Wyndle sighed, but curved up the outside of the captain’s tenement. Lift climbed, using his vines as foot- and handholds. This took her up past a number of windows, but only a few of them were lit. One pair of windows on the same side helpfully had a washing line draped between them, and Lift snatched a shiqua. Nice of them to leave it out, up high enough that only she could get to it.

She didn’t stop at the captain’s window, which Wyndle seemed to find surprising. She went all the way up to the top and eventually climbed out onto a field of treb, a grain that grew in bunches inside hard pods on vines. The farmers here grew them in little slits in the stone, just under a foot wide. The vines would bunch up in there, and grow pods that got wedged so they didn’t tumble free in storms.

The farmers were done for the day, leaving piles of weeds to get carried away in the next storm—whenever that came. Lift settled down on the lip of the trench, looking out over the city. It was pinpricked by spheres. Not many, but more than she’d have expected. That made illumination shine up from the slots, like they were cracks in something bright at the center. How must it look when people had more infused spheres? She imagined bright columns of light shining up from the holes.

Below, the captain closed her window and apparently hooded her spheres. Lift yawned. “You don’t need sleep, right, Voidbringer?”

“I do not.”

“Then keep an eye on that building. Wake me up anytime someone goes into it, or if that captain comes out.”

“Could you at least tell me why we’re spying on a captain of the city watch?”

“What else are we going to do?”

“Anything else?”

“Boring,” Lift said, then yawned again. “Wake me up, okay?”

He said something, likely a complaint, but she was already drifting off.

It seemed like only moments before he nudged her awake.

“Mistress?” he said. “Mistress, I find myself in awe of your ingenuity, and your stupidity, both at once.”

She yawned, shifting on her stolen shiqua blanket and swatting at some lifespren that were floating around. She hadn’t dreamed, thankfully. She hated dreams. They either showed her a life she couldn’t have, or a life that terrified her. What was the good of either one?

“Mistress?” Wyndle asked.

She stirred, sitting up. She hadn’t realized that she’d picked a spot surrounded by and overgrown with vines, and they’d gotten stuck in her clothing. What was she doing up here again? She ran her hand through her hair, which was snarled and sticking out in all sorts of directions.