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big misunderstanding, and I’m sorry for that. It would never, ever happen again,” and she went on, babbling anything she could think of to convince Lobra that she should be allowed to get out of the mirror.
    “Hush,” Lobra repeated. “There is someone here who would like to see you,” she said, looking up, past Emriana, to some place out of the girl’s field of view.
    Denrick Pharaboldi strolled around the side of the window, stepped right up and knelt down, that familiar, terrible, wolfish grin spreading wide. “Hello, Emriana,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

CHAPTER 4
    Lavant knows we’re watching him,” Falagh said, sounding impatient. “He must. He hasn’t said anything of consequence to Lord Wianar since we began.”
    “Perhaps,” Grozier replied, leaning over Bartimus’s shoulder and watching the scene displayed on the wizard’s mirror.
    The glass was smaller than the one in Bartimus’s chambers at House Talricci, handy for travel, but it made viewing the images more difficult. Since they were performing the viewing in the sitting room of House Pharaboldi, it was a necessary inconvenience. He would have liked to use the larger one, the exquisite glass he had been ordered to fetch from the dungeons of the Generon, for it was much more suitable
    for scrying. But the woman Lobra had it in another room, along with one of the shapeshifters, who had taken the form of her dead brother.
    Bartimus wondered if she had some ability at magical scrying, too.
    “Stop shaking it!” Grozier ordered. “It’s hard enough to see what’s going on.”
    The wizard sighed and held the small mirror still, wishing his employer would stop putting so much weight on him. Grozier’s breath stank of salted fish roe, a delicacy served at the celebration and something Bartimus knew the man enjoyed.
    “He doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to our spy, though,” Grozier continued. “I think Lavant would have taken action if he suspected something.”
    “Well, if the two of them try to wander off alone and put some distance between themselves and our planted guard again, that might be a good clue that they sense trouble,” Falagh replied. “Maybe he and the Shining Lord just aren’t willing to discuss their private matters with guards standing about, and if your doppelganger insinuates himself into their, midst one more time, they are bound to realize he’s‘ shadowing them.”
    “Perhaps,” Grozier said again, sounding doubtful, still peering into the mirror. “Give it a little more time.”
    Bartimus thought Falagh’s initial plan had seemed promising. After Junce had shown the lot of them where the magic mirror was stored and then vanished to deal with other issues, the scion of House Mestel had suggested that their duplicate Pilos wait a bit before carrying out his ruse with the Darowdryn family. Instead, Falagh had suggested,
    they should have him transform into the likeness of a Generon guard and get near Lavant. He reasoned that attempting to use Bartimus’s magic to scry directly on either Lavant or Lord Wianar might trigger some magical defenses one of the men had in place, but focusing the magic on another figure who could get close to them might let them overhear a conversation with little chance of getting noticed.
    Thus far, the high priest and the ruler of Chondath had done nothing but make small talk, and frankly, the wizard was growing bored. He didn’t much care to return to the party, not so much because he would rather be somewhere else, but because he so often got lost in the middle of conversations. He always found himself mulling problems in his head, letting his mind wander over spells he was developing. Being drawn back into a discussion in which someone was waiting for him to reply to a missed question made him uncomfortable, so he tended to keep to himself at public events, standing off in the corner and avoiding groups. That wasn’t much fun,