Abigail beams at him. "Gideon the Ninth! How wonderful. So she speaks after all? Well, Magnus will be delighted – and I'll have lost another bet, but then, I often do."

She places her teacup back down, and looks about the room. "Yes," she says, "curious, isn't it? I'm extremely disappointed in myself for never following along this particular line of inquiry." She doesn't sound disappointed; she sounds like an honors student who has just been told there's a whole wing to the library they had never noticed before.

"And the food is excellent – I didn't think it was possible to grow the Darjeeling variant of camellia sinensis anymore."