“You can’t just eat mutton and yoghurt,” she said, but he looked at her in that way he had that made her feel bad for teasing him. Then he scanned the street. It was dusk, when villagers settled after a hard day’s labor. In Toskala, market stalls were still selling food, folk chattering and haggling, on their way with lamps lit. Olossi had seemed unimaginably complicated to a country girl. Toskala overwhelmed, so huge, so busy, so crowded, so packed with shops and squares and streets selling grains and pies and oil and kites and banners and cord and dried fish and cloth and fans until it made her dizzy. So much! And with a hostile army camped outside their gates and the population swollen with refugees, folk lived as on a knife’s edge. She always felt someone was about to jump out of the crowd and slug her. She liked having Pil at her back.

She chewed eel, sighing with pleasure. “Good today,” she said to the vendor. “Even if you raised your prices.”

The vendor was middle-aged and comfortably portly, wearing a mended tunic and broad-brimmed hat in case it rained. A small umbrella covered the pan and fire. “My thanks. Spice and fuel sellers raised their price, eh? What am I to do?” She laughed too brightly. “I hear tell they’ve sent reeves to Olo’osson, asking for help. You know anything about that?”

“I don’t, and I couldn’t say if I did.”

“That’s fair enough.”

The neighboring vendor, selling noodles, broke in. “Our defenses are strong enough to hold off that cursed army.”

Under cover of this conversation, Pil tugged at her sleeve. “I think we should go back,” he muttered.

“My thanks to you,” said Nallo, “greetings of the dusk.”

She slurped down the last bits and set off, Pil striding alongside. “What is it?” she asked.

Then she heard shouts rising over the twilight clamor.

Pil edged into a trot as folk looked up from their shopping and eating and chatting; foreheads wrinkled; a man harrumphed irritably; a child whined, “Come on, Ma, come on.” The knife sharpener’s whetstone creaked to a halt as he forgot to pump. A noodle vendor’s ladle tipped sideways as she strained to hear, and the steaming noodles slithered out to plop on the ground.

“Move.” Pil broke into a run, pulling out his reeve’s baton.

She fumbled as she slipped hers out of its loop. A tumult of shouting lifted as in a wave to wash over them. Dogs began barking and howling, the cry taken up throughout the city. Something had gone horribly wrong.