They found him in the garden, two hours before dawn.
Reinhardt Frost had not stayed to watch his hired men die.
That was the clever thing about him.
He had walked out through the front doors the moment the first scream went up, and he was a good half mile from the house, striding down the long birch avenue with a valet and two saddle horses, when the Concord's elders found him.
Faust learned this later.
What he saw himself was the aftermath: the cold, grey dawn, the three furred elders arrayed on the gravel with their retainers, and Reinhardt standing before them in his midnight blue, hands open, smile in place, the picture of grieved innocence.
"I do not understand the accusation," he was saying. "I arrived to mourn. I have been mourning for nine days. I am as shocked as any of you at these dreadful events."
"You were seen leaving the house at the first alarm," said Ottilie Brandt.
"I went for help."
"You went for horses."
"A man may do both."
"A man may." Brandt's face did not move. "But a man who went for help would not have a rapier whose soul has been excised."
The garden went silent.
Faust, who had been standing at the edge of the gravel with Isfrid and the Herzog, felt something cold slide down his spine. The Warden had spoken casually, and every word of it was weight. She lifted a gloved hand, and one of the elders stepped forward with a shallow brass dish in which something black and writhing lay, like a moth in a puddle of oil.
"We took it from your saddlebag, young Frost," said Ottilie Brandt, "while you were so busy denying us."
Reinhardt looked at the dish.
For the first time, the smile slipped. It merely thinned, like a skin over milk, and beneath it Faust saw, plain and sharp as a knife, as if he had calculated every move except the last.
Faust let his gold eye drift across the gravel, and saw what the others could not. The valet had stopped breathing. One of the elders, the youngest, had shifted his weight toward the nearest horse, a tiny motion. And Reinhardt himself, behind the thinning smile, had gone completely still, the way a hare goes still when the hawk's shadow crosses the grass.
'He has a door,' Faust thought. 'Nobody walks into a trap this carefully without leaving himself a door.'
"Isfrid," he murmured, not moving his lips. "Be ready."
"For what?"
"For whatever a clever man does when he has run out of cleverness."
Isfrid's hand drifted to the dragon head on his cane. Beside him the Herzog, who did not know what was coming but knew a drawn bowstring when he saw one, shifted his own grip on his sabre.
"I could explain," Reinhardt said again, and this time there was something almost like regret in it. He glanced at the Warden, at the elders, at the pale dawn creeping over the birches, and let out a long breath. "But I find, on reflection, that I would much rather be somewhere else."
"You will be taken to the Concord's tribunal," Ottilie Brandt repeated, and four of her retainers stepped forward with iron manacles.
"I rather think not," said Reinhardt, and snapped his fingers.
"You will explain it to the Concord's tribunal."
"I rather think not," said Reinhardt, and snapped his fingers. "I'll take on accolade no matter what, and then you will not stop me."
Far behind them, the old watchtower of the estate burst into flame.