One photograph showed a young flagellant, a girl with angry, haunted eyes, sitting braiding a whip.

The girl was sitting in an artist’s studio, photographic equipment in the background. Far in the back, showing through a doorway, there was a printing press with some blurred figures working over it, and the girl sat with one foot on a poster, one of several strewn around the floor. In the photograph you could only see a bit of it, part of a headline and a picture of the gates to the infant penitentiary, but it was enough for Thanakar to recognize a poster he had seen on the walls around the city for a few weeks, the first of their kind that spring. It had filled him with furtive hope. The bishop’s secretary had ordered special patrols to go and rip them down.

“Have you shown these to anyone?”

“No.”

“Don’t.” Thanakar replaced the photographs on the bed. Standing in the prince’s room, looking at Charity’s famished face, he felt some of that same hope. He had stood in the rain, watching a group of soldiers pulling down a line of posters on a wall, while people gathered to read ones further along.

The feeling rose in him and mixed irrationally with some of the pride he felt at being in the bishop’s uniform, finally, a captain in the bishop’s army. It was as if things might change for him, finally, and the world too. He stared at Charity until she dropped his hand to break the tension and walked away to the prince’s wardrobe near the window. His suits hung there in a row, ten of them, one for each day of the week.

“He hasn’t taken any clothes,” she said. “What’ll he wear?”

* * *

When Thanakar opened his eyes in the dark, awake and quickly sensitive, he found the shadows coalescing into unfamiliar shapes, the wall at his head instead of by his side, the window in a different place. It had been a long time since he had slept in a bed different from his own. And the sound that had woken him—the spray of rain against the glass, not that. Something else. There, again. He raised himself up on his elbow.

He had been woken by the sound of dreams. Charity Starbridge lay curled away from him. Light stretched in through the window from some distant source and drew a soft diagonal across the bed. It was enough for him to see her eyes moving under her lids, and he could hear the labor of her lungs, as if she were out of breath. Once her foot made a small kicking motion. Like her brother’s, her dreams led her fast, far.

He reached out his hand towards her but then drew it back. How sweet she seemed, smelling of hashish and sleep, and perhaps even a little love, her skin pale and luminous, stretched tight over her sharp bones, her hair so black. Looking at her, he tried to remember other women—a few, older, a long time before. They had never taken off their clothes. And sometimes, later, he had gone down to the market at night, to stalls rented from the bishop by the guild of prostitutes, but from those places he remembered mostly the colored lights and the peculiar textures of certain kinds of artificial cloth against his skin, and it was as if those things had happened to another body, not this clean one he had now, lying in this clean bed, but to another one, as if he had put on another body like a suit of old clothes to do some unmemorable and degrading chore.