She feels a hand, as dry and hard as a plank of wood, lift her hand. Something cold drops into it. She does not look at the woman but keeps her gaze fixed on the ground, on Salaud, who, she notices, is trembling and undecided between running away to save himself and biting the woman’s ankle to save his master.

She realizes that a space has been made around her, that a stranger not far away is talking loudly: “Ah, what an honor. To be blessed by Colette of Corbie herself. The girl must be an orphan—poor mite, her parents killed in the wars. Look at her hair. Englishmen or worms, do you think?” A giggle—malicious or kind, it is difficult to tell.

She does not want to be blessed. She does not want hands, if they are not the hands of Catherine or Durand, touching her.

She meets Salaud’s eye, and a blink of understanding passes between them. She looks up just as the holy woman is about to bestow a kiss on her head, and pulls back, wriggling away before taking off. The holy woman is left staring, a corpse shocked into life. One of the men—she thinks it must be the butcher-monk—bellows after her, “Shame! Shame on you, child!”

As she runs, she passes a large circle drawn with chalk; inside it two roosters, hackles raised, peck and lunge with stabbing talons and beaks. She nearly brushes against the legs of a stilt walker stepping over a huddle of children, who scream, half from fear, half in delight. She runs so fast, looking over her shoulder, that she doesn’t see she is heading straight for—

She is pulled back—only just—by a rough hand that grabs the collar of her dress. For a moment, the sensation is like flying backward. Then the hand drops her, and she lands with a grunt on her feet.

“You might have cracked your skull against that,” a red-faced stranger with a nose as large as an onion says to her, pointing. He is staring at her wide-eyed.

Wherever she has run to, these are friendlier climes than before. Here, there is laughter, and she sees what she would have crashed against: a wooden pole set in the middle of a square. The pole is as tall as a giant, and at the top, something is squawking and writhing inside an open basket.

“That would be the goose,” the same person explains. “Sitting on a bag of gold coins, or so we are led to believe.”

“And we are waiting for the basket to fall?” she asks.

“No, no, look!” And again, an emphatic hand gestures in her face. “If you reach the top and take the basket, it is yours: the goose and the coins both. Courtesy of the Duke himself. Of course, he knows no one will reach the basket. It is impossible. The pole is greased with pig fat.”