As if summoned by this turn toward intrigue, here is Bastien, clothes and hair rumpled but face focused. A rare unsmiling approach.

He does not crowd into the carriage. He braces his arm against the door to lean forward, not quite in, and gives Marcus a once-over, lingering on the bloody lip, that will have to stand in for asking how he is. The answer is obviously not great but also being seen to.

Tsenka warrants a glance. He'd prefer not to be doing this in front of anyone, but he's attuned enough to the various relationships around him to figure there's not much point going all cloak and dagger just to earn a five minute delay before Marcus tells her anyway.

"Rowntree," he says. "Can you rule out Fitcher?"

If he needs more context for that question, he will have to ask.

Bastien shifts a few inches to accommodate Julius' return, tips his head in acknowledgment of Tsenka's connection, and at Marcus' venomous no gives his shoulders a slant and his jaw an angle that convey hedging inconclusion.

"I am not ruling her in," definitively. They'd likely need more proof than the word of a self-interested man trying to explain his way out of an abduction. "Our new friend Arlyn says they received word from us that you were some kind of traitor. They believed they were doing this at our request. They'd had letters."

Her merry wit, her company at the theater. Her sharp eyes and aim. Her access to records. There is a feeling he is not allowing himself to feel. It's premature. It's unhelpful.

"Does SF mean anything to you? Is there anyone among your contacts or old company—" A less tidy explanation than the same person within Riftwatch, using the same methods as before, but he wants the stone turned. "—who might want you gone?"

Bastien stands back from the door to allow Marcus out, and Julius and Tsenka if they follow behind. He nods; hope evaporating. Which is good. Hope is stupid. This is why people in his erstwhile line of work don't have friends.

Now it's his attention that turns away. To Derrica and Seeker Hart, first, where they're discussing a plan he can't hear. To Flint beyond. (Where's Edgard? Worried, probably, wherever he is, and due to be wrecked when he finds out the man he killed thought he was helping them.) While he looks, he's thinking: who needs to know, who doesn't. The ways it might benefit them if it does not become common knowledge in the Gallows, just yet, that they had a chance to speak to any of Marcus' captors. Maybe not even that Marcus was found alive.

In the meantime, there's a silence that could be filled with someone's unspoken thoughts.

Julius' observation settles around his shoulders like a particularly weighty cloak. Tsenka's theory—it makes sense. Whether because of Marcus' politics or because of his particularly interested sniffing-around for the source of the leak they'd sprung. The pool of candidates who had been with Riftwatch long enough, who didn't have verifiable pro-mage sympathies, who had access and opportunity was already so small. Foolish joins the other unhelpful feelings he refuses to actually feel right now.

"She does," he agrees. "And it might be to our benefit if she does not know what has happened here yet."

Maybe. He doesn't know. But announcements can't be taken back, and he glances around at the three mages for who might or might not have brought a sending crystal.

"If you must contact Madame de Cedoux," to make concessions for love, "make sure she keeps it to herself for now. I have to go back," to Derrica and Tiffany, he indicates with a head tip, and he strides away without any of his standard polite and friendly nonsense.