But even in that white painless perfection, one small black pebble nudged him. An almost nothing, but it was there, and his soul blinked, and the world and its pettiness slowly drew back to life. That black pebble had cut it short, it had been so much shorter than before, but that made no matter now, did it? There was a body underneath him that he would need to dispose of. He was too cold, and the Guard would be looking for him soon. None of these worried him, for they were simply tasks for him to check off a list. Pebble or not, there was nothing he couldn’t accomplish now that the buzzing was gone, and to prove it he sprang to his feet and heaved the body over his shoulder.

A short run down the rocks and into the shallows of the river brought him to a cutaway in the northern slope, just large enough to conceal the body until he had time to come back later with a horse and take it out of the city. It was light as air as he flung its limbs over itself, and Gilbert cut off a cluster of nearby bramble to cover the face. He washed clean in the water and left.

In the Raff, he noticed an old woman standing in place, turning slowly as though one foot were stuck, squinting, looking, searching. His satisfaction of doing the thing wavered, and for a moment the black pebble burrowed through his brain again. He couldn’t avoid wondering if the old woman was looking for a man who would never come back.

Gilbert slapped his own face. He was better than regret, he couldn’t be bothered with such a pedestrian attitude. It made no sense, why it would come now, why it had come in the white, for such a trivial act. He’d done far better things, things that would brand him a traitor to many, and never felt that pebble’s touch. Not an inch of him regretted delivering Jon Bassett to the Red Lions. The boy had screamed and squealed as the Lions spit him and strung him. He’d begged and cursed Gilbert in the same breath as they teased his life away in the tunnels beneath Nottingham.