“Fell spears,” Gabriel said in jest.

“Less metal. Much easier,” Mortirmir said. “Tom’s idea.”

Harndon—Lessa

Lessa moved quickly through the streets. They were relatively empty; people were afraid of the new plague, and the horned men and their sorcerous dances, or so it was said, and now there were royal guardsmen and trained band guilds people everywhere, on alert, in full armour; some street corners and larger market squares had apprentice magisters, or initiates of the Order of Saint Thomas.

She’d tried for two days to find anyone who’d seen these horned men and lived to tell about it; there had been at least three groups, and when they exploded, they showered every observer with a fine black dust that almost invariably brought death. There was a rumour that the queen had a counterspell; Tyler put it about that the queen didn’t see any need to share the cure with her subjects.

Despite the empty streets, or perhaps because of them, this time Lessa was better dressed, wearing men’s clothes: good hose that showed her legs, light boots like a soldier or a forester, and a loose gown that hid her gender and some other objects as well, under a fine hood that suggested she might be a person of quality, and topped with a fine red bycocket. At her side hung a short arming sword and a purse, and as she passed through Cheapside, men sometimes bowed and often cleared her way.

She was late, and annoyed to be late. The time for her assignation had passed with the chiming of the bells of the cathedral, and she worried that her man would simply walk away. But she’d been delayed by attentive guards and lines of suffering plague victims, and already Harndoners knew that when you saw one of the poor unfortunates, faces riddled with black marks like lettering on a page, you walked well around them, because they could burst and spread the black dust as horribly as the horned men. Or so it was said.

But several streets before the site of the meeting, deep in the tangle of alleys of the Scramble, she saw her mark, Captain Crowbeard, as Tyler had named him. She knew him instantly—his age, his erect back, and slightly bent neck, as if he’d spent his life trying to be slightly shorter than someone else. As she’d raised her status, he’d lowered his, and he wore a coarse wool gown, a matching hood, and loose hose held up by garters and bagged into heavier boots. Despite his low attire, he wore a long sword, but many did in the troubled times.

She thought of hailing him and realized what a foolish notion that was, and instead set herself to follow him. She pressed in closer. He paused to bargain with a pie man who was so thin he looked as if he needed to try some of his own wares. Crowbeard held out a pair of coppers and took a meat pie, and just then she brushed past him, laughing inside, and carried on down the narrow street.