She’d been turning the Seril problem over in her mind—gods and goddesses, faith and credit, debt and repayment and Abelard’s despair and the gargoyles atop their ruined tower. Swirled round with sharp-toothed dilemmas, she marched past the shadow people who drifted down the sidewalk toward home or gym or bar. A beggar held out a cup and she tossed him a coin with a few thaums of soul inside. Might as well be kind while she could afford it. Soon none of them might have the luxury of generosity.

The man thanked her with a wave of a soot-caked hand as she swept past. Strings of curses ran together inside her skull. Streetlights cast bright puddles on the pavement.

Brighter than usual, in fact, and of a different color too, as of molten silver. Far off, a giant struck a mountain with a hammer in heartbeat time. She stumbled. Eyes closed, she searched the lightning-lit world of Craft for the source of her sudden weakness, but saw nothing—and beneath the nothing, a tide. Her knees buckled, and she fell beyond herself into a sea of churning light whose waves sang a chord no choir could have matched. And she saw—

The market square, unfamiliar faces. Matthew Adorne, bleeding. The fierce man from the produce stall wept beneath a moon that was also a face she knew—mother and tiger at once. And Shale stood before them both, Shale overshadowed by his Goddess, Shale the clawed vector for a Lady who refused to hide.

Something soft struck her whole body at once, as if she’d fallen onto a featherbed from a height.

Rough fingers touched her cheek. Her vision focused and refocused until it carved the beggar from the moonlight haze. The lines of his face mapped a territory of confusion and concern. “Miss?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and realized she was lying on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon. When she tried to stand, the world spun sideways.

“You fell.” His breath smelled harsh and there was liquor in it.

She took quick inventory: skirt and stocking torn by impact, jacket dusted with road, a scrape on her cheek. Unsteady sitting, and more unsteady rising. Her soul, that was the problem: her soul ebbed out, a few hundred thaums gone, like leaves into a fire. “Did you feel that?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Thank you.” She pushed a few more thaums into his hand, but he forced them back.

“You need help.”

“Which way to Market Square?”

“Left at Bleeker,” he said, “but the stalls are closed.”

She could not run, but after she killed the pain receptors in her ankle, she forced herself to a brisk walk.

By the time she reached the market, there was little left to see—only a crowd around the Crier’s dais, and there, interviewing a young dark-skinned couple whose body language screamed “traumatized onlookers,” Gavriel Jones.