“Graves would be longer,” Adare said firmly. She had made it past the red walls, but their shadow loomed, and she wanted to be away, truly buried in the labyrinth of the city, and quickly. Unwilling to tip her hand to the Aedolians, she hadn’t yet donned her blindfold, relying instead on the depth of her hood to hide her face and eyes. The meager disguise made her twitchy and impatient. “If we want to reach the Lowmarket and be back before noon, we’ll need to take the canal. It’s relatively straight. It’s flat. I’ve traveled the canals before.”

“Always with a full contingent of guards,” Fulton pointed out. Even as they stood talking, his eyes ranged over the crowd, and his right hand never strayed far from his sword.

“The longer we stand here arguing,” Adare countered, “the longer I’m outside the palace.”

“And we’re ducks here,” Birch added, his earlier playfulness gone. “It’s your call, Fulton, but I’d rather be moving than standing.”

The older Aedolian growled something incomprehensible, stared long and hard at the canal snaking away to the west, then nodded gruffly. “Let’s get across the bridge,” he said. “Less traffic on the southern bank.” He fell in on her left as they crossed the stone span, while Birch walked a few paces to the right, taking up a position between Adare and the waterway when they reached the far side.

The canal, like two dozen others coiling through the city, was as much a thoroughfare as the actual streets. Vessels crowded the channel, tiny coracles, barges, and slender snake boats, most loaded with wicker baskets or open barrels, most selling to the people on the shore, taking coin in long-handled baskets, and returning goods—fruit or fish, ta or flowers—with the same. People crowded both banks, leaning out over the low stone balustrades, shouting their orders to the boatmen. Every so often, something would drop into the water, and the half-naked urchins shivering on the bank would leap in, fighting viciously with one another in their eagerness to retrieve the sinking goods.

Without a score of palace guardsmen to clear a path, the walk took longer than Adare remembered. Though she stood taller than most women, almost as tall as Birch, she lacked the bulk necessary to force her way through the press of bodies. Fulton seemed to grow more tense, more wary, with every step, and Adare was starting to feel nervous herself, the relief of having slipped the noose of the red walls replaced by the constant pressure of sweating bodies all around her, the jostling and shouting, the hammering of a thousand voices.