As she shouldered through the crowd, she worried over her student loans and her to-do list. The Iskari Defense Ministry wanted stronger guarantees of divine support from the Church of Kos, which they wouldn’t get, since a weaker version of those same guarantees had almost killed Kos Himself last year. The Iskari threatened a breach of contract suit, ridiculous—Kos performed his obligations flawlessly. But she had to prove that, which meant another deep trawl of church archives and another late night.

Which wouldn’t have felt like such a chore if Tara still billed by the hour. These days, less sleep only meant less sleep. She’d sold herself on the benefits of public service: be more than just another hired sword. Devote your life to building worlds rather than tearing them down. The nobility of the position seemed less clear when you were making just enough to trigger your student loans but not enough to pay them back.

Life would feel simpler after breakfast.

But when she reached the stall where Matthew Adorne sold eggs, she found it untended. The eggs remained, stacked in bamboo cartons and arranged from small to large and light to dark, but Adorne himself was gone. Tara would have been less surprised to find Kos the Everburning’s inner sanctum untended and his Eternal Flame at ebb than she was to see Adorne’s stand empty.

Nor was his the only one.

Around her, customers grumbled in long lines. The elders of the market had left assistants to mind their booths. Capistano’s boy scrambled behind the butcher’s counter, panicked, doing his father’s work and his at once. He chopped, he collected coins with bits of soul wound up inside, he shouted at an irate customer carrying a purse three sizes too large. The blond young women who sold fresh vegetables next to Adorne, the stand Tara never visited because their father assumed she was foreign and talked to her loud and slow as if she were the only dark-skinned woman in Alt Coulumb, they darted from task to task, the youngest fumbling change and dropping onions and getting in the others’ way like a summer associate given actual work.

Adorne had no assistant. His children were too good for the trade, he said. School for them. So the stall was empty.

She wasn’t tall enough to peer over the crowd, and here in Alt Coulumb she couldn’t fly. A wooden crate lay abandoned by the girls’ stall. Tara climbed the crate and, teetering, scanned the market.

At the crowd’s edge she saw Adorne’s broad shoulders, and tall, gaunt Capistano like an ill-made scarecrow. Other stall-keepers, too, watched—no, listened. Crier’s orange flashed on the dais.