“I wasn’t in on it! As soon as the trouble erupted, I secured the storehouses and cisterns with what firefighters remain up here, in case any of this crowd decides to grab what they can.”

“Why come over here to the stairs, then?” asked Peddo. “Since it’s the only way up or down from this rock besides flying, or the baskets?”

The young man gestured helplessly, a sweep of his arm that took in the city. Overhead, stars glittered in silence; below, Toskala roared as its thousands ran or fought or hid, or simply wailed and grieved. The wind blustered, but like them it could do nothing but witness.

“What’s the point of staying?” asked Kesta. “We’ve lost.”

“What’s ever the point of staying?” said Nallo, thinking of the day she had walked into a strange village to marry a man she’d never met, to fulfill a contract other hands had sealed in her name. “To say you can. To show you will.”

“And what the hells does it matter, Nallo, when those demons can fly? The steps are blocked, but the demons can come back any time they want.”

“Maybe so, but if they’d wanted to kill us all, then why didn’t they?”

“The winged ones carried no weapons,” added Pil, “but the ones who died, died in blood. So then who stabbed them? Not the demons.”

“A good point,” said Peddo, smiling wanly at Pil, who blushed and looked away.

“Traitors stabbed them!” said the fire captain hoarsely. “Any of us might be a traitor!”

“The hells you say!” snapped Nallo. “I’m no gods-rotted traitor. And I’m not cursed ready to give up, either.”

“We need a captain,” said Pil. “If we mean to resist. This rock is a good fort. If we can protect ourselves against demons, and ration water and food.”

“And throw the cursed traitors to their death!” screamed the fire captain with a howl of outraged grief.

Distant voices on Justice Square echoed his cries, and the guards at the stairs stirred restlessly, looking scared.

Nallo slapped the fire captain right across the face. That shut him up. Probably with his soft skin and well-kept hands he’d never done a day’s worth of real work in his silk-wearing, pampered life.

“Do you think you’re the only cursed person who’s suffered? We either give up now, or we take stock of our situation and then we cursed well decide what we mean to do! I don’t want to give up!”

The image of her husband lying dead in the road with the flies buzzing in and out of his gaping mouth sprang so vividly into her mind that she began to cry. He had stayed behind with the other men to hold off the army while the women and children ran into the forest to hide. Dazed from a day of hiding in the brush, Jerad and little Zi had not truly understood what had happened to their father. Avisha had trembled so close to hysterics that Nallo recognized only now how much strength it had taken the girl to suck it up and keep going for the sake of the little ones. And they’d done it. They’d walked away from the ruins of a life they could never have back, and by sheer stubbornness they had found other shelter. Not a safe place, for maybe there weren’t any safe places left. But a decent place, a good place. A place they could find pride in.