“Vish.” Jerad’s voice threaded into a whine. The sad little sprout sagged against the wall, his legs crossed.

“You have to be patient, Jer.” She shifted the sleeping girl, Zianna’s weight aching her shoulder. The little girl’s naming-day clothes—the nicest garments anyone in the family had ever owned—were dirt-stained and stinking from being urinated in more than once; the once-precious orange silk was probably beyond salvaging after all those days on the road. “Just a little longer. See those double doors, there?”

She pointed with her free elbow.

The women pressed forward to cluster around the impressive wooden doors that gave access into a building bigger than Sapanasu’s temple hall in the village. There was a door in each wall of the vast courtyard. To the east, gates led to the street. The warehouse entry doors carved with elaborately twined salamanders were set in the western wall. To the north stood a gate trimmed in iron, big enough for wagons. The small door against which Avisha and the children huddled was the kind of entrance regular people passed through. The trees rising on the other side of the wall meant there was a garden beyond, filled with cool shade and, perhaps, a fountain. She licked dusty lips with a parched tongue.

“Don’t crowd!” shouted one of the militiamen as he reined his horse in a mincing circle, whip raised.

There were about fifty women, with perhaps twenty children in arm or in tow. Most of the women were young; some were older. Most were wrapped in a plain cotton taloos or dressed in the linen tunic and trousers worn by farmers and artisans and laborers. Poor clans desperate enough to send their daughters and sisters to make a marriage with outlanders; impoverished widows eager to find a home with their children. The beggar shuffled through the crowd, trolling for alms among folk likely as poor as he was!

A pair of elegant city girls passed him a few vey and returned to their conversation.

“My uncle told me to demand nothing less than forty cheyt as a marriage portion. They can afford it. They took the whole treasury. Greedy bastards.”

“Forty cheyt? Whew! You could never hope to see that much coin in your whole life. Who’s being greedy?”

“It’s fair payment for having to marry a dirty out-lander.”

“Best make sure they don’t find out about—” Their voices dropped to a whisper.

A girl with a bright red birthmark splayed over one cheek kept lifting a hand to cover her face. “Auntie, don’t you think they’ll turn me away the instant they see me? Can’t we just go home? I’d rather go to the temple than be scorned again.”

“Quiet! The dowry the temple is demanding is more than we can afford. We’ll offer you to the outlanders with no request for a bride price at all. That might induce them to take you.”

A middle-aged man fussed over two girls dressed neatly in farmers’ best, each in a cotton taloos, one dyed a calm sorrel green and the other a reassuring bracken orange-brown. “Be polite. Be respectful. It’s a good opportunity but there’s no need to sign any contract unless you’re truly willing.”