The murderer wasn’t difficult to track, despite the cloak of darkness that had settled over the town, shadows creeping along the edge of the buildings. Everywhere he and his band of thugs went, chaos seemed to follow. First they spent what was left of their rage on an unsuspecting drunk, shattering what was left of his cloudy bottle over his head and then kicking him until his groaning stopped and he no longer moved. Next they moved on to where a merchant was loading his unsold crates of wares into a wagon while his steed waited patiently. One of the thugs, raised a foot and kicked the horse’s side so hard that it spooked, going from standing to a full gallop in an instant. The man fell back, the crate he’d been hefting into the wagon squashing him and spilling its contents while the men laughed their heads off.

Bryony made no move to intervene, content to follow them. For now. It wasn’t lost on her that if she’d arrived a day later, or if she’d decided to bypass Dunmire completely, that all of these events would’ve occurred anyway. The man in The Horse’s Rump still would’ve died, the poor vagabond still would’ve been brutalized, this innocent merchant still would’ve had his horse sent stampeding away from him, pulling his entire livelihood behind it. In a thousand other towns and cities across Finfalla—no, across the whole world—awful things were happening as well, things she couldn’t be there to witness. But good things were happening, too, right? Husbands were treating their wives with kindness, the weak were being defended by the strong, babies were being born, lovers were gasping in the dark, music being played by talented musicians was being enjoyed and appreciated rather than having scraps of food flung at it. But was it equal? The good and evil? Was there balance? Because from the sliver of life that was Bryony’s place in the world, she couldn’t see it, no matter how hard she tried.

And if she wasn’t here, in Dunmire, on this particular night at this particular time, the thugs she continued to track as they entered a shadow-dark alley would’ve continued their violent romp through the city. Even now, they targeted a young boy who was scrubbing a bucket, perhaps the last of a laundry list of chores he’d been tasked by his mother with completing on this day. Innocent. Young. Naïve.