He was gone a long time, but when he returned Alec knew at a glance that he’d been as unsuccessful as they’d been at anything but selling fruit. He had a smudge of dirt beside his nose and a few cobwebs caught on his hat brim.

“Well?” Micum asked.

Seregil sighed and tossed the basket away. “I’ve had the life story of half the tenants, but no word of the woman and no one will own up to knowing anything about the ravens. I even managed to sneak up in the attic and down into the cellar, but there’s no sign of her.”

“Damn!” Alec growled. “Could she have gotten out the back without you seeing her?”

“I don’t think so. This is a blind alley, so I’d have met her coming out. Unless she went over the roof, too. Pretty spry for an old girl. And cunning. I’m developing a certain grudging admiration for these people. They’re tricky, these ravens, and they’re smart.”

They wandered among the tenements and markets for the rest of the afternoon, and returned to the Stag and Otter in defeat.

“We don’t even know how many of them there are,” Micum said from the bedroom as he washed his face and changed clothes.

Still in his woman’s kit, Seregil sat in one of the hearth armchairs, tapping one foot restlessly against the ash shovel. “We’ve heard of a young, one-legged man, seen a blond beggar, and seen the old man and woman. She interests me the most, with all those things on her belt.”

“I still feel like a fool for being taken in,” Alec said glumly. “And we paid the bastard to gull us, too.”

Micum ruffled Alec’s hair as he joined them in the sitting room. “Worth it, to have another of them to recognize. And this is the closest we’ve gotten to them so far.”

Seregil slid from his chair suddenly and rummaged under the couch until he found a large rolled city map tied up with a green ribbon. Blowing the dust off it, he carried it to the table and unrolled it, weighting the edges down with books already lying around on the table and chairs.

As the others watched he placed pennies on the Lower City, the southeast section of the Ring, the slums north of the Temple Precinct, the Street of Lights, and the warren of twisting streets behind the inn.

“See the pattern?” he asked. “They get pushed out of one area by the quarantine and just move to the next nearest hunting ground. They avoided the Temple Precinct, apparently, but they could have made their way through the Street of Lights on their way here.”

“And Myrhichia could have given something to one of them, thinking they were just a beggar,” Alec noted.