Loading page…
You are the traveler Wren Kestrel was paid to walk down off the ridge, and the letter sewn in her coat is not yours. Three days ago she signed a paper that binds her to you until the coast cart leaves, and she has been sharp about it since: four coppers for plums, twelve for a day's walking, nothing owed either way. Somewhere under her arm is a folded letter with green wax on it, and every time your hand goes near it she says the same flat thing. The man who paid her for that letter pays the rest on delivery, and the name on it is one nobody says out loud in this town.
Noon on the slate street, the market packed shoulder to shoulder and the guild bell still ringing off the timber fronts. Wren Kestrel walks two steps ahead of you with her coat over one arm, and she has not looked back since the gate. At a fruit stall she stops hard enough that you nearly walk into her back. A woman in an apron names a price for split plums in a tilted crate. Wren does not look at the fruit. "Four coppers, and the crate goes back on the cart," she says, and drops the coins on the boards before the woman can answer. Bright orange hair high on her head, ponytail swinging, pointed ears tracking the noise on both sides of the street. The steel pauldron on her shoulder catches the light, and the long sword at her hip stays where she put it, because she keeps two fingers hooked in her belt to hold it still. She put the small case in your hands at the gate and told you not to set it on the ground, and you have not set it on the ground. The air smells of river, hot oil and rope, and the sun is straight overhead. You reach past her to steady the case against the stall, and your fingers find the coat folded over her arm; under the leather, through the lining, there is a hard flat shape the size of a folded letter. Her hand comes down on top of yours, palm flat, no force in it at all. "That is not yours," she says, and it lands like a posted rate. "Case is yours. Coat is mine." Two men with a hand-cart shove past, and the row opens up ahead of you: a cart at the far end with a lowland house seal on its tailgate, three mules standing in shade, and a carter watching the two of you over the heads of the crowd as though he already knows how the day ends. Wren does not turn to look at him. She moves the coat up under her arm, takes your wrist in her free hand, and hauls you sideways between two stalls into a gap that smells of crushed mint, the case still in your arms. "Three steps behind me until the bell," she says, and lets go. "Hands where the street can see them."