‘I cannot believe these steps haven’t been repaired!’ exclaimed Valannie, again with her annoying laugh as special punctuation. ‘I’m sure when the Governor hears that you will be coming this way so often then he will speak to whoever is meant to keep this quarter in full repair!’

Clariel didn’t respond. She was still thinking through the events of the day before, and the things she had been told by Roban, Valannie and her father. She needed to know more, particularly if one of the likely possibilities she’d thought about needed to be averted.

If her parents got her married off, then she would never escape from Belisaere.

‘Almost there!’ said Valannie, as they reached a road cut into the side of the hill to make a long terrace. There were houses built all along its outer edge and down the slope, presenting one story at the road level, but three or perhaps four going down the hill, where there was another, lower road along another broad terrace. ‘Look, the house of blue gables there, that is the Academy.’

The house was impressive, the white stone façade newly cleaned, with thin blue lines painted to delineate each course of blockwork. The crow-stepped gables of the central roof and its two lesser companions were indeed edged with a stone that had a faint bluish sheen, of a kind Clariel had not seen before. The entire building was larger even than Jaciel’s new house, the front spreading at least eighty paces along the road, with a great arched gate and two lesser doors, and it ranged three storeys up and at least another four below to the next terrace, the whole of it occupying as much space as Clariel’s old home in Estwael and all six of its neighbours, and those houses had been the best and largest in the town.

There were a dozen guardsmen standing outside the open gate, three wearing the familiar blazon of the Goldsmiths’ coins, the others different badges: a black anvil for the Ironmongers; a slender purple bottle for the Vintners; three stacked square stones of white for the Masons; a gold-hooped barrel of red for the Brewers; a blue lozenge with silver roundels for a Guild Clariel didn’t know but guessed to be the Upholders who made cushions and stuffed chairs; and a silver pepper-pod for the Spicers. The guards bore man-high oaken staves in addition to the swords at their sides, and looked ready to use them.