Chapter 2: Worth Arguing With

"If the documentation exists in the form you're describing," she said, "why not invoke Counter-Claim centuries ago?"

"Counter-Claim requires a House liaison to accompany the filing." He picked up his glass again. The corner of his expression changed — not warmer, but dryer, more precise. "For the first two hundred years, every collector the House sent ran when I explained the situation. Easier to log me as evasive than to report an account that might be unrecoverable. Bad for collection numbers."

"That's not documented behavior."

"It wouldn't be documented. That's the point." He set the glass down. "The House stopped sending collectors for roughly a century after that. Presumably other accounts required attention. When they started again, the new ones skipped the conversation and went straight to compulsion techniques. I'm old enough that most of those don't take. One tried an entrapment binding."

"That's not authorized House methodology."

"No. It isn't." The dry thing at the corner of his expression sharpened briefly. "I still have it. It's decorative."

She held his gaze. "And me."

"And you," he agreed. "You came in and sat down and opened with the debt summary. You didn't lead with compulsion. You didn't run when I disputed." He looked at her steadily. "Open the case."

She did.

The documents were old in the way that things kept by someone with centuries of patience were old — handled carefully, preserved correctly, still legible. She recognized the contract format immediately: sixteenth-century Unseelie standard, the ink dark on age-browned paper. The deed. The sworn title statement in what she took to be Ossian Mael's hand. The land registry pages, two sets, dated six years apart, with the competing claim on the parcel notated clearly in the older set.

She turned to the witness affidavits last.

Two names. She didn't recognize them individually, but she recognized the family markers — the lineage notation in the signature block, the way Unseelie documents of that period required witnesses to name their bloodline. She knew what to look for. She looked for it.

Ossian's first cousins. Both of them.

She closed the case.

Caedron was watching her with the patience of something that had been waiting for a specific moment across a very long time.

"The documentation requires verification by a Court archivist," she said. "I can't accept it as dispositive on my own authority."

"I know."

"Verification requires formal Counter-Claim filing."

"I know."

"Counter-Claim suspends all collection action for thirty days from filing."

"I know that too." He leaned back in his chair — like something very large choosing to settle without any suggestion of threat. "I'm not filing to delay. I'm filing to close this. I've been carrying these documents for four hundred years on the chance someone showed up worth arguing with." He looked at her directly. "Come to the Ashen Hold with me. Invoke the filing there — proper jurisdiction, the debt originated in the old territories. Serve as House liaison within your authority, which covers exactly this. If the Court arbiter finds for the House, I'll pay the full balance and I won't contest your collection methods. If the arbiter finds for me, the debt is void and the House reclaims against Ossian's estate." A pause. "I'll cover all travel costs. You can treat it as a supervised filing."

"And if I decline?"

"You go back to the House and log me as evasive. I go back to being very difficult to locate." He said it without heat, without threat — the same flat recitation of available facts he'd used on the debt balance. "In another century someone else has this conversation with me. But I'd rather not spend another century on it, and I don't think you want to spend three more weeks finding me again."

She considered him across the table. The ember hadn't shifted in his eyes — still amber, still even, with the patience in them that she'd clocked when she first sat down and had not stopped clocking since. She thought about what it meant to carry documentation for four centuries. She thought about the internal consistency of the fraud argument and the three nights it had kept her awake.

She thought about the fact that he'd ordered her a drink before she'd told him who she was, which meant he'd known she was coming, which meant he'd let himself be found.

She picked up the leather case. He didn't move.

"I'll review the documentation tonight," she said. "You'll have an answer in the morning."

"I'll be here."

She looked at him with a moderate amount of skepticism.

"I'll be here," he said again, and she believed him, which was the strangest thing that had happened all evening, because she'd spent three weeks finding a man who didn't want to be found and had just decided he'd been waiting for her to arrive.

She stood. The drink she hadn't touched sat where the bar staff had left it. She left it there.

"How did you know I'd read the file the way you'd read it?" she asked.

He looked up at her. The amber in his eyes caught the bar light and held it.

"You sat down," he said. "You led with the summary instead of compulsion. Someone who thought the case was simple would have started with the binding." He opened his book. "Someone who thought the fraud angle was interesting would do exactly what you did."

She didn't have anything to add to that. She picked up the documentation case and walked to the stairs. She was three steps up when she stopped — not a decision, just stopped — her hand flat against the cold stone of the stairwell wall, the bar noise rising around her, and behind all of it the quiet sound of him turning a page.