Was High Haldia slain, or only licking its wounds?

Movement flashed to her right. Marit urged Warning into a trot down a side street. A figure dashed across the street, ducking into an alley. Marit slipped off Warning, ran in pursuit. In the depths of shadow between windowless walls, she grabbed a slight young person by his tunic.

He went limp, so she let go, and he sprawled at her feet. The side street lay behind them. Ahead, the alley met an intersection of murky lanes, the routes beyond too dim to trace.

“Jus’ ran to fetch medicine.” Despite short hair clipped close to the head, it was a girl. “I didna mean to break curfew, only my nephew needs the tisane for a fever.” She opened a hand to reveal a stoppered vial with an orange ribbon wrapped around it to mark its medicinal virtue.

“I saw folk walking in from fields earlier,” Marit said, hoping a friendly voice would stop the girl’s convulsive shivering on a hot night. “All with stooped backs and bowed heads. The guards at the toll gate outside town let me pass without a word. Why’s there a curfew?”

The back of her neck had a rash, and her feet were bare, newly blistered, as though she had formerly been accustomed to walking everywhere in slippers. “We’ve given our hostage to the garrison and kept the rules,” she said into the dirt. “It was jus’ that my nephew needed the medicine. He’s jus’ three. Cudna you let me go this one time?” Her hand closed around the vial.

Marit heard footfalls. She turned halfway, keeping an eye both on the girl and on the six soldiers who crowded into the alley’s entrance

“Lord? Any trouble here? Got a curfew-breaker?”

Averting their eyes, they approached in file, blocking the alley.

The sergeant flung out an arm to halt the others. “Who are you?” His suspicion gave flavor to the air and made the others draw their short swords. The girl whimpered.

“I’ve not seen you before, lord,” the sergeant added, words as tentative as a baby’s first steps.

Now it’s true that anyone might affect a long cloak, especially in the rainy season, although few would choose white as their ornament. As soon as she thought it, Marit wondered if a bold rebel might attempt a disguise and thereby walk through a city such as this one, imprisoned by a curfew that made an innocent girl cower when she was caught out at dusk with a vial of medicine.

“I’ve just come from Walshow,” Marit said, looking them over as they glanced every way but at her.

“She’s the one they warned us to look out for—” blurted the leftmost fellow, and his sergeant kicked him so hard on the shin that he yelped.

“Don’t even try it,” she said wearily. “Look at me.”

Of course they didn’t want to look. Joss’s determination and misery had been laid bare to her sight: his nostalgic, regretful desire for the Marit he had once loved, a desire he knew he ought to have strangled long since but could not quite kill; his hunger for a young woman so vivid and sensual that Marit raged with envy while knowing perfectly well that she was dead and he had to get on with his own life.