Later, after she’d told everything to Tyler, she lay under the man’s cloak in the beggar’s hall, the undercroft of the former Guild Hall of the Drapers, burned by the Galles. The upper stories had fallen in, but the basements were mostly intact, and the King of the Beggars and his court had moved in.

Tyler came and sat cross-legged like a tailor by her palette of straw. “One more thing,” he said.

She rolled over. Out in the smoky hall, a man was beating another with his fists. Closer in, two women made love in relative silence. “Yes?” she said softly.

He gestured with his thumb. “What’d he look like? Your contact?”

She thought about it. “Middle height, grey beard, sharp nose, beard and mustache like a courtier, sword hands; clean nails, calluses. Clean linen.”

“Scars?” Tyler asked.

“On the backs of both hands.”

Tyler made a motion with his mouth; she didn’t like it, because she associated it with his hiding something. But in this case the old Jack nodded. “Kit Crowbeard,” he said. “You did well,” he said, the rarest of praise.

“Comrade?” she asked. “Why kill the queen?” She paused. “I mean, I know why. But why for Towbray?”

Tyler leaned close in the whisper-filled darkness. “We will bring it all down,” he said softly. “Let it all burn. Then we’ll be free.”

But you take orders from a demon, Lessa thought. She was still trying to parse it when she fell asleep.

Albinkirk—Mistress Helewise

Mistress Helewise was watching her daughter flirt. Her daughter was standing in their yard, now finally clear of refuse, with swept cobbles and one neat pile of horse dung by the stable door, there apurpose. The well worked and had a pump, and by the pump stood two tall, well-muscled young men, Jamie Le Hoek and Haegert Coucy, squires, and today, reapers. Most of the women had been out in the fields; the wheat was tall and dark autumn gold, the grains full and hard so that the stalks bent a little with the weight; the wheat and the oats were both ready to be harvested, and it was the fullest harvest anyone could remember, if on the fewest farms. Viewed from the roof of Helewise’s stone manor house, there were more fields fallow than tilled, stretching away to the walls of Albinkirk; the red and gold of the trees had to replace the glowing gold of crops in too many places. But if the planting had been sparse, the crop was rich beyond imagining, and they were too few to reap it all and get it into the barns and stone silos.