Now perhaps, at any other time, perhaps in another year or so, she might have gotten away with such an ill-considered remark. But not now. Not when barely six months had passed, and Selenay had been making herself very popular with little gestures like the “Queen’s Bread.” People down here had a lot of trouble keeping their children fed, and one guaranteed free meal a day, at the trifling cost of lessons in rudimentary literacy and numeracy, was a small price to pay. A youngling down here couldn’t earn the price of that breakfast himself in the course of a morning. It was good economics to send your younglings to a temple until noon, then put ’em to work.

“’ere now!” A man just near enough to have overheard the speech stood up, glaring at her. “Our Selenay ain’t like that, ye owd drab, an’ if you was a man, I’d’a thrashed ye fer that!”

The woman shrank back, and well she should have. He was big and broad, and looked as if he knew very well how to handle that cudgel at his belt. “No offense meant, I’m very sure,” she said, hastily. “I didn’ mean Queen Selenay! I just meant, a Queen, in a gen’ral sort of way.”

The man glared at her. He was as drunk as the whore pretended to be, and he was at the very least going to say his piece. “Our Selenay ain’t no layabout!” he insisted. “Why, I seen ’er, I even talked to ’er, couple’a nights afore the last battle. Come right to our fires, she did, ’avin’ a word with our officers, seein’ we ’ad good treatment!”

“Oh, yeah, an’ she talked t’ you, did she, ye old liar!” jeered someone else—

Ill-advisedly.

The drunk rounded on the skeptic with a roar, and grabbed the man’s shirt in one hamlike fist. Only the intervention of the “peacekeeper” that the proprietor of the Broken Arms had seen fit to hire prevented mayhem from breaking out. But there was the start of a fight, and under cover of it, the woman slipped out.

Alberich followed.

She wasn’t at all difficult to follow, the silly wench. She paid absolutely no attention to what was behind her. The man she accosted just outside in the alleyway next to the tavern was a little more careful, but not enough to spot Alberich. He was a darker shadow in the alley—people always thought that wearing black would make them blend in with shadows, but it didn’t; it made them into man-shaped black blotches in an almost black place. Alberich was wearing several shades of very, very dark brown and gray. Each leg was a slightly different color. So was each arm. And his tunic was blotched. There was nothing about him that was man-shaped, when he stood in shadow.