She slid into the chair opposite. “Were you followed?”

“No. Were you?”

She glanced about the room without seeming to, but there was no sign of the big man who’d been following her. Just a plump woman in an expensive hat splashed red, reading a poem about the horrors of watching one’s children starve. “No.”

“Good. You should try these.” And he slid his plate across towards her, breathing the words. “A gift from Princess Carlot.”

“Looks good,” she lied, and drew the plate close so the packet underneath it dropped into her lap. She took a bite from one of the sausages. “And it tastes as good as it looks.” That, at least, was no lie. But those eating were the lucky ones. Food that tasted good was a true extravagance these days.

“That concludes our business,” said Chancellor Sotorius’s nondescript man. “Good luck with your endeavours.”

Vick caught his wrist as he got up to leave. “She realises I can’t make any promises.”

“If there is a chance it will help her brother, she is content.” And he nodded briefly, and disappeared into the crowd.

Behind him, a set of young men clashed their tankards together, sent up a spray of froth and dissolved into raucous laughter.

Oh, to be a careless young idiot.

She stopped beside a boy selling matches, so swaddled by his scarf he could barely see.

“First give me some matches,” she said, holding out a silver mark so his eyes lit up.

“Then?”

Vick made sure not to turn. “Do you see a big man watching me? With a hood and a grey beard?”

The boy glanced past her. “He’s stopped maybe twenty strides back.”

She bared her teeth. Bastard had picked up her trail again somehow. “I’m going to take a left here. You hold him up as long as you can.”

“For another mark I’ll fight him.”

“Good lad.” She pushed another coin into his hand. “But you can leave that to me.”

She ducked past him, darted in front of a skeletal horse dragging a near-empty cart and slipped around the corner, down an alley into one of those blackened scars in the city. Someone had set a fire, burned one of the Southerner’s temples down, taken a few streets with it. Now the houses yawned empty—blackened rafters, scorched windows, glimpses

of charred wreckage through the broken doorways.

Quiet here. That soft, muffled silence that comes with snow. A few sets of tracks, from people taking refuge in the ruins, or doing dark business of one kind or another, but they’d partly filled up with the most recent fall. She stomped a dozen clear bootprints into the white then backed up quick, planting her feet in the tracks so she made no more. She gathered herself, then sprang sideways into a dripping doorway, pressing her back against the scorched plaster. She made herself silent, made herself small, and waited.

She could’ve slipped away. But if this bastard had found her twice, he’d find her again, and when he did, it might be him who got the jump on her. She had to know who he was, who’d sent him, in which of the thousand possible ways her rickety plan had shaken apart. There could be a dozen Burners waiting right now at her apartment with a fistful of letters from the king and her name all over them. She had to know.