Kiel looked out at the street a moment, face blank as a page, unreadable. Finally he nodded. “All right. We’ll avoid the rooms and the bank. But that leaves us with no coin and no safe place to lodge.”

“Do you know anyone in the city?” Kaden asked.

Kiel started to respond, but Triste spoke first. “I do.”

Her eyes were wide with something that might have been fear or hope or both, and she had clutched her hands together so tightly the knuckles had gone white.

“Your mother,” Kaden said, the realization settling into place like the last stone in a carefully built wall.

She nodded.

“Did you tell Matol who she was?”

She hesitated, then nodded once more.

“Then they’ll know to look there.”

“He won’t be able to,” Triste replied, seized with a sudden vehemence. “The temple is enormous, and it’s built for discretion. There are dozens of entrances, most of them hidden, so that the patrons can come and go without attracting notice. If we can get inside, my mother will hide us. I know she will.”

Kiel held his hands up, trying to slow the conversation. “What temple? Who is your mother?”

“She is a leina,” Triste replied, her voice hard and defiant, inviting him to mock her.

He just raised his eyebrows. “A priestess of Ciena.”

She nodded. “It’s perfect: Annur’s richest, most powerful men and women patronize the leinas, and my mother used to tell me ‘Lust loosens the tongue.’ If there’s something worth knowing in Annur, we can learn it there.”

For a sacred structure dedicated to all the pleasures of mankind, Ciena’s temple didn’t look like much from the outside. It was huge, no doubt, sprawling over more than a city block, but all Kaden could see from the street was a blank stone wall six or seven times his height, the whole thing crawling with flowering vines but otherwise unadorned. Aside from the size, it wouldn’t have been so out of place in Ashk’lan.

“I expected more . . .” He searched for the right word. “. . . extravagance.”

“It’s all on the inside,” Triste replied. “Like true pleasure.”

Kaden stared at the nondescript stone. “All right. How do we get inside?”

The cobbler’s shop was small, but the shoes perched behind the glass windows—shoes in every color and shape, from delicate sandals to boots that would stretch halfway up the thigh, shoes made of soft leather and snakeskin and dark exotic wood—looked as though each pair cost at least a golden sun. Reinforcing the impression, two men stood flanking the door, hands on the pommels of their swords. Both were immaculately groomed and armored, but they had the hard eyes and scarred faces of seasoned fighters.

The closest one ran his gaze skeptically over Kaden and Kiel, then raised a palm.

“Nothing your size here, I’m afraid.”