The moon smiled down and she smiled back. She walked too fast, and breathed too deep. The whole world was velvet padded. She whistled to herself, an old tune from across the sea, a song she remembered a mother singing once. She wasn’t sure if the mother had been hers. There were so many mothers.

The whistle shrilled in her ears. Some god sharpened the streetlights and the stars. The moon’s smile turned wicked. She hid behind a trash bin, gripped her ankles, and thought of Edmond Margot dead.

A broken, tired man, far from home, a deserter of his people, deserted in turn by gods and muses. And anyway, others had died before this. Why weep for him?

She did anyway.

This surprised her.

A while later she emerged onto the street, and moved north and west with dreadful purpose.

She ignored crowds, drunks, and flower-draped tourists. Three skeletons in tie-dyed shirts stumbled past, drinking from silver flasks and singing God Wars songs. Soon the streets narrowed, and yards unfurled from the houses.

She found the priest’s house dark, shuttered. She walked the block twice, casing it from every angle. Once in a while she heard a cry from within, a yowl like a cat would make, or else a person with bad dreams.

Nick had been right: the house was warded. Cross the fence and Izza would wake the alarm. But the house next door was less secure, and in its yard grew those trees Izza didn’t know what to call, the ones like a buried chicken’s upturned claw. A limb of one such tree overhung the fence. The ward was younger than the tree, and rather than cutting back the tree, the contractor must have bent the ward around it.

Izza climbed the claw tree and crept out along the thinning branch. Crossing the ward burned like a bath in cold iron. Spiderwebs of light and lightning spread around her. She pressed herself against the bark, always at least one patch of skin touching. She was one with the tree. The pain built, sharpened, vanished.

She was through.

Faint ghostlight flickered from the priest’s second-floor window: a nightlight, or a bedside lamp left on. Between that and the occasional moans, she might have suspected the priest was entertaining callers. But she heard only one voice, and the wind, and a creak from the branch beneath her.

Now to find a way down, Izza thought before the branch broke.

She landed hard on the lawn. False stars spun above, in front of the real ones. The limb of the neighbor’s tree now ended in a jagged line above the fence. So much for her clean exit. Fine. Revenge was best served hot, whatever Camlaander playwrights said.