Before he’d collected the price of a cheap meal, rough hands hauled him to his feet and he found himself surrounded by five blue-coated men of the City Watch. One of them ran his hands down Alec’s sides and gave him a nasty grin as he felt Alec’s perfectly good arm hidden beneath his dirty peasant’s smock.

“By the Flame, look what we have here,” he exclaimed loud enough for some of the well-dressed passersby to hear. A few even stopped. One of them was Lady Mallia, a good friend of theirs, on the arm of some blond nobleman Alec didn’t recognize. Alec kept his head down, heart hammering in his chest.

The bluecoat tore the shoulder of Alec’s smock open and yanked his arm out. “You know what the penalty for false begging is, my boy?” he asked, giving him a hard shake.

“Pity, your honor!” Alec mumbled.

“Twenty lashes in the Tower,” one of the other bluecoats informed him, as if Alec didn’t already know. “And the pillory. Let’s see what we have here.”

He reached for the bandage shrouding nearly half of Alec’s face. Mallia was looking on with evident pity, murmuring something to the gentleman with her. One of the bluecoats still had Alec by the arm. The other four had him hemmed in pretty well, and most of them were a good deal taller and heavier than he was. Before the one reaching for his face could touch the bandage, Alec twisted his arm free, dropped into a crouch, and sprang between two of the men at knee level, taking them by surprise. One still managed to grab the flapping tail of his torn smock, but what was left of the side seam let go and Alec sped on shirtless through the evening crowd, dodging the grasping hands of those trying to heed the bluecoats’ calls for help as they pursued him. If he’d been tackled it would have been the end of him, but Alec was fast and agile, and he knew the back alleys and low roads of the city as well as the lines on his own right palm.

Outdistancing the shouting, he turned into Gannet Lane at a dead run, narrowly missing collision with a pair of young ladies and their escorts. Screams and curses followed as he ran on, searching his memory and Seregil’s lessons for the right combination of turns. He rounded another corner, and another into a narrower street. He’d left the fashionable neighborhood behind. Respectable merchant folk filled the streets here, enjoying the cool of the evening. He earned plenty of disapproving stares as he stopped to get his breath, sweat clammy on his skin. His head rag and bandage were still safely in place, but a half-naked young man was notable in any street. This was borne out all too quickly when he heard someone shout, “There he is. Down there!”