It took a long time because the old man could not stop crying and lamenting his unfair fate, but at last Unver had the story from him, word by ugly, weeping word.

When he had finally finished, the old man lay on his back like a whipped dog. There were thin cuts on his cheeks and his hands, but no mortal wounds. “I have told you all I know,” he sobbed. “Please, son, do not kill me. Take Deofol and go. See, I did not sell him! I knew that if you returned, you would want him. He is in the paddock.”

The younger man frowned. “For the last time, do not call me son. I am no son of yours.” He snorted and stood up. “Kill you? I have killed two men today. Why should I waste my blade on a sniveling creature like you? For my stepmother’s sake, I will let you live, so that you may remember your shame. I hope it burns you, old man.”

“Oh, may the Sky Piercer bless you!” the old man said, and would have said more, but he was silenced by a kick in the ribs.

“But before I go, I wish to see your fine new wagon that you bought with my hard work—with my horses, that would have been Kulva’s bride price.” He bent and took a burning brand from the fire, then walked the length of the wagon, examining the cunning fittings of leather and metal and painted wood. Then he went up the steps and stepped inside.

“Seven horses this cost you?” he called. “Truly?”

Zhakar was on his hands and knees now, trying to get to his feet, puffing and gasping from the ache in his chest. “It is a fine wagon!” he bawled. “Odrig gave me an excellent price!”

Unver appeared in the doorway. “I think he cheated you.” He came down the steps and dropped the brand back into the firepit.

“Cheated?” The old man was still struggling, but at last he managed to rise. Thin streams of blood had run down his cheeks and into his beard, giving him the look of a painted clan shaman. “It is a fine wagon! Odrig’s second best! How can you say I was cheated? What is wrong with it?”

“For one thing,” Unver said with a hard smile, “someone seems to have set it on fire.”

As Unver walked away toward the paddock the old man screeched helplessly at the evening sky, calling for help. Flames were just beginning to lick at the windows and their carefully painted trim.

By the time Unver saddled his horse and rode away, the wagon had become a ball of bright fire, visible from a great distance away, like a nighttime sun.

She went out the southern door of the Sancellan Mahistrevis. It was the least used, but guarded as closely as all the others. Jesa nodded politely as the guards called to her, but she did not find their attention flattering, only confusing. Did they not know who she was? Did they think that the Duchess’s own nurse had time for flirting with soldiers, even if she wanted to? She was not even dressed to please, her hair pulled tight and wrapped in a head-scarf, her dress covered with an old cloak.

Most men are fools, she thought.

Time was pressing, so she made her way quickly through the farmer’s quarter of the old city to the spice market, and bought cinnamon, nutmeg, and Harcha pepper, paying with the silver coin her mistress had given her. As she went with her bag from merchant to merchant, Jesa kept a close watch for anyone following her but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The market was full of the usual morning buyers, many of them servants of great houses like herself—although none from any greater house, she thought with pride, since there was no house in Nabban above the Sancellan Mahistrevis, except perhaps the Sancellan Aedonitis, the palace of His Sacredness, the Lector.

When she felt confident that she was not being watched, she left the market and walked quickly down Harbor Way toward the docks, through the wide commons and into the Avenue of the Saints as most called it, since the great entrance arch bore statues of several important religious figures. She only knew Saint Pelippa, the one who had given the dying Usires a drink of water from her bowl, and although the saints of Nabban were not hers, Jesa respected Pelippa as a woman who, for once, had been given praise for doing a woman’s thankless job.

The Avenue of the Saints was a wide, winding road that led up from the quarter, curving around Estrenine Hill until it reached the large residences at the top, mostly owned by foreigners, rich merchants and rich nobles who liked to keep a place in the city—the greatest city in all the world, as Duke Saluceris liked to say. Jesa did not doubt it was true, at least in terms of size. Everywhere she went the roads were crowded, not just with folk going about their business, although there were plenty of those, but with others who never seemed to leave the streets at all; hawkers, layabouts, and even women who Jesa felt rather certain were the ones Canthia had told her about, those who had fallen so far from God (as the Duchess explained) that they had to sell their samuli, as Jesa’s people named them—their “delicate flowers”—for money.

And although today everything seemed ordinary enough, even in this wealthy neighborhood she saw signs of the troubles that had beset the city lately, the riots in which she herself had nearly died. Crude pictures of wide-winged birds and the motto, “SECUNDIS PRIMIS EDIS”—“the second shall be the first”—had been painted on the walls of several buildings, symbols of the Stormbirds, the men who supported the duke’s enemies, Dallo Ingadaris and the duke’s own brother, Drusis. At the poorer end of the street, near the public market, she could even see the ruins of several houses that had been set afire. She shivered as she passed one, the blackened spaces of its windows like ghostly eyes.

When she reached the middle of the hill she looked back once more to make sure she was not being followed, then turned and walked quickly through the gate and into the ill-tended courtyard of a tall house. At the back of the courtyard she knocked on a heavy wooden door. A servant opened the slot and asked her business. Jesa whispered Duchess Canthia’s name and was quickly admitted.

If the outside of the house had been disappointing for the dwelling of a man as rich as Viscount Matreu, the inside was not. Candles burned everywhere, and tapestries of many colors hung on the walls, some stitched with bright golden wire, but she had little time to admire them as she passed.

The servant silently led her upstairs to an antechamber furnished with thick, low couches and equally low tables and lit by several oil lamps. This room also was too thickly draped with fine tapestries to examine them all, but one in particular caught her attention. After the servant left, she walked closer to examine it.

Jesa had never seen anything quite like it. The design was of a male human figure wearing a crown, but the figure had the tail of a whalefish (or so she assumed, having seen such things only in pictures). The crowned man’s hands were spread wide over what looked like mountains, but much of his vast body seemed to be floating in the ocean, with tiny ships surrounding him on all sides. Surely this must be a picture of Usires the Aedon, Jesa thought, the great god of Nabban, although she had never seen him portrayed in such a way. The strangest thing about the hanging, though, was the material itself. It was not stitchery that made the picture, but rather tiny little shining plates glued one beside another, like the beautiful mosaics on some of the floors of the Sancellan Mahistrevis. None of the shiny bits was much larger than baby Serasina’s fingernails; as Jesa moved they caught the light and seemed to flicker and move, as if the crowned man with the tail was truly alive and watching her. This made her fearful, so she made the sign of the Tree, although it still felt strange and false to do it. Still, in a foreign land there were foreign gods and demons that needed to be appeased, and Jesa was a practical young woman.