So I am writing, after all, to thank you.

The writer had filled up the book. There was no more to be read. Karis closed it and sat with it held between her hands. The house grew silent, except for the rain. The candle burned low and dripped a long strand of yellow wax down the wall. Karis stood up finally, and went to lift a window sash, and open the shutters. Four wretched, sodden black birds flew in, quarreling with each other, and found perches on her chair. “That’s a new chair. Try to aim your crap on the floor,” she told them. “Poor Garland! Maybe I should scrub the floor before he sees it. But he’ll be up before me, humming to his bread dough.”

One of the ravens said, “He’ll forgive us.”

“Give us something to eat,” said another. “The starvation season has begun.”

She went into the dark kitchen and came back with the scrap bucket. “Garland has started saving food for you.”

The ravens set to emptying the bucket. They made quite a mess. Karis watched them, with the book out of danger in her hands. When they were finished and settled again on the chair to preen their feathers, one of them looked at her and said, “Well? What?”

“Tell your brothers in the Midlands to fly to Medric’s window. He’s awake, probably packing his books. I imagine he already knows what the raven will say to him, but say it anyway. Tell him to pack up the house and come to me, with Emil and Norina. Tell him we have work to do.”

Chapter Seventeen

In a ditch where water and mud were chilled by their anticipation of winter, the battered woman lay bleeding. The darkness had come all at once, and she had shut her eyes against it. The last light of the stumbling sun flickered out. Her outstretched hand lay limp, with the churned up ruts of the road beyond reach.

Now the wagon came, hauled through the mud by weary horses, driven by a man who had repeatedly been forced to get out and put a shoulder to the wagon to get its wheels unstuck. That they traveled on this wet day was his passenger’s fault: that detour east to Hannisport, those three days in the dockside fabric shops. Yet she berated him for the slow progress, the constant risk the rain posed her load of silks. Watfield was still hours away, and soon the driver would have to light the lamps. He could hear water running, but the ditches were already black, their contents obscure.

The horses shied sharply. The passenger cried, “Stop!”

A pregnant woman who had to relieve herself at every turn of the road ought not to travel at all, thought the driver. Now the wheels would sink in and it would take more horses than he had to get them loose again.

The woman had seen something, though: an open hand, the gray smear of a face. She picked her way fastidiously through the mud, and stood looking down at the woman who lay in mud and running water like another shadow. She looked again, to make certain that what she saw was there.

“What?” said the driver wearily.

“I’ve never seen the like,” said the pregnant woman. “A border woman, I think. She may be dead. But we can’t just leave her here.”

“I’ll light the lantern,” the driver said. “A border woman? There’s no tribes around here.”

With impatient displeasure, the woman observed the mud staining her shoe. The driver came over with a lantern. “Look how her eye is swelling up! Someone was angry with her, that’s certain.” He looked around himself, worried that the border woman’s attacker might still be lurking in the dark. There was nothing in the woods but trees, though.

“Look how bloody she is,” the pregnant woman said. “She must be dead.”

She had made it apparent that she would not touch the woman sprawled in the ditch. Sighing, the driver gave her the lantern, and knelt in the mud. Seeing no buttons, he tore open the front of the border woman’s blood‑soaked tunic. He spread the edges of the wound in her breast, and said sharply, “Don’t look if you’re squeamish. But hold the lantern steady. No, she’s not hurt to death that I can see. Just fainted, probably.”

The pregnant woman said, exasperated, “We’ll have totake her to the next farmhouse. And she’s all mud! She’ll wreck the silk!”

They got her into the wagon, wrapped in a blanket to prevent her from staining anything. The horses smelled blood and tried to hurry away, but the smell followed them. The driver peered anxiously into shadows. The passenger kept a sharp eye out for the lights of a farmstead, but perhaps the winter shutters were already closed everywhere, for the darkness was unrelieved even by stars. She finally said in frustration, “We’ll take her to Watfield, then. My wife will know what to do with her.” Then she sat glumly tapping her foot, wishing she had not noticed that hand reaching toward her out of the darkness. Or that she had looked away.

Chapter Eighteen

The note, written in Shaftalese, remained obscure even after Gilly read it out loud to Clement: “Please visit as quickly as you can. You will not regret it.” The note was signed, not by Alrin, but by Marga.

“You look flabbergasted,” Gilly said, clearly enjoying the sight.

“Come to Alrin’s house with me,” said Clement.

“What for? It’s raining!”

“It’s dinnertime, isn’t it? Or teatime?” Clement raised her eyebrows at him.

“Of course I’ll go with you,” he said hastily.

She sent an aide to put together an escort and sent another with an explanatory message to Cadmar. That day they had gotten more bad news about a nasty attack on tax‑collecting soldiers in the east–some ten from the same garrison, all hunted down and slaughtered, one by one. Now Cadmar was working off a bad temper in the training ring, which was fortunate. Given his foul mood, he almost certainly would forbid both of them to go anywhere.

But the people of Watfield had finally gotten distracted from their pot‑banging by the urgency of autumn work, and Clement’s instincts told her it was reasonably safe for her to go out on the streets. “You just want me along to keep you out of that woman’s bed,” grumbled Gilly.

“I do feel like I’d do almost anything for clean sheets,” Clement replied.

Getting Gilly onto his horse was a painful process, but he looked around himself with lively curiosity as, surrounded by soldiers, they rode out the gate and into the city. “What are all these people doing in town? It’s pouring rain!”

Even as he spoke, the sky opened up with a deluge, and so did hundreds of umbrellas: strange, heavy contraptions of wooden spines and waxed leather that spooked the horses. The farmers that crammed the main road were so intent on business that they hardly looked twice at the company of soldiers pushing through the crowd. Parcel‑laden adolescents followed their elders dutifully in and out of shops, and frequently paused to look around for familiar faces and to loudly greet the friends they were able to spot on the far end of the street, or even across the square.

Gilly pulled the hood of his oilskin cape over his head, muttering, “An umbrella would be a fine thing.”

“Your horse would have a fit,” said Clement.

“Not this horse.”

The short journey was lengthened by the crowds, and Clement’s trousers were soaked through by the time they reached the quiet side street, and the respectable townhouse where summer flowers still bravely bloomed at either side of the front steps. The curtains all were drawn, but Clement saw light glimmer in the parlor window, and it was only a moment’s wait for Marga to open the door. She looked beyond Gilly and Clement at the soldiers and horses standing miserably in the road. “You can bring them into the kitchen to dry out and have a bit of cake,” she said.

Clement called an order to the sergeant, who did not conceal his pleasure. She said to Marga as she and Gilly stepped in the door, “This is Gilly, the general’s secretary. Why have you asked me here?”