After three strides she glanced back and saw his eyes light on her.

He gave a tenth of a smile and raised his meat pie in mock salute.

A hand reached out and seized his wrist.

The pie man was knocked flat by a thug, and every other man and woman on the street fled like pigeons before hawks, some shrieking, some silent.

The thug who dropped the pie man was big: tall and deep-chested, with a long blond beard.

The man who held her mark’s hand, pie and all, was the pimp of their first encounter. He backhanded Crowbeard, who spun away and fell across the pie man, limbs sprawling.

“That’s your protector, you bitch?” he asked. “You think I don’t know you in men’s clothes? I could get your nose slit for wearing men’s clothes, sweetie. I might just slit it myself.” He came toward her. “Bishop pays a reward for women caught in men’s clothes.”

She didn’t run. Nat Tyler needed the man on the ground and his “lord.” And this was what she trained for. The pimp scared her, though.

“You stuck me with a little knife?” he said. “I’ll . . .”

She drew. She didn’t have time to loosen the sword in the scabbard, and in her moment of fear, she forgot to get her left hand down to hold the throat of the scabbard, and so, for a heart-stopping moment, the scabbard’s wood and leather clung to the blade, and they came up together, but the narrow belts that bound the scabbard held, and the blade broke free.

Her draw, clumsy as it was, took the pimp by surprise, still moving forward, confident in the awe and fear he could cause, and the rising point caught him at the corner of his mouth, ripped out a tooth, and went up through his nose and stuck a moment in the ridge of bone in his brow before she passed back and got the blade free.

He grunted, slipped to one knee, and drew a heavy cutlass.

“You fucking bitch,” he said, except that a bit of his gum came out and he had to spit blood.

The big thug stepped forward and hefted a big oak club studded with nails.

“Shit,” Lessa said aloud. She knew that if she’d had her face opened by a blade, she’d be lying on the ground whimpering, or at least, she assumed she would. Not drawing a weapon and advancing. “Shit,” she said again.

She circled a little, keeping the big man behind the wounded one, and the pimp stood, swayed, and cut at her with his cutlass. It was an utterly incompetent blow; in one movement, he told her that he was no real threat, that he was untrained, a mere bravo, and weak from her first blow, and her heart soared. She flicked her little sword at his face; he overparried, and she cut his sword hand off his arm, just as Tyler had taught her, with a back cut from her rising sottano, her thumb pressed to the flat of her blade.