Hey! Not deadfic! Emphatically NOT! I've never stopped working on this (actually, I seem to make the most progress when I put it down for a few days and come back with fresh eyes, but it's so gosh-darn hard to put it down. My New Year's resolution: don't worry so much if a paragraph isn't exactly right...I think my writing-to-editing ratio is something like 1 to 57...)

I want to finish the story completely before I start posting again, to avoid dragging it out in bits and pieces; I have a good chunk mostly written, with two chapters and an epilogue left to go. However, I have absolutely no idea how much longer those last dangly bits will take, so I'm not even going to try to estimate. I'm posting this chapter now because you've certainly waited long enough (more than long enough). So, in conclusion: a) not a deadfic!, b) enjoy a chapter update!, and c) unfortunately, another long wait is forecasted before you seen another chapter, but when it comes, there won't be any more long waits. Ever again. (for this fic)

Actually, would you guys rather I posted as chapters are wrapped up, or is it worth it to wait an unspecified length of time for the promise of a consistent update schedule? I know which I prefer as a reader, but I realize everyone's reading habits aren't the same. Let me know what you think!

When he came back inside after sweeping up the last of the trash, Elle was lifting a second pancake onto her plate and Neal had returned to his perch on the table. She looked up as he closed the door, smiling her radiant good-morning smile, "Welcome back, hon. Neal was just filling me in on the second test."

"Any ideas?" he asked, taking a seat at the table and forking a pancake onto his plate.

Neal shrugged, "Nothing so far...Though I have to say, I don't think the flute has much intrinsic value, only sentimental. Depending on how old it is, it might count as antiquary, but..." he tipped his head back and forth in a so-so gesture, "this is all speculative."

Peter hummed noncommittally; he'd barely finished buttering his first pancake when he was interrupted (again) by a sudden, urgent knocking at the door. Quick as a flash, Neal climbed up his arm and resumed his perch on Peter's shoulder, wobbling slightly as Peter pushed back from the table and stood up. As we went to answer it, he heard Neal mutter in his ear, "Soon again there came a tapping, somewhat louder than before."

"If you keep quoting 'The Raven' all day, I'm serving you deviled ham for lunch." He yanked the front door open, and a frantic oddball of paranoia swept into the room.

"Suit! Have you seen -oh! Hi, Neal! You had me worried sick." As if worried that he'd given some game away, he quickly backtracked, "That is...Suit, why do you have a bird on your shoulder? Fashion week is months away."

"How - how the heck did you know this is Neal?"

"Because it looks like him." Mozzie's tone made it sound obvious.

Neal took the opportunity to pipe in, "Why shouldn't he? You noticed right away."

"There was a precedent..." Peter trailed off; Mozzie looked intrigued. Unwilling to admit to kissing a dog, even if it was wife at the time (and was there ever going to be a way to make that thought sound less wrong in his head?), he hastened to add, "It's really not a logical leap to make."

"Ah! But logic is 'the art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. Ambrose Bierce." His hands never stopped moving as he talked.

Movement from the corner of his eye - Neal, scratching his beak with one foot as he responded wryly, "That, and I know for a fact you are wearing your ring that allows you to see through glamours."

"In your case, it's less of a glamour and more of a, shall we say, enchantment."

"I don't know, 'enchantment' might be too similar to 'magic'." In what would have been a conspiratorial aside if he'd been able to pitch his voice to a whisper, he added, "Peter is still having trouble with the m-word."

Mozzie seemed to give this due consideration before clapping his hands together, "I've got it! Transmogrification!" Peter opened his mouth to nip this stream of synonyms in the bud - he didn't have a problem with the m-word, he didn't! - but Mozzie startled, as though only just now realizing the most salient point - "And what do you mean, the Suit 'noticed right away'? What does he know? Neal, what did you tell him?"

"Raven's targeting Peter. I told him what he needs to know."

Mozzie took a deep breath and let it out very, very slowly. "Neal, I think you and I need have a little tête-à-tête, right now." He turned a murderous glare towards Peter, as if daring him to contradict, "Sans Suit."

Peter held up a hand to forestall him (and prevent Neal from walking down said arm to the couch). "One moment before I leave you two unsupervised to your no-doubt nefarious plotting. Magic ring?" he asked, pointedly.

Mozzie rolled his eyes and crossed his arms. "Of course magic rings exists; how else do you explain Atlantis? I know aliens are the popular theory, but you'll find that if you consider all the facts, it leaves some glaringly obvious holes."

"Moz, I'm a bird. I don't think that's what Peter meant."

Darn right that wasn't what he meant! "You knew he could 'see through glamours,' and you didn't think we could have used his help last night?"

"Worst-case scenario, Raven would consider it cheating. That..." Neal's toes abruptly dug sharply into his shoulder, before easing. "That would not be good." He walked pointedly down Peter's arm until Peter gave in and allowed him to return to the couch.

"I'm not going to pick you up again," he warned. "Find your own damn taxi." Fighting every instinct that told him not to leave those two alone, he turned and returned to his seat at the dining table. Fortunately, he had enough on his plate (literally and metaphorically) to keep him in his seat, valiantly resisting the urge to get up and check on them.

"Raven wants me to find his missing flute." He took another mouthful of pancake (the first time he'd raised his fork, he'd paused, wary, but no more interruptions were forthcoming), "I suspect it was taken; if it was only misplaced, he can damn well find it himself. Furthermore, it had to have been taken by someone who knows that Mason Verdanse is really Raven. There's just no motive otherwise - most of the value of the flute comes from belonging to him."

"Like thousand-dollar celebrity tissues." Elle nodded knowingly.

"A premeditated theft, or maybe someone with a grudge saw an opportunity. Maybe Raven was distracted by this whole Ezra Gray business," he took a bracing sip of coffee, heaven, "which may or may not be related. Probably not taken in a random mugging, because, again, how would they fence it, and I can't see any would-be muggers being successful, not against him. So someone who knows about...all this stuff. Folk? I think that's what Neal called them."

"The mot juste you're looking for, Suit, is 'Listeners'." Mozzie crept into the dining room, Neal riding on someone else's shoulder for once. "It's a more general term, and includes people in-the-know." He installed himself into an empty chair, pulled the now-empty serving plate over, and forked one of Peter's pancakes onto it for himself. ("Hey!")

"People who Listen to Folktales," Neal elucidated.

"Right." He turned to address Mozzie. "Then that makes you a Listener, and Neal Folk?"

"Loath as I am to be included in any category that also includes a Fed, that makes us Listeners. Though, I could be Folk - there's no definitive test, and a child of unknown parentage might have certain archetypal expectations in mythology. And Neal usually pretends to be only a Listener when moving in Folk circles."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because he's his father's son." Mozzie's eyes went wide at the admission, and he clamped both hands over his mouth. A very muffled, "Neal, I am so sorry. I did not mean to say that," could barely be discerned. He looked wildly from side to side, as though expecting to be attacked at any moment.

Neal's voice was as somber and subdued. "Men in our profession never say sorry. Are you feeling alright?"

"Only if 'inexplicably truthful' counts in your definition of alright, which it shouldn't, by the way!" Mozzie's voice rose in pitch and volume.

"Calm down. We'll figure this out," Neal soothed, even as his feathers ruffled in agitation.

Mozzie forcefully shoved his half-eaten pancake away. "What did you drug me with, Suit!?"

"Nothing! That was supposed to be my pancake! I didn't even offer you any!"

"Reverse psychology! You knew that if you'd offered me any, I would have known they were drugged!"

"Moz!" Neal rapped him on the hand with his beak. "The pancakes aren't drugged."

"How do you know?" Mozzie wailed, wringing his hands. "Did you have any?"

"Well, no, but...I'm feeling 'inexplicably truthful' as well, now that you mention it."

"I only speak Portuguese," Peter tried. "Nope, not feeling it."

"Today's not my birthday." Elle blinked. "Huh. That's not what I tried to say. Hon, I think they might be on to something."

Neal's head swiveled in his direction, "Peter you...you haven't made any wishes lately, have you? You know those never end well."

"No, I don't know, since I didn't realize monkeys' paws and genie bottles and..and...the 'first star I see tonight' were things I should be worried about!" Voice rising to a shout by the end, he tried to bring his temper back under control. It was just all still so new to him, and so strange, and stressful, and then Neal would go right ahead and say things like that, as though all this was stuff Peter should already just know. His paradigms were shifting, slowly, like tectonic plates, rearranging his world - with all the potential to set off a few earthquakes in the process.

"Don't pretend this isn't a dream-come-true for you!" Neal snapped back, eyes flashing.

"What, because I'm not allowed to get tired of your constant lying and evasions and - you know what? You've seen the consequences! You know what kind of trouble it causes! Why do you..." Peter bit off his sentence before he could complete his very loaded question. Neal's feathers were plastered tight against his body - cornered, afraid. This wasn't how he wanted to get his answers. Well, if he was being honest (there seemed to be a lot of that going around), this wasn't how he wanted to rebuild his trust in Neal, pulling truths from a distressed and unwilling participant. What he wanted, really wanted, was for Neal to offer up his honesty willingly. Disjointed bits of proverb floated through his head, and he found himself contemplating an immutable truth: if you lead a horse to water and teach him to fish, he'll be thirsty for the rest of his life. Which was complete nonsense, but he chased after it anyway, chasing some buried truth…

He was pulled to the present before he could follow that elusive train of thought to its conclusion by Elle's arm across his back, rubbing his far shoulder in comfort. He could feel his shoulders unwind one tense knot at a time, but he was having greater difficulty unclenching his fists, and there was a tic on his forehead that wasn't going away. Luckily, Elle was willing to mediate.

"So, we've established that everyone except Peter can only tell the truth, and that he isn't aware of making any wishes. Isn't that right, sweetie?" A few more deep breaths reined in the last stray threads of his temper. A sullen Neal fluffed himself back up and glared pointedly at Peter, not ready to let the argument go but unwilling to tangle with Elizabeth.

"It sounds like a 'Field of Veracity.'" Mozzie posited.

"Nobody actually calls it that, Moz."

"They would, if they wanted to correctly differentiate it from Grozel's Applied Honesty Well."

"And I'm sure only Grozel ever called it that," Neal countered. "What's a 'field of veracity?'"

"Those in close proximity to the subject cannot speak falsehoods, all lies are banished. I've only heard speculation about them before today."

"There are other truth spells, Moz. Boundary ones are much simpler, for instance.]," Neal argued. Peter took mental notes.

Mozzie shook his head. "It's proximity, I tell you. After all, you were able to lie in the front hallway just fine; it's only when we approached the Suit that we've run into this difficulty."

"I didn't lie much in the hallway!"

"Your quantifier betrays you, Neal." He stood up from the table, "I don't mean to be rude, Mrs. Suit, but if your husband has any type of truth-inducing spell on him, it is imperative that I depart posthaste." He extended his arm, "Come on, Neal."

Neal, looking very small and miserable, spoke just loud enough to be heard, "I'm staying."

Mozzie's double-take was not as surprised as it might once have been. He gave Neal a shrewd once-over. "Neal, are you absolutely certain you want to stay here?"

After only a single beat, Neal made his decision. "I want to stay." So saying, he walked across the table to stand at Peter's right. Peter felt heartened by the show of - was it faith? trust? some hitherto unseen sense of duty?

Mozzie gave him another long look, before nodding once, and then skedaddling out the door as fast as - or perhaps faster than - humanly possible.

Once Mozzie had left, bringing the cloud of tense anxiety with him, the morning returned once again to its typical routine at Casa Burke. Or some strange permutation thereof. Dishes and cutlery were cleared from the table, another pot of coffee was started, Neal managed to make his own way off the table, and, after an over-enthusiastic altercation with their resident bird, Satchmo was let out in back.

Those duties taken care of, everyone drifted back into the living room by unspoken agreement, resuming their places from the previous night. "So, was Mozzie telling the truth?"

"He was."

"You're not just pulling my leg?"

"Not pulling your leg."

"You've had to speak the truth in my presence all morning, and you didn't notice?"

"We don't know when it started," which was the truth, "And besides, I wanted to be honest with you."

Which...almost wasn't an answer. He could see the loopholes if he looked closely enough - Neal could have known before this moment, and still not know when it started. More importantly, Peter was quite familiar with how nebulous the connection could be between the desire to do something and the reality of actually doing it. Neal could want to tell the truth more than anything, without having any intention of actually doing so. And if Neal hadn't been aware of the spell before, he was certainly aware of it now, and could pick and choose his words with appropriate consideration...but he'd stayed.

Neal hadn't run away.

It was nice that Neal had decided to stay - really, really nice. And not just because Neal was not as allergic to honesty as he'd once feared. It was nice to have Neal with him, because he was in over his head and he needed his partner by his side if he had any hope of getting out of this mess. It was nice that Neal was more than a fair-weather friend (but he'd known that already); that come hell or high water, when it really mattered, he could count on Neal to do the right thing...even if it took until the eleventh hour to do so.

"What did you- " lie to Mozzie about, he swallowed the rest of his question. There was a bit of a moratorium on personal questions, at the moment, and he couldn't deal with another blow-up, not now.

Neal, no doubt guessing the unasked question, answered anyway, "I said that this didn't change anything."

Oh.

"Change...doesn't have to be a bad thing?" he offered.

Neal snorted, "Save your platitudes, Peter. There's work to be done."