a bell that only he could hear, stopping his search and giving him a destination. His traps were as excessive as everything else about him, half of them just thought experiments taken a bit too far. Time and money sunk into things he never actually planned to use, simply because he could.

    It was important for a man to have hobbies.

    He stalked toward the tripped trap, gathering shadows as he went, wrapping them around himself and letting them trail behind him like a cloak. He deactivated traps as he passed like he was sucking up light, though it was really a matter of conserving energy.

    It also looked terrifying. Or, at the very least, impressive. Ideally, both.

    By the time he made it to the hall in which he'd trapped his uninvited guest, he had become a looming void topped with a mask, horned and beaked, the gold filigree possessed of a faint red glow.

    That part was not actually deliberate. He was just irritated.

    It faded a bit at the sight of the woman stuck to the floor, but only a bit. Still irritated. He'd just expected someone… taller? Or maybe just a little more obviously irritating. Some filthy, scrawny little human thief with teeth half-rotted trying to hasten his apprenticeship.

    Not that this was any kind of a lady. Still an intruder in his home, still a thief from the look of her, even if the look was not one that he had anticipated. Some of the shadow dissipated with the knowledge that even at his natural size he could loom and intimidate.

    He was allowed to be melodramatic and petty, if he wanted. It was his house.

    "You seem to be trespassing," he said, as shadows wrapped around her calves to hold her fast, pulling her downward to try and bring her hands in reach. "Find anything interesting?"

    Petulant. Like a child trying to avoid a chore. So she struck him, anyway, limp as she was.

    Not that struggling would be better, necessarily. But it showed a bit more spirit than acting like dead weight.

    He cocked his head when she did, the same tilt, but more birdlike. Surely she did not actually think he would believe that? "You were attempting to rob the Duchess LaFontaine?" he asked. "You must be a very poor thief. You're in the wrong part of the city." Not that he should be giving her directions. But he held no particular affection for the Duchess – nor any other Duchess, for that matter. He was simply very certain that she was lying.

    All else aside, innocent women did not go limp and quietly acquiesce to having their wrists bound.

    Usually.

    He would have expected a little screaming, anyway.

    He followed the brief flicker of her gaze to the bureau, and she would not be able to see the way his eyes narrowed as he looked at it. "Hm." A twitch of his fingers and the lights came back on, all blazing to life at once, the eerie cold light of magic. Though her shadowy restraints remained, the darkness wrapped around him fell away as he turned his attention toward examining his furniture. Fingertips ran over the edges, over the lock and the enchantment it held. Tampered with. Unsuccessfully, but even that attempt should have trapped her. He unlocked it with nothing more than a well-placed bit of power, removed it from the bureau so that he could get a better look at it. Holding it up and turning it, he clicked his tongue absentmindedly.

    "Willow ash!" he said suddenly, pleased. Not because of the ash itself, but pleased at having figured it out. The delight of a solved puzzle was brief, and he turned to put the padlock back – then stopped.

    "What exactly were you hoping to find, I wonder."

    "A visit through the window," he murmured, not swayed by her smile. He'd been resisting sweet smiles since he came to be of marrying age. "If you're trying to convince me of an illicit affair with the Duchess, you'll need to offer more interesting details."

    It would be funny if she did. Untrue, but funny.

    Familiar enough with spells to have willow ash on her person, to use it against his charm. Chose to break into his home, specifically, which had little to recommend it except the artifacts within. Expensive, to be fair, but not worth the trouble for most.

    They weren't going to get anywhere with this if she kept trying to lie to him.

    "You know, I'm feeling generous. I think perhaps I do have a gift for you." He opened the bureau, sifted through some of the miscellaneous abandoned projects until he found what he was looking for. A silver ring with a wide oval of polished kyanite, he pulled a stick pin from his lapel, used it to scratch shapes into the band. They were small and intricate, and it was a wonder he could see anything at all clearly enough through the eyeholes of his mask.

    "There," he said, returning the pin to its place as he admired his handiwork. "I think it suits you."

    Long, slow steps brought him back to her side, where he knelt to present her with the ring. As he had done nothing similar for any other woman, that made this home invader rather special. He doubted she'd appreciate it. "Put it on," he said, and it was not a request. "You'll be on your way to see the Duchess soon enough."

    After he had answers.

    "So I've been told."

    Unfortunate. It would have been fun to hear what she came up with.

    Despite his love of spending entirely too much money on magic few else could afford, most of his time was spent with that oldest and cheapest form of magic. Runes and equations, sacred geometry carefully arranged to channel ambient power into some specific purpose.

    His manor had more ambient magic than most. The artifacts helped.

    Originally, the various spells across the floors had been as such, always on and requiring no effort from him. But that had turned out to be terribly inconvenient. He kept getting his boots stuck, for one thing. So he'd modified the scripts and the shapes, until they no longer drew in power of their own accord and required his intervention.

    Animated shadow was always the easiest to work with – aside from light, of course. Making anything glow was the easiest magic of all. But they were two sides of the same coin, and turning light into a solid thing was much harder than simply putting light into something else.

    Up close and in the light, her eyes were unmistakable. He was almost curious. But he didn't ask. The blue stone really did complement her eyes marvelously.

    For a moment, it seemed she might refuse him. But the way she acquiesced made him smile, though she could not see it. "Am I?" he asked. "I'm flattered." He slid the ring onto her ring finger, and it would have felt cold, drawn shapes of light onto her skin. His fingers brushed against hers for the briefest of moments.

    It wouldn't hurt. But it also wouldn't be coming off for a while.

    It would wear off eventually, of course. Assuming she did not find some way to get it off, the little thief. And until then: no more lies. Not for him.

    "Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?"

    Francesco grinned behind his mask, enjoying entirely too much her expression of confusion and irritation. Her words betraying her, despite her every intention of lying. And, without a doubt: she would have lied.

    "Fisel," he repeated, though of course the name meant nothing to him. Why would it? But there was power in a name, and so he would delight in its possession. He remained kneeling, because their height difference was such that looking down on her would be awkward with his mask. Unless he wanted to stand at a distance. At the moment, he did not.

    He liked being able to see her face. It made the conversation more… interesting. One really would have thought she'd have worn a mask for this sort of thing. Masks were the usual policy of the Thieves' Guild, carved alike in style to indicate membership. A thief without a mask was a thief without a second life to protect – or one whose other life was masked, instead.

    Interesting.

    "Did anyone in particular whisper in your ear?" he wondered, because though she did not say she had been sent, someone may well have given her the idea deliberately. "What were you hoping to find?"

    It might have been that someone wanted a particular artifact to show up on the black market for their retrieval. Or it may have been that someone wanted only to sabotage his work.

    Or else it was just her, and just greed.

    It was hard to say which he'd prefer.

    "It would be quite the trouble – and quite the risk – to satisfy an idle curiosity." Though he himself had sometimes gone to ridiculous lengths to satisfy his curiosity. But that was different. His had been legal.

    Mostly legal.

    He had not, personally, participated in any breaking and entering in any homes.