She felt the tears squeeze hotly from the corners of her eyes and trace their steady and relentless paths along her temples, dampening her hair, but they would not be held. She was shaking, and not wishing to disturb Nanse, she rose carefully and took a few steps from the bed. She tried to make no noise.

And then she froze, because she heard a sound that was not of her making.

There was only one small window in the kitchen, near the door, and Nanse had fastened it before they went to bed, yet Lily heard the window shifting in its frame as though it had been forced, and then she heard it opening.

At least, she thought that was what she heard, because by then the sound of her own pulsing heartbeat in her ears had risen loud enough to mask all other sounds, and she was rooted to the floorboards by her fear. She could not move.

Someone was coming through the window.

Not a grown man, but a boy. Her eyes, adjusted to the faint light from the near-dead embers of the hearth, could just make out his figure as he clambered through the opening and dropped on cat feet to the floor. He carried something in his hand she thought at first might be a tankard until he unlatched the front and Lily saw it was a dark lantern, designed to shield the candle well within until its light was needed.

In the sudden glow she glimpsed his face. And he saw hers.

From underneath the window, in the close, there came a muffled cough, and at the same time a rough whisper asked, “All clear?”

She stared in terror at the boy, who looked not that much older than herself, and he stared back at her, and Lily thought, He’s going to let them in.

He was not on his own—he’d come with men who meant to rob the shop and house, and he was going to let them in, and then all would be lost. They would hurt her, and hurt Nanse, and—

More impatiently now came the whispered, gruff demand, “All clear?”

She should have screamed. She should have run for aid, or run for safety, or done anything but stand there like a rabbit trying hard not to be seen. Against the candlelight, she held the boy’s gaze pleadingly and shook her head.

He closed the lantern, and the light was gone. And then he was, as well. Or very nearly.

He’d gone halfway through the window when she heard one man outside ask, low, “What is it?”

“There were men awake and talking in the next room,” said the boy.

If he said anything more Lily did not hear it, for she was startled by a shrill scream at her back as Nanse rose from their bed in time to see the boy’s feet slipping out the window.

“Thief!” cried Nanse, and “Murder!” as she staggered to the door and wrenched it open and called out into the close after the running figures that had swiftly fled into the shadows of the Canongate.