“She’s prolly a prisoner!” he said, shaking the doll in both hands, talking out of the corner of his mouth.

The boy’s eyes widened.

“Why, Mr. Poop,” he said, a hand to his chest, “what an awful thing to say!”

“Well, she’s tied up, ain’t she?” the doll, Mr. Poop, said. The boy twitched his eyes to Anji, then back to the doll, giving it another shake.

“If you’d been listening,” he said, “you would have heard that I already asked.” The boy rolled his eyes to Anji and held the doll at arm’s length. “He never, ever listens. Sometimes I wonder why we’re friends.”

“Some folk don’t much like hearing what others have to say,” said Anji.

The boy furrowed his brow, as though this were a nugget of information he’d keep to himself for later. “Why are you tied up?”

A dry clatter of wood issued out of the darkness up the road. Anji squeezed her fingers into a fist, hoping she and the boy weren’t about to be set upon. What was keeping the Hawk in the tavern so long?

“I was … running,” Anji said, “and I got caught.”

“Like in a game?” The boy’s eyes lit up.

Anji’s mouth twisted. “I guess so.”

The boy tilted his head to one side, taking another step toward her, the doll limp in his hand—forgotten. “So you lost, then,” he said, his voice low, solemn. “That’s okay. I lose at games all the time. Ma used to tell me, she said, ‘You just have to keep playing, keep trying no matter what.’” He shrugged one shoulder. “And eventually you win.”

Anji sighed. “I won before I lost, I think.”

The boy narrowed his eyes, as if unsure whether Anji was pulling some kind of trick on him, using the esoteric words adults wield when they’d prefer a child stop talking to them.

“Where are you and the horse going?”

“Linura,” said Anji, then, thinking he might not know where or what that was, she added, “A city far south of here.”

“I know where it is,” said the boy, affronted. “That’s where the yellow men come from. They took my friend Sarella and her parents in one of their big wagons.” He held his hands out as far as they would reach, his eyes wide. “We used to play together…”

The boy toddled closer, blinking. Purple bruises clustered about his neck, around his right arm above the elbow. Anji stepped back, as though whatever horror he’d been through would seep into her, and felt a rush of shame.

“Do you have any food?” the boy asked, blinking up at her.

Words fled Anji, like water trickling from her cupped hands.

The boy ventured closer, and Anji could see he was shivering. Of course he is, she thought, My teeth are chattering and I have a coat. He doesn’t even have shoes.