“Nira, stop that,” said Yazi. “I’m so tired my feet are on fire. Keep walking, will you?”

Qinnitan walked forward, but after a dozen paces turned again. A man was walking along the edge of the colonnade, and although he was not looking at her she thought she saw him hesitate for an instant and almost break stride, as though he had just decided it was too late to step back out of sight again.

Qinnitan pointed up at the sky above the high walls of the Echoing Mall, shot red with the last light of the day, and said, “Isn’t it pretty, with all those colors!” While performing this bit of show, she examined the man as best she could. He wore shabby, unobtrusive clothes—the kind any of the menial laborers might wear—and had somewhat the look of a northerner, with hair of the lackluster brown shade Qinnitan had learned was almost as common north of Hierosol as black hair was in Xand. He was studiously avoiding her eyes as he walked, and so Qinnitan swung around again.

“What are you talking about, the sunset?” asked Yazi. “If your thoughts wandered any farther, girl, you’d have to put bells on them, like goats.”

When Qinnitan looked back the man was gone into the crowd. She didn’t know what to think. Even Yazi suddenly seemed capable of having secret depths.

Pigeon came bounding out to greet her when they reached the dormitory hall, excited as a puppy. He threw his arms around her, then grabbed her hand to pull her back to the bed they shared, waving his free arm excitedly. He had taught her some of the hand-language he had spoken with the other mute servants back in the Orchard Palace, but at times like this he didn’t bother trying to make his thoughts known in a more subtle way, nor did he need to. Some of the other women looked up as he dragged Qinnitan down the open space between the tiny wooden beds, a few with indulgent smiles, remembering brothers or children of their own, many others with the generalized irritation of someone who had just finished a long, hard day’s labor being forced to observe the endless energies of a child. It was strange, living with so many women again—almost a hundred in this dormitory alone, with several more buildings like it on this side of the citadel. The culture was oddly familiar, the same quick-blooming friendships and rivalries and even hatreds, as though someone had taken the wives of the autarch’s Seclusion, dressed them in dirty smocks and sweat-stained dresses, then dumped them into this vast, depressing hall that had once been the royal stables for some long-dead king of Hierosol. These women were not so comely, and not so young—many of them were grandmothers—but otherwise there seemed little difference between this and her former home, or even the Hive where she had lived before.

Cages, she thought. Why do men fear us so that they must cage us all together and keep us apart from them? Hierosol was better than Xis, but even here there were strict rules about keeping out men, even for those of the washerwomen who were married. Only Soryaza’s intervention with the dormitory mistress had gained a place here for Pigeon, and he was one of but a dozen or so children, most babes in arms who stayed behind during the day to be cared for in an offhand way by a pair of washerwomen now too old to work, two crones who each morning found the sunniest place in the dormitory and sat there like lizards, muttering to each other while the children more or less looked after themselves.