Surrounding her, literally in the shadow of the immaculately maintained walls, hunkered a long row of wine sinks and brothels, teak shacks slapped together, their walls as much gap as wood, crooked doorways and windows hung with limp, ratty cloth. The juxtaposition was glaring, but it had its logic: the Malkeenians maintained the right to raze fifty paces beyond the moat in the event of an assault on the city. There had been no such assault in hundreds of years, but those citizens rich enough to want fine homes were cautious enough to build them elsewhere, far enough from the palace that no skittish emperor would burn them in the name of imperial security. And so, despite their proximity to the palace, the streets and alleys surrounding Adare were all squalor and noise, the scent of cheap pork grilled to burning, rancid cooking oil, shrimp paste and turmeric, and, threaded beneath it all, the salt bite of the sea.

In the past, as befit her station, Adare had always departed the palace by the Emperor’s Gate, which opened westward onto the Godsway, and for a moment she simply stood, trying to get her bearings, trying to make sense of the cacophony around her. A man was approaching, she realized with a start, a hawker, the wooden bowl hung from his neck filled with some sort of blackened meat, the strips charred to their skewers. He was halfway into his pitch when Fulton stepped forward, shaking his grizzled head and grumbling something curt that Adare couldn’t quite make out. The vendor hesitated, glanced at the pommel of the blade protruding through the Aedolian’s cloak, then spat onto the pitted flags and moved away, already soliciting other business. Birch joined them a moment later.

“Over Graves?” he asked. “Or along the canal?”

“Graves would be safer,” Fulton responded, looking pointedly at Adare. “No crowds, fewer lowlifes.”

The district lay immediately to the west, rising steeply onto the hill that had once, as its name suggested, been given over entirely to funerary plots. As the city grew, however, and land became more precious, the well-to-do merchants and craftsmen who sold their goods in the Graymarket or along the Godsway had slowly colonized the area, building between the cemeteries until the entire hill was a patchwork of crypts and open land broken by rows of mansions with handsome views over the Dawn Palace and the harbor beyond.