“We’re looking for Zaira,” I said before Marcello could bring his more authoritative voice to bear. “We’re worried about her. Has she been to see you?”

The old man regarded us warily. “You’re Falconers.”

“Yes.”

“Zaira didn’t want to join the Falcons.”

“We’d noticed.” The old man’s lips pursed at that, as if he were suppressing a smile. I pressed my advantage. “We don’t want to hold her against her will. But now that her secret is out, she won’t be safe anywhere else.”

The old man sighed. “I told her, Lady. I told her she wouldn’t last the night in the Tallows, with Orthys crying for her blood. But she’s fixed on that dog. I might as well have been talking Vaskandran.”

“Orthys?” Marcello asked.

But I held the old man’s gaze and spoke right over him: “Dog? What dog?”

The old man shook his head. “She made me take money. Said something about balancing the scales. All I did, Lady, was this. When Orthys’s ruffians came for her a couple weeks ago, they cornered her in the abandoned laundry she used to sleep in, and she had that scrawny mongrel with her. She could jump out the window into the canal and swim for it, but the dog couldn’t, and she had it in her head that if she left him for Orthys’s men, they’d hurt him. I was in there buying scraps from her, so I promised I’d get the dog out, just so she’d run.”

A wave of pity so strong it bordered on nausea flooded my stomach. “So all this was to pay you back for saving her dog?”

“They do say the mage-marked are a bit daft, Lady.”

“Do you know where she is now?”

“I expect she’s looking for her dog,” he replied with the weary tone of an elder who knows better. “I told her I didn’t see where the mongrel went once I got him out of the building. I’d check the laundry first, since that was where she last saw him.”

Marcello stepped forward into the light of the candle. “How long ago did you talk to her?”

“She couldn’t be more than half an hour gone,” the old man said. “Less, maybe.”

I wanted to clasp his hand, but it was full of candle. “Thank you.”

Marcello reached into his purse, but the old man waved him off. “Take care of that girl, sir. That’s all I ask. No one has since the old woman died.”

“Old woman?” I asked.

The ragpicker nodded. “Zaira never had any family, but an old street sweeper used to watch over her when she was small. She died in the awful tenement fire, what, eight years ago? Zaira’s been alone since then, except for the dog.” He peered at Marcello. “So you find her, Falconer, and you keep her safe.”