But things hadn’t gotten any better, and here she was, feeling light as a feather. For the first time since the Vendre, she was on her own again, walking the streets without royal raiment or escort. And she had a goal she could actually reach with her own hands. If she lost sight of that, she only had to close her eyes to see little Emil dragging his mother’s body across the cobbles. Whoever had done that had to pay. And if Maurisk was behind it . . .

There was guilt at the back of her mind, of course. Guilt for putting Sothe in danger, for dragging Marcus into her affairs. Guilt for feeling happier than she had in weeks while people were suffering. But Raesinia had been living with guilt for a long time, and she’d learned to push it aside, to get the job done, to take her pleasures where she could.

“Something wrong?” Marcus said. He looked uncomfortable in his full dress uniform, with silver embroidery at his collar and a golden eagle on his shoulders. He’d insisted on wearing his old, battered sword, which was out of place among the polished buttons and neat, shiny leather straps.

“Nothing,” Raesinia said. “Just thinking that this place has changed.”

Which was true enough. The Exchange, an irregular expanse of open, muddy courtyard, occupied almost the entirety of the small Exchange Island, with only a single row of large buildings surrounding it. It was the beating heart of Vordanai commerce, a cyclone of paper and coin, spitting out a storm of letters and messengers to every city in the land. The briefest nod or handshake in the Exchange might mean the launching of a fleet a thousand miles away or the felling of a mighty forest, the destruction of a generations-old family concern or the formation of a new merchant empire.

The permanent structures around the edges of the courtyard represented the princes of commerce, the great banks, merchant houses, and the mightiest of shipping concerns and traders. More mundane traders had to make do with wooden planks laid across a couple of barrels, set up in clusters around the courtyard according to some arcane scheme that took into account their line of business, seniority, and general respectability. Cora had tried to explain it to her once, but Raesinia’s eyes had begun to glaze over after only a few moments.

Even Raesinia, however, could see that things were different now. Many of the great buildings were shuttered and dark; the foreign banks and merchants had abandoned their outposts, either with the revolution or at the advent of the war. Some had been vandalized, especially the Borelgai banks, where the mob had battered the marble and painted vicious slogans across the facades. Others had attracted squatters, traders setting up their temporary desks on the steps or in the lobbies, looking like pygmies invading the homes of giants among the massive, pillared porticos.