It was green, for one thing. Green grass grew out there, catching the sun. It was so wide and open, and not a soul in sight. Malden took a few steps into the narrow tunnel of the gate and found the guards there didn’t even look at him. No, of course not—they had no brief to keep people from leaving. The people of Ness were free to go outside if they pleased. They just weren’t free to come back in.

The sun on the grass out there looked so warm and inviting. A summer breeze played with the blades of it, stirring them gently, then letting them fall back. Behind Malden, in the Stink, all was noise and grime and desperation. Out there it would be quiet, he thought. Quiet and peaceful and—

“Make way, you little fuck!” someone shouted, and suddenly a brown and black dog was snarling at him, its wet teeth snapping shut on his cloak. Malden looked up in startlement and just had time to jump back as a mounted man came thundering through the gate, heedless of where his horse’s hooves fell. The owner of the dog, a footman wearing the same coat of arms as the rider, shoved Malden back against the wall of the gate with a cudgel. “There’s people of importance trying to use this gate, and you’re just standing here gawking?”

Malden tried to stammer out a reply. “I assure you, I was simply—”

The footman knocked him down with the cudgel, and probably would have beaten him senseless if he hadn’t needed to run off then, to keep up with his master. Down in the dust Malden felt at his ear where the footman had struck him. He was glad his fingers didn’t come away bloody.

“Oh, just get out of there,” a guard said, grabbing his arm and pulling him away from the gate. “You’re lucky I don’t dump you outside and let the reeve take you.”

Lucky indeed. The green grass out there might look inviting, but the second he trod on it he would have legally become a villein. A slave, in all but name.

But if he had a little money to his name—if he could purchase even a small plot of land in some cheap place . . . the story would be different. And that was what Cutbill had promised him, wasn’t it?

Cutbill had said he was a prisoner in Ness. Malden had never felt that way before—now he could think of himself in no other terms. A prisoner. And Cutbill had the means to set him free.

It could happen tonight, for the price of a little risk.