Babbling apologies, Avisha crouched, careful to keep her hem from dragging in the mud, and plucked the thick se leaves one by one out of the muck. The woman cursed at her until she shrank back, red-faced and sniveling, looking for a place to get out of the fray and catch her breath, but there was nowhere that people weren’t moving, shoving, blustering, shouting.

“Heya! Ready to move, now! We march to the docks. No falling behind.” A factor brandished a whip as, from the saddle, he addressed a pathetic gang of laborers, young women and men with fresh debt marks and freshly shaven heads that made them look like Sapanasu’s clerks, only in homespun, not the robes worn by the Lantern’s hierophants.

She would not have recognized Nallo with all her hair gone, if the woman standing in the second rank of the gang had not blanched and tried to cover her face.

“Heya!” The whip cracked a warning in the air. “Look sharp! Stay in line! You’ll find you’re well treated in your new work if you keep discipline and remain orderly. Don’t disappoint me, or your new masters.”

They marched off toward the docks down the main avenue, feet shuffling on churned earth. In their wake, the market traffic resumed, but Avisha stood as with feet planted, folk bumping into her, cutting around her, cursing her for getting in the way and would she please move on move on. She began to cry.

Nallo had sold her labor. She was now a slave

KESH THOUGHT THAT probably the old man was just a beggar, fallen on hard times, a Sirniakan carter stuck in Olossi because his team foundered and afterward reduced to begging. It happened. But Chaji’s urgency infected Kesh. It was odd that the girl had seen him hanging around the Qin compound weeks ago.

Their biggest problem was in how to move through the city without drawing attention, because of course everyone noticed two armed Qin soldiers. They would have to hope that the beggar’s attention would be fixed on the large party he was following, which was certainly roiling the waters. And not just because of the Qin soldiers and the huge slave. Everyone must stop to stare at beauty as it passed.

The red cap slid sideways to the side of the thoroughfare as, far up ahead, the company stopped at a merchant’s stall. From within the crowd, he could not see what the merchant was selling, but then the object she held in her hand caught sunlight and flashed.

Mirrors, for the vain to stare at their pretty faces.

The beggar loitered. Keshad glanced at Chaji and Umar, and they nodded. Very suspicious!

The company moved on, the black-clad soldiers opening a wedge through the crowd not so much by forcing it as by simply being there. For a moment, the crowd thinned in just such a pattern that he saw her lustrous black hair arranged in a complicated set of falls held up by combs and hairsticks. She was speaking to the captain, laughter in the lift of her chin.