creation. Then there was the lynchpin of the whole business, King Orso—born with a silver spoon so far up his arse you could see the end when he yawned. Vick’s best hope was that his valet could stop him making a fatal blunder—a fourteen-year-old he’d hired while she was working as a laundry girl in a brothel.

The one person she actually trusted was Tallow, and he was the one person she’d made sure to keep entirely out of it.

All those hard-learned lessons from the camps. All the painstaking risks and calculations. All the lies she’d told to make sure she stayed on the winning side. All pissed away in one moment of folly.

She paused at a corner to tap the dirty snow from her boots, and to take another careful glance back while she was doing it.

That big bastard in the hood was still on the other side of the street, face hidden except for a scraggy grey beard on a heavy jaw. She’d been worried he was following. Now she was sure. There was something in the way he stood that she didn’t like at all. Slightly hunched around his left side. As if he was trying to hide a weapon that was too big to conceal.

Tempers were short in the market. Stocks were low and dwindling, prices high and climbing. A beefy labourer was arguing with the fishmonger, feet planted wide and finger stabbing. Vick slipped up through the crowd and, in passing, slid her hand between the labourer’s legs from behind and gently cupped his balls. He spun around, but by then she was considering the second-hand cutlery on the next stall.

“What the—”

The labourer grabbed the nearest man, started snarling in his face. Vick dropped and slithered under a wagon, darting through the press bent double, gripping her bad hip tight to stop it aching, folk all straining up on tiptoe to see the blazing row behind. She slipped through the doorway of a pawnshop she knew, which had another door at the far side onto the Middleway. She nodded to the clerk as he frowned at her over his cracked eye-lenses, pulled her collar up against the cold and joined the hunched crowds shuffling south.

It was busy in the tavern. Noisy with idle chatter and hot with wasted breath, the windows misted so the street outside became a sparkling blur. One of those places where rich young men gather to pretend to be poor young men, and vomit up whatever point of view they last heard. One of those places where rich young men once brayed for a Great Change, and now drank hard and hoped desperately it would go away again.

She’d made sure she was early but her contact was there ahead of her. A nondescript fellow with a sprig of holly on his lapel, an empty glass and a plate of unappetising sausages in front of him.

“Inspector Teufel.”

“And you are?”

“An employee of Chancellor Sotorius of Sipani.” Though he spoke with no accent at all.