When they slipped out through a small side gate, Morgase did not look very much like herself. A bit of soot had darkened her red-gold hair, taken its sheen away and made it lank. Sweat rolling down her face helped, as well. No one believed that queens sweated. A shapeless dress of rough—very rough—gray wool, with divided skirts, completed her disguise. Even her shift and stockings were coarse wool. She looked a farm woman who had ridden the cart horse to market and now wanted to see a little of the city. Lini looked herself, straight-backed and no-nonsense, in a green woolen riding dress, well cut but ten years out of fashion.

Wishing she could scratch, Morgase also wished that the other woman had not taken her so to heart about the dress not fitting very well. Stuffing the low-necked gown away under the bed, her old nurse had muttered some saying about displaying wares you did not mean to sell, and when Morgase claimed she had just made it up, her reply was At my age, if I make it up, it’s still an old saying. Morgase more than half-suspected that her itchy, ill-draped dress was punishment for that gown.

The Inner City was built on hills, streets following the natural curve of the land and planned to give sudden views of parks full of trees and monuments, or tile-covered towers glittering a hundred colors in the sun. Sudden rises hurled the eye across Caemlyn entire, to the rolling plains and forests beyond. Morgase saw none of it as she hurried through the crowds thronging the streets. Usually she would have tried to listen to the people, to gauge their mood. This time she heard only the hum and babble of a great city. She had no thought of trying to rouse them. Thousands of men armed mainly with stones and rage could overwhelm the Guards in the Royal Palace, but if she had not known it before, the riots in the spring that had brought Gaebril to her attention, and the near riots the year before, had shown what mobs could do. She meant to rule again in Caemlyn, not see it burned.

Beyond the white walls of the Inner City, the New City had its own beauties. Tall slender towers, and domes gleaming white and gold, huge expanses of red-tiled roofs, and the great, towered outer walls, pale gray streaked with silver and white. Broad boulevards, split down the middle by wide expanses of trees and grass, were jammed with people and carriages and wagons. Except to notice in passing that the grass was dying for lack of rain, Morgase kept her mind on what she was hunting.