The note was on the sill before the sun had cleared the rooftops, which meant Silas had been up on the inn's roof again in the dark, and Alistair had not heard a single thing.
He read it twice, then once more.
Channel's compromised, so use chalk on the third stair from now on. Mark it when you've read it, and leave it clean when you haven't.
That was the whole of it, with no greeting and no joke and no name signed at the bottom, which, coming from Silas, was worse than finding a knife pushed under the door.
Silas only stopped being funny when he had grown certain of something, and the things he grew certain about were never the kind of things a man wanted to hear about.
Alistair touched the corner of the paper to the candle and watched it curl up and blacken.
The Sealed Step's third floor smelled of beeswax and old timber, so the thin thread of smoke from one burned note simply folded into all of that and vanished.
He had picked the inn for that reason.
