The other man, tall and lean and slender, with light brown hair that hung lank to his shoulders, paused in the middle of affixing a Phoenix brooch to his high collar. "I hadn't realized I was hiding."

"You know what I meant." The Dragonlord in the bed spoke in a voice tinged with exasperation. "When you come into the room, I notice. When you leave, I notice."

"Ah." The brooch in place over his new House colors--the pale gold suited him in a way that black and gray never had--the Phoenix strapped on his weaponbelt, heavy white darr-leather with two scabbards, one on either hip. The matched slender gold daggers seemed to tremble in their sheaths and absently he lay one long-fingered hand on a pommel. The room filled with a subaural crooning. "My birth-curse, you mean."

"No, I meant your tendency to lurk behind potted heaken trees--of course I meant your birth-curse." The man in the bed rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows, black hair falling in waves about his shoulders. "Can't you make them be quiet? Proper weapons know when to be quiet."

Obligingly the Phoenix lifted his hand from the pommel and the daggers fell silent and still. "They don't like you, you know."

"I know." The Dragonlord seemed pleased by this. "So the daggers broke your birth-curse? Or was it the Orb? I'd have liked to have seen that."

The Phoenix shivered, slightly. "It wasn't very pleasant. Do you know, I've never had so many people looking at me all at once? It felt heavy, like a stone." He stepped into his boots. "I'm told I screamed."

"You haven't answered my question."

"No, I haven't." Pleased, the fair-haired man bent to buckle his boots.

"... must I say please? You know I hate to say please. It leaves me with a foul taste in my mouth."

"Well, if you insist: the Orb was, I'm told, able to see past the birth-curse that hid me to recognize me for who I was, and then the daggers were brought to me and I was made to take them." The Phoenix straightened up and stared out the window at the lowering reddish sky. "And the daggers--as far as anyone can tell--were the ones who broke the curse."

Silence for a moment. Then the black-haired man on the bed laughed, a short sound. "So forthcoming! Whatever happened to that Jhereg reticence of yours?"

"Dead, with the Jhereg himself." The Phoenix abruptly locked gazes with the Dragonlord, and in the end it was the Dragonlord who looked away.

"And so your parents failed and you were revealed as a Phoenix despite all their blundering machinations. Terrible sorcerer, your father. Cursing you himself!" The black-haired man sat up. "So, I assume you'll be required to marry the ex-Empress now? Carry on the line?"

"That's the rumor."

"Oh, Verra, I hate rumors."