Reiner came back grinning, which was rarely a good sign, towing a young man behind him by the shoulder like a prize he was still deciding whether to be proud of.
"Look who I found wandering the fourth floor, of all places, like he didn't know better than to show his face there." Reiner steered the newcomer into the seat across from them and dropped down beside him, delighted with himself. "This is the Hummingbird."
The young man in question had flaxen hair combed forward in a way that was clearly meant to look careless and clearly wasn't, and an expression that settled somewhere between a smile and a smirk without ever fully committing to either. He inclined his head with the exaggerated formality of someone who enjoyed being introduced. "The empire's finest intelligence gatherer," he said, before anyone else had the chance to, and puffed his chest out slightly, entirely without embarrassment.
"Self-appointed title," Ilsa said, not unkindly.
"Earned title." The Hummingbird's smile widened. "I simply choose to appoint myself before anyone else gets around to it. Saves time."
"Charming," Dorian said, and meant it about half as much as his tone suggested.
"He's the best in the business," Reiner said, still grinning, clapping the Hummingbird once on the shoulder hard enough to make him wince slightly around the smile. "Knows things before the people the things are about know them. Absolute menace. I love him."
"You love my information," the Hummingbird corrected. "There's a difference."
"Same thing, in my experience." Reiner turned to the two across from him, some of the drink from earlier still loosening his tongue. "Speaking of information — did anything come of yesterday's meeting? About the child. Any movement at all?"
The Hummingbird's easy smile flickered, just slightly, his eyes darting between the three of them with the particular alertness of a man realizing, a beat too late, that he'd wandered into a conversation he hadn't been invited to. "Sorry — am I meant to be hearing this?"
"Relax." Reiner waved a hand, entirely unbothered, and pulled the Hummingbird back down by the sleeve when he made a small motion to rise. "Sit. It's not a secret, it's just family business nobody bothers repeating at every dinner party. Twenty-some years back the family had a child stolen. Newborn, right out of the birthing room, gone before anyone even had the chance to properly hold him. They've been looking ever since." He said it plainly, without much weight behind it, the way you'd explain an old scandal that had gone stale enough from repetition to lose most of its sting. "Every few months someone gets a lead, everyone gets excited, and then it comes to nothing. Yesterday was another one of those nothing days, if I'm reading these two's faces correctly."
"Nothing again," Dorian confirmed, and something briefly tightened around his mouth before he smoothed it back into the easy composure he wore for company.
The Hummingbird's expression had shifted entirely by now, the sleaze giving way to something sharper, more calculating, the professional interest of a man whose actual trade had just wandered directly into his lap over drinks. "How old would he be now, if he's alive at all?"
"Fifteen," Ilsa said. "Give or take a season either way. Nobody's entirely certain of the exact date, given how it happened."
The Hummingbird went quiet for a moment, turning that number over behind his eyes with visible interest, and Reiner, catching the shift, laughed and knocked his knuckles lightly against the younger man's arm. "There it is. I can see the little wheels turning already. Don't go promising anything you can't deliver, now. This family's heard that particular promise more times than I've heard you talk about your fees."
"I never promise," the Hummingbird said, recovering some of his earlier polish, though the sharpness didn't entirely leave his eyes. "I simply mention, very casually, that fifteen years isn't nearly as long a trail to lose as everyone seems to think it is. If the boy's alive, and if he's still anywhere within the empire's borders, there are perhaps a dozen ways a person like that leaves a mark on a city without meaning to." He spread his hands, modest in the specific, insincere way of a man who didn't believe a word of his own modesty. "I'm merely very good at noticing marks other people walk past."
"He really is," Reiner said, to Dorian and Ilsa both, with the pride of a man introducing a favourite dog's trick. "Terrifyingly good. Don't ever play cards against him."
"I don't play cards against anyone who counts my drinks before I've finished them," Dorian said, and the Hummingbird laughed at that, properly this time, some of the performance dropping away from it for just a moment.
"Fair," he said. "Though for the record, you were three drinks in before I even sat down. I didn't need to count anything."
Ilsa watched the exchange with the faint, considering look of someone filing away exactly how useful a man like this might turn out to be, long after the lightness of the conversation had moved on to something else entirely.
The Hummingbird rose a little while later, unhurried, brushing something invisible from his sleeve with the same theatrical care he did most things, and for a moment it looked as though he'd simply excuse himself the way people excused themselves from rooms like this one, a nod, a farewell, nothing more. Instead he paused, halfway to standing, and looked back at the two of them with an expression that had, for once, no performance left in it at all.
"Fifteen years is nothing," he said. "I've found men who'd been missing for forty, hiding under names they'd worn so long they'd half forgotten their own. Fifteen is barely a warm trail. If your boy is out there, breathing, walking around some corner of this city right now without knowing what he's worth to the people looking for him — I'll find the thread. Give me a season. Maybe less."
Nobody said anything for a moment after that. Reiner's easy grin had gone still on his face, caught between his usual pride in the man and something more serious creeping in underneath it. Dorian's hand had stopped halfway to his glass. Ilsa simply stared, something behind her eyes working too fast to settle into any one expression at all.
The Hummingbird straightened his coat, offered a small, almost apologetic smile at the silence he'd left behind him, and walked off toward the stairs without waiting to see what any of them did with what he'd just handed them, leaving the three of them sitting in the low red light, quiet, each of them turning the same handful of words over and over as though checking, again and again, that they'd actually heard them right the first time.