“Do you remember me?” they would whisper.

“This is my brother. He and I—we remember you, Eagle.”

“God praise you, Eagle.”

“I followed you out through the crypt. Lady save you, Eagle.”

It was this crowd, more than that of the prosperous merchants and artisans, that attracted Sanglant’s notice, a tide of common laborers and craftsmen, most of them very young. Fully half of them wore at their necks crudely fashioned necklaces from which hung two charms: the Circle of Unity and a flowering bird. He knew the symbol. He had seen representations of it elsewhere, carved in similar manner.

It was a phoenix.

3

IT was late. The feast had ground on for hours, pleasantly enough. The beggars had eaten a most noble portion. Bread had been passed out to the multitudes waiting outside the mayor’s palace. Sanglant retired after the singing, but he could not sleep and so pulled on his tunic, laced up his sandals, and slipped back into the great hall with Hathui and Fulk padding at his heels.

Dogs slept in the rushes. Beggars snored beneath trestle tables. What else stank in the hall he did not care to identify. It would be swept out at dawn in preparation for tomorrow’s second feast.

“Where do you mean to go, Your Majesty?”

He threw his cloak over his shoulders.

Hathui did not ask again after he did not reply, but a look was exchanged between her and the captain. Four soldiers appeared, two bearing lamps, and followed him as he went outside. As always, the sky was dark. No moon or stars shone down on them. The light of the lanterns rippled over the courtyard as he walked to the palace gates, once shattered and now rebuilt. Gent would always haunt him. He had suffered too much here. Like the buildings, he had scars, but he had prospered nevertheless.

Beyond the palace gates he walked the cold streets. It was dark and dank, and his feet slopped in mud. In the handful of years since Bloodheart’s ouster there had been time to rebuild walls and residences but not yet the plank walkways that had once kept men’s feet out of the muck.

Wind moaned through eaves. A smattering of rain kissed his face. All the smells of the city drifted on that night air: offal and sewage, fermenting barley and rancid chicken broth, the rank savor of the tannery and the slumbering iron tang of the blacksmith’s forge. The old marketplace had been reconstructed as a row of artisan compounds. The old mint was still a ruin, a jumble of charred pilings and shards of lumber too badly burned and broken to be scavenged for other buildings. Eyes shone in lamplight, and feral dogs growled as he and his escort passed. He growled back. They slunk away into the shelter of overhangs and collapsed walls.

‘Amazing they haven’t been killed,” said Fulk. “I’d think it would be good sport for the lads in the town to hunt them out, vermin like that.”