All eyes were turned towards the scene I had abruptly created. My heart near stopped in my chest, but I found myself going on without it, stepping forward without conscious volition, shouting words whose source was not myself. ‘I bring you word of her death. Poverty and privation shortened her life, but it was your betrayal of her heart that killed her, Howarth. Aubretia Lantis was my grandmother. I give to you now the last bit of wealth that you were unable to strip from her: this ring, as empty as your promise. Keep it, along with all else you swindled from her.’ I pulled the silver circle from my hand and threw the empty setting with a skill not my own. It sparkled as it flew through the air, and it landed squarely in Howarth’s empty glass, setting it ringing in the silence that followed my words. The old man’s eyes stood out from his face, and a vein pulsed wildly on his brow. I suspected he thought he saw a ghost, come back to waken old scandal just when his reputation most needed to be sound. I looked aside from him to his wife. She was scarlet with humiliation. ‘Study it well, Howarth’s wife,’ I bade her disdainfully. ‘Would not the Lantis emerald you wear about your neck fit well in its setting? Believe what you have denied to yourself all these years; a dead woman’s wealth bought you. Know that you married a liar and an upstart; know that your whole family is founded on his betrayal of a Bingtown Trader.’ I rounded disdainfully on the two young Trader men who sat at his table. The young women beside them, obviously Howarth’s daughters, stared at me in white-faced horror. ‘Consider well what you join your names to, Traders’ sons,’ I told them. ‘It is the Lantis wealth you are marrying, stripped of the Lantis name.’

Howarth had found his tongue. The dapper old man now looked drawn and pale. He pointed a shaking finger at me but spoke to his wife in the pitched voice of the near-deaf. ‘She can prove nothing! Nothing! The money Aubretia gave me, she gave me for love of me. She cannot legally force me to return it.’