“Jesus fuck,” the pimp muttered. He fell to both knees in the street. “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck!”

The wrist was still held together by a thread of gristle, and he was trying to hold his hand on. Blood fountained. She moved, watching the big man.

He was shaking his head, whistling between his teeth. “Bad business,” he said in a deep voice.

“Turn,” said Crowbeard, who’d gotten to his feet unnoticed in the last heartbeats.

The big man pivoted, a passable volte stabile that said he might be a tougher prospect than the man who’d hired him.

But he already had three feet of steel through his chest, and he died before he fell back off the long blade.

Kit Crowbeard leaned down and pulled the big man’s hood off his shoulder and used it to clean his long sword. Then he tossed it to Lessa, who caught it fastidiously and used it to clean the blood off her own much shorter sword as if she killed men every day. She was charged with spirit; she wanted to sing, or shout aloud.

“I never like to stab a man in the back,” Crowbeard said conversationally. “I have done it, mind. But I don’t like it.”

Crowbeard sheathed his sword without looking, drew a small knife out of his big boots, and leaned over the pimp, who was still kneeling, whimpering, as he bled out. Lessa thought he was going to finish the man, but instead the older man cut the pimp’s purse free from its strap and opened it, casually leaning against a dirty white house wall.

“Help me,” the pimp said.

Crowbeard looked both ways on the street. “Thanks, by the way,” he said to Lessa. “Nice cut. Next time, use your hips and the hand will come right off like the head of a flower.” He popped open the purse, dumped the coins in the mud, looked inside.

“Help me! Please . . .” the pimp said. His voice already sounded weaker.

Crowbeard looked at the pimp. And grinned. And then looked back at Lessa. “Shall we?” he asked, pointing toward the inn where they were supposed to meet.

“He’ll . . .” she began.

“He’ll bleed out in a few minutes,” Crowbeard said with a terrible smile. “And then he’ll go to hell. Forever.” Crowbeard blew the pimp a kiss. “Come. We have a queen to kill.”

The pimp subsided gradually into the bloody mud of the street. The pie man got to his feet and searched the mud for the coins Crowbeard had dumped, and then ran off, leaving his pies; the other pickpockets, whores of both sexes, as well as the relatively honest tradesmen like the paper seller and the paste maker all stepped over the dying man and hurried on their various ways as he mumbled and burbled. Eventually his mouth filled with the slush and liquid manure of the street when an urchin shoved his face in the muck to shut him up.