"Any more business?" the head of House Uskevren asked calmly over the rim of his raised glass.

The lamplight flickered on the last sweetened ices and the wines served with them. The slight ripple of his set jaw behind it was the only hint of the disgust Thamalon Uskevren felt at dining in his own feast hall with his two most hated rivals-and creditors.

"Oh, yes, Uskevren," the man with silver-shot hair and emerald eyes so sharp they glittered said in an idle manner that fooled no one, "there is one thing more." Presker Talendar's smile was silken. "I've brought along someone who very much wants to meet you."

One of the four hitherto silent men who sat between Talendar and Saclath Soargyl-the fat, sneering son of a man who'd tried to kill Thamalon six times and hired someone else to bring down a sharp, cold end to Thamalon's days at least a dozen times more- leaned forward. Something that might have been the ghost of a smile adorned his face. It was the stranger in the doublet of green musterdelvys gilded with leaping lions, who resembled Thamalon's long-lost elder brother Perivel… as he'd been when young and vigorous, so long ago. Had Perivel found time back then to secretly sire a son?

Thamalon knew the other three silent diners at his table by sight. One was Iristar Velvaunt, a coldly professional mage-for-hire whose presence here this night must have cost the Talendars several thousand fivestars, at least. He was the whip to keep raised tempers from exploding into something more… or to blunt the many menaces a host might whelm against guests in his own house.

The man beside Velvaunt was Ansible Loakrin, Lawmaker of Selgaunt. Loakrin was the perfect witness and the owner of a face as carefully expressionless as Thamalon's own.