“I don’t see how it could be, these are common folks’ kin who are going missing.”

Eslingen lowered his voice, despite the closed door. “The queen is childless, and the Starsmith is about to change signs. There is talk–” He wasn’t about to admit it was Cijntien’s idea. “–that that might be the cause.”

Devynck winced, looked herself toward the closed door. “That’s dangerous talk, from the likes of us, and I’ll thank you to keep it to yourself.” Eslingen said nothing, waiting, and the woman shook her head decisively. “No, I can’t think it. If the queen were at fault–well, there would have been some sign of it, surely, some warning, and she wouldn’t have ignored it. Besides, the gossip is, she’s barren. She couldn’t be blamed for that.”

Eslingen nodded. He was less convinced by the benevolence of the powerful–though Devynck was a skeptic by nature, certainly–but he acknowledged the wisdom of her advice. This wasn’t speculation to be voiced openly, at least not now.

“In any case,” Devynck went on, “I want to make sure we don’t have any trouble here for a while. I’ll tell Hulet and Loret, too, of course, but I’d like you to keep a special eye on the soldiers, especially any newcomers. If they haven’t heard what’s going on, they may do something stupid.”

“Like I did?”

Devynck smiled. “Not everyone has your–tact, Philip.”

Eslingen laughed. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”

“It’s what I pay you for,” Devynck said, without heat, and Eslingen made his way back into the main room.

The broadsheets he had bought that morning still lay on the table by the garden window, and he collected them, shuffling them back into a tidy pile. The one on top caught his eye. It was a petty thing, one of the two‑for‑a‑demming sort, offering predictions for the next week according to the signs of one’s birth. He had been born under the signs of the Horse and the Horsemaster, and the woodcut that covered half the page–the most professional thing about the sheet, he acknowledged silently–showed a horse and rider, and the rider held a gambler’s wheel, balancing it like a top in the palm of his outstretched hand. The fortune lay crooked across the page beneath it: chance meetings are just chance and chancy, bring chances, take chances. chance would be a fine thing! Eslingen allowed himself a smile at that, wondering if his encounter with the pointsman, Rathe, was covered in that prediction, then headed for the garden stairs and his own room.

Rathe took the long way back toward Point of Hopes, through the Factors’ Walk, with its maze of warehouses and shops and sunken roads and sudden, unexpected inlets where the smaller, river‑bound lighters could tie up and discharge their cargoes in relative privacy. He was known here, too, was aware of people slipping out of sight, staying to the edges of his vision, but they weren’t his business today, and he contented himself with the occasional smile and pointed greeting. Some of the factors dealt in human cargo–there would always be that trade, no matter what the law said or how many points were scored– but they had been the first to be searched and questioned, from the first report of missing children, and all their efforts, both from Point of Hopes and Point of Sighs, had turned up nothing more than the usual crop of semiwilling recruits. A few of the more notorious figures, the ones who’d overstepped the bounds of tolerance bought with generous fees, were spending their days in the cells at Point of Sighs, but Rathe doubted the points would be upheld at the next court session.

“Rathe!”

He looked up at the shout to see a tall woman leaning over the edge of one of the walkways that connected the warehouses at the second floor. He recognized her instantly: Marchari Kalvy, who made her living providing select bedmates for half the seigneury in the Western Reach, and owned a dozen houses in Point of Hearts as well. He admired her business sense–how could he not, when she’d had the sense to provide not just bodies but the residences where a noble could keep her, or his, leman in comfort, taking their money at all stages of the relationship–but couldn’t like her, wished he’d had the sense to pretend not to hear.

“Rathe, I want to talk to you.” Kalvy bunched her skirts and scrambled easily down the narrow stairs that led to the wooden walkway that ran along the first‑floor windows of Faraut’s ropewalk. “Will you come up?”

She was more than capable, Rathe knew, of coming down, and making a scene of it, if it suited her. “All right,” he said, and found the nearest stair leading up again.

The smell of hemp was strong on the walkway, drifting out the open windows of the ropewalk, and he could hear the breathless drone of a worksong, and the shuffle of feet on the wooden floor. There was a smell of tar as well, probably from the floor below, and he wrinkled his nose at its sharpness. Kalvy watched his approach, hands on her hips.

“So what is it you want?” Rathe asked.

“Do you want to discuss it in the street?” Kalvy returned.

“It was you who wanted to talk to me,” Rathe said. “I’ve business to attend to. It’s here, or come in to the station.”

“Suit yourself, pointsman.” Kalvy leaned against the rail, looking down onto the cobbles a dozen feet below. “It’s about Wels.”

“I assumed.” Wels Mesry was Kalvy’s acknowledged partner and the father of at least two of her children–though not, malicious rumor whispered, of the daughter who bade fair to get the family business in the end. Mesry had been arrested for pandering to a landame from the forest lands north of Cazaril. The boy in question, a fifteen‑year‑old from Point of Hopes, had claimed he was being held against his will, though Rathe personally suspected that he’d exaggerated the degree of force Mesry had used while his mother was listening.

“You know the point won’t hold,” Kalvy said. “The boy wasn’t half as unwilling as he claims–hells, how could he be, gets the chance to live in luxury for a moon‑month, maybe two, and it’s not like she was that unattractive.”

“Old enough to be his mother,” Rathe muttered.

“Sister, maybe.” Kalvy shook her head. “I tell you, Rathe, the brat was glad of the chance, losing his virginity that way.”

“She paid extra for that?” Rathe asked, and shook his head in turn. He would have liked to claim a point on the landame as well, but Monteia had flatly refused to countenance it, saying it was a waste of time and effort. She was probably right, too, but it didn’t make it any better.

Kalvy glared at him. “The landame’s childless, poor woman, that hits high as well as low. The boy had the right stars to be fertile with her, and he was well paid.”

“Practically a public service,” Rathe said, and Kalvy nodded, ignoring the irony.

“Just so.”

Rathe shook his head. “I won’t release him til the hearing–and neither will Monteia, so you needn’t bother walking all the way to the station. Think of it this way, Kalvy, I’m doing you a favor, keeping him in. This way, he can’t be blamed for any of the other kids who’ve gone missing.”

“That’s not my trade, and you know it,” Kalvy said. “You can’t blame that on me.”

In spite of herself, her voice had risen slightly. Rathe glanced at her, wondering if it meant anything, but decided with regret it was probably just the general climate. Anyone would be nervous, these days, at the thought of being linked to the missing children. “See you keep out of it, then,” he said aloud, and pushed himself away from the rail. He thought for a moment that she was going to follow him, or call after him, but she stayed where she was, still staring down at the cobbles. He went down the far stairs, past the ropewalk’s lowest doors where the smell of tar was strongest, mixing with the damp of the river.

The Factors’ Walk ended in the crowds and noise of the Rivermarket, where the merchants’ carts and pitches had spilled out onto the gentle slope of the old ferry landing. There was no ferry anymore–no need for it, since the Hopes‑point Bridge had been built fifty years before, in the twenty‑fifth year of the previous queen’s reign–but a number of the merchants brought their goods in by boat, and the brightly painted hulls were drawn up on the smooth damp stones at the bottom of the landing, watched by apprentices and dogs. Rathe skirted the edge of the market, watching with half an eye for anything out of the ordinary, but saw and heard only the usual cheerful chaos. Except, he realized, as he reached the top of the low slope, there were fewer children than usual in sight. There were a couple by the boats, a third buying vegetables at one of the cheaper stalls, and a fourth, a slight boy in patched shirt and breeches, stood talking to a man in a black magist’s robe. The magist wore neither hood nor badge, unusually, but then a man with a handcart trundled by, blocking Rathe’s view. When he had passed, the magist was gone, and the boy was running back down the slope to the river, wooden clogs loud on the stones. Rathe shook his head, wishing there were something he could do, and lengthened his stride. It was past time he was getting back to the station.