He'd end his days mutilated and in pain, probably tormented by Talendar servants and hirelings sent to hunt and harry him in the streets to provide feast-table amusement with their reports. He'd heard of their doing so before with House Feltelent, breaking the fingers of a lone, blinded old man one by one as months passed, purely for cruel sport.

In Sembia, it was all too easy to ruin a man.

It hardly seemed more difficult to shatter an entire family, no matter how rich, proud, and historied it might be.

His father had died fighting against such a fate. Thamalon could do no less, whatever it might cost him, and no matter how sick he'd become of such skulking and strivings. Thamalon owed the ghosts of Stormweather Towers-and his children, their lives still bright with promise before them-no less.

He raised his eyes almost idly, face smoothly expressionless. Seventy-nine thousand golden fivestars was coin he did not have. Nor was it a treasure Thamalon would be willing to let any Talendar steal from Uskevren coffers, even if he'd had it to spare. Yet if he lost this his beloved home, the brightest and best of Selgaunt would shun him and his as paupers whose every coin might already be spoken for… and, again, the Uskevren would be ruined.

Ruin, ruin on all sides, and sinister smiles all down his feast table, from men waiting to see him fall into the doom they had prepared.

The Talendars were the oldest, proudest family in all Selgaunt. One did not lightly refuse the request of a visit from one of them. Foes and longtime rivals they might be-and they might well have earned their cruel badge of the Blood-beaked Raven many times over-but they could boast trading contacts, agents, and factors almost everywhere across the teeming continent of Faerun. Only a fool snubbed the Talendars in Selgaunt.