Adare hesitated. The two youths frightened her, but then, she was quickly discovering that everything outside the confines of the red walls frightened her: the canal, the narrow streets, the shouts and slamming doors, the people with their hard, defiant eyes. The whole ’Kent-kissing world was turning out to be terrifying, but every Annurian citizen couldn’t be a robber or a rapist. The rich, she reminded herself, did not have a monopoly on decency. She tried to think about the picture she presented: a mud-smeared young woman suffering from a strange sort of blindness, navigating a particularly treacherous street. Maybe they just wanted to help.

“C’mon,” the youth pressed. “Skinny thing like you can’t weigh but a few pounds.”

He gestured to the basket again.

Adare took a deep breath and nodded. Maybe they wanted to help her out of simple kindness, but more likely they were hoping for a few copper suns when they reached the square, something to mitigate their failure at the canals. Palanquins were ubiquitous in the city, and what was the basket but a poor-man’s palanquin? She felt surreptitiously for the purse secreted inside the dress. If they expected coin, she had enough to pay them a thousand times over. Besides, her legs were trembling after the effort of fleeing her guard, swimming the river, then crouching cold beneath the bridge. It would feel good to be carried again, if only a short distance.

“All right,” she said. “Just as far as the square. I appreciate your kindness.”

The youth with the hook winked, gesturing toward the basket once more.

Adare took two steps toward it when a new voice brought her up short.

“Unless I’ve forgotten my geography, this isn’t your turf, Willet. Last time I checked, you worked the streets south of Fink’s Crossing.”

She looked up to find the speaker watching her from the intersection a few paces distant. She couldn’t be sure through the blindfold, but he looked older than the canal rats, maybe ten years older than Adare herself, tall, rangy, and handsome in a rough sort of way. She squinted, eyes adjusting to the shadow. The man’s deep-set eyes, the lines stamped into his forehead beneath his short-cropped hair, made him look worried, even severe. He had a large soldier’s pack on his back, though he wore no obvious uniform, just leather and wool. It was the sword hanging from his hip that drew Adare’s eye.

The youth with the hook paused, then spread his hands. “Lehav. Been a while. We was just doin’ the lady a good turn, carryin’ her to Dellen’s Square. . . .”

“A good turn,” Lehav replied. “Is that what you call it now?”