AUREK

I take the latch off the window and drop it in the river.

Sela Marsh has robbed me nine times this year, from houses I own under other names. I let her. The hunters at my door, I don't.

On the velvet I set her a coin, new-struck, and enter it in the ledger as a loss in advance.

SELA

The dragon's window is open, which is either a trap or an insult, and I've never once turned down either.

I'm halfway up the old customs tower, toes on a gutter, fingers in a crack some mason left before anyone's grandmother was born. Below me the river runs black. Above me the window stands wide, and warm air is rolling out of it.

Warm. On the last night of October. It smells of woodsmoke and cloves and money.

I'm here for one coin. Any coin from the dragon's hoard, two hundred crowns on delivery, which is a year's rent and a winter coat and new soles on my good boots. My fingers are numb. My pulse isn't.

Then my hand finds the fourth bracket, and stops.

I've been learning this wall for a month. The fourth bracket was rust held on by habit and pigeon muck, and I'd planned a long, ugly reach to skip it. Tonight it's new. Bright brass, new screws, still smelling of the file.

Somebody has mended my route.

The back of my neck goes hot before my head catches up. Nobody mends anything in Vell. I once watched my landlord fix a roof by moving the bucket.

"You're brass," I tell the bracket. "Who asked you to be brass?"

It takes my weight without a murmur. That's the worst part. It's a lovely bracket.

I go over the sill quick and low, the way I go over every sill, and crouch in the dark with my back to the river.

"Mind the board by your left foot," says the dark. "It talks."

I don't move. Not my foot, not my face. If a house speaks to you, you become furniture.

"So do you," I say.

"Only to guests."

"I'm not a guest. I'm a burglary."

"You're the first burglary in years to use the window." The voice is low and unhurried, from somewhere across the room. "The rest try the door."

"How do they get on?"

"They go home."

My eyes are getting the dark now. Low, soft-edged heaps, banked against the walls, catching what light comes up off the water. A candelabrum standing up out of one drift. A crown, an actual crown with points, tossed on top of another as if somebody had finished with it.

Gold. Not a chest of it. A floor.

Every thief in Vell has dreamed this room. In my version I'm wearing more pockets.

"Is all of this yours?"

"Most of it. Some of it's only resting."

"Did you fix my bracket?" I ask the dark.

"It was going to go."

"I know it was going to go. I'd planned around it. I had a whole reach worked out, very elegant, with a little swing at the end." I stand up, slowly. "You've ruined my best move."

A pause. "I apologise."

"You should. It was the nicest part of the job."

"I doubt that," says the dark, and for the first time it sounds as though it might be smiling.

There are three ways out of this room, and I count them, because counting is what I do instead of panicking. The window behind me. A door in the far wall, standing open on a stair. A chimney I could get up if I'd skipped supper, which I have.

Three ways out, all of them open. A sensible woman would take the nearest.

I'm not a sensible woman. I'm the best pair of hands in the city, and the last time I asked a sensible question in this trade, the answer was a dog.

In the middle of the room there's a table, and on the table, alone on a square of dark velvet, one coin. Set out, the way a jeweller sets out the stone he wants you to look at.

"I came for a coin," I say. "I'd rather not go home without one. Are you going to stop me?"

"No."

"Are you going to eat me?"

"Not tonight."

I'd like to know which word in that I'm meant to worry about.

I walk to the table anyway. Towards the voice. I keep to the bare boards between the drifts, and with every step the air gets warmer, until I'm standing at the velvet with my coat open and heat on my face, and I understand it isn't the room.

It's him. Somewhere in the dark ahead of me, a man is giving off heat like a baker's oven before dawn, and every part of me that's been cold since September turns towards it.

I hate that. I hate it so much that I take another step to prove I'm not afraid, which proves nothing, and my body enjoys it far more than it should.

"Light a candle," I say. "I don't rob men I can't see."

"Most thieves prefer the dark."

"Most thieves aren't me."

Fingers snap. Every candle on the table lights at once. No flint, no match, just a soft cough of flame at every wick.

There's a high-backed chair in the corner, velvet, the colour of the last inch in a wine glass, and there's a man in it.

Black hair, too long, pushed back, with one streak of dark red from the temple. A wine-velvet jacket over a white shirt, open at the throat. Long legs, bare feet.

A face of about thirty-eight that has had a great deal longer than that to decide what it thinks of people.

And horns. Two of them, black and curved, sweeping back from his hairline, polished as a good boot. Candlelight runs along them and gathers at the tips.

"Good evening, Miss Marsh," says Aurek Emberlyn, the dragon of Vell.

He knows my name. Fine. Plenty of people know my name. Most of them are owed money.

"I thought you'd be bigger," I say.

"I am. Occasionally."

He starts to get up.

"Don't," I say. "Stay where I can see you." He stops halfway, one hand on the arm of the chair. Then he sits back down. Slowly. As if I'd asked for something perfectly reasonable.

Huh.

"You know my name," I say. "What else?"

"That you've robbed me nine times this year." He says it like a clerk reading a ledger.

"Name one."

"My pawnshop by the tannery. My salt barge. A strongbox, which was badly made; I've had words with the smith. A silver pen from my inkstand while the doorman was looking at your ankle."

I open my mouth. I shut it.

Nine jobs, nine names on nine deeds. The best year of my working life. I've bragged about that year in taverns. I've been bragging about him.

"You let me."

"I watched you."

It isn't said as a threat. That's the trouble. It goes down my spine and settles there, warm.

"So you're the idiot," I say, "who runs a pawnshop with a skylight."

"I'm the idiot who stopped latching it."

"So," I say, because one of us has to be a professional. "The coin."

He gets up. This time I let him. He's taller than the chair made him look, and the heat comes with him. He lifts the coin off the velvet and holds it out to me on his open palm.

So that's the trick. If I want it, I take it out of his hand.

I've had purses off bishops. I've had a ring off a magistrate's finger while he was shaking my hand. I reach out now and my hand isn't steady, and he sees, and does me the courtesy of looking at my face instead.

My fingertips touch his palm.

It's hot. Too hot to hold, much too good to let go of. I don't let go. One second. Two. I'm standing in a dragon's tower with my fingers in his hand, and he doesn't close it, and I don't take the coin.

He's holding still. Not calm. Still, a muscle going in his jaw, his fingers spread wide and kept there, open on purpose, by force.

"How long have you been sitting in the dark?" I ask.

"Since dusk."

"And before that?"

His eyes don't leave mine. "Since spring."

"That's a long time to sit in a chair."

"Not for me." A pause. "It felt long."

It's very hard to rob a man who keeps looking at you like you're the thing worth stealing.

I take the coin.

It lands in my hand face down, heavier than a crown. I don't turn it over. A thief who admires the goods in the shop gets to admire the inside of a cell.

Below the window, oars. A lantern swings up the face of the tower, yellow and searching. The Hunters' Guild has held a charter to kill the last dragon in Vell for ninety years, and my climbing line is hanging off his gutter in plain sight.

"My rope's on your gutter," I say, and I'm halfway to the window before I've decided to move.

"Stand still," he says, not moving. "The man with the lantern is afraid of heights. He never looks above the third floor."

The light climbs. First floor. Second. Third. It stops there, wavers, and drops back to the water. The oars go on.

"How long have you known that?"

"Since he joined. He's afraid of ladders too. It's a hard life for him."

I laugh. I don't mean to, and it comes out loud in a dragon's hoard, and he looks at me as if I've done something rare.

That's when I see it, while he's still looking. Below his jaw, where the shirt's open, the skin isn't skin. It's scales, each one smaller than a fingernail. As I watch, they warm, from black to the low red of a coal someone has breathed on.

I don't say a word. I look at it the way I'd look at a lock I mean to come back for, and I put it away.

"What is it?" I ask. I mean the coin. Mostly.

"Take it," he says. "Come back when you want to know what it is."

At the sill I stop. "Thank you for the bracket," I say, before I can think better of it.

"Thank you for the reach," he says. "I'd have liked to see it."

I look back. He's in the chair again, one hand on the arm, the candles between us, and his throat is still glowing.

"Your window," I say. "You could lock it."

"I could."

"Someone worse than me might come in."

"There isn't anyone worse than you, Miss Marsh," he says. "That's why I leave it open."

I'm halfway down the gutter, on his brass bracket, before I work out whether that was an insult.

The coin is warm all the way home. Up the stairs to my room above the ropewalk, where I sit on the bed in my boots with it in my fist and don't look at it.

You deliver what you were paid to deliver. That's the whole trade.

I lie down. It stays warm. I put it under my pillow, and the pillow warms, and then my cheek, and then I'm lying in the dark thinking about the inside of his palm. How he didn't close it.

How much a man has to want something to stand that still.

Nobody has ever wanted anything from me that badly.

I don't sleep. I think about the velvet chair, and the horns, and my hands on them, and whether his throat would glow brighter with my mouth on it.

At dawn I walk to my client's rooms above the chandler's with the coin burning a small round hole in my coat.

He's waiting, as if he never went to bed either. Grey gloves, indoors. Grey eyes. A desk, a good lamp, nothing else.

I put the coin on the desk, face down. He doesn't touch it.

"Did anyone see you?"

"Nobody ever sees me," I say, walking a penny across my knuckles. It's the easiest lie I've told all year.

"Not even the owner?"

"Especially not the owner."

"There's a further hundred crowns," he says, "if you'll draw me the way in. I collect methods as well as objects, Miss Marsh. I'd like to frame it."

"It's a gutter," I say. "You'll want a very small frame."

"Humour me."

Three hundred crowns. Two winters' rent. And I've just robbed a dragon, and I would very much like it framed.

So I draw it on the back of his bill of sale. The river face. The gutter. The brass bracket, with a little arrow. The window, open. I sign it with a flourish, and he blots it as if it's precious.

Then he picks up the coin in his grey fingers, and frowns.

"It's warm," he says.

"So would you be," I say. "It spent the night with me."

The coin's been warm all night. When my client turns it over, it has my face on it.