“I’ve seen enough folk thrown off the Tower of Chains. And I quite like King Orso.” A strange thing for her to say. She hardly even knew the man. Just that little bit of appreciation he’d given her, when she came back from Westport. And his hand on hers, in a room under the House of Questions. Was that all it took, to win her devotion? Maybe Glokta had been right. She really was desperate for something to be loyal to. “You can stay here for now. Doubt they’ll be looking for you a few hundred strides from the Court of the People. And they’ve plenty of others to chase. Seems to me they don’t care much who they execute as long as there’s a queue.”

“What were you doing,” he asked, “in that tavern?”

“Don’t trust me?”

He said nothing. She supposed where the king’s safety was concerned, a First Guard trusts no one.

“I was getting these.” She winced as she pulled the packet out from behind her belt and slipped it onto the table. “Jewels. From the king’s sister, in Sipani. We’re going to use them to buy the city gates.”

“Greed still works?”

She snorted. “People are still people—”

There was a heavy knock at the door.

Vick met Gorst’s eye and put a finger to her lips. A pointless gesture, since he barely spoke anyway. He pressed himself to the wall and silently slid out his short steel, a forearm’s length of immaculately polished metal catching the candlelight.

So those dozen Burners she’d been expecting had done the clever thing and waited for her to get home before paying a visit. She grimaced as she bent down and slid the knife from her boot, holding it out of sight behind her arm.

“Coming!” she called breezily as she strolled down the hall, while her heart thudded in her ears. She tried to pull the door open as if she was guilty of nothing and had no broken ribs, then felt a giddy rush of relief, then a giddy rush of pain as she breathed in too hard. “What is it, Tallow? I’ve got company.”

He stood there in the chilly dusk, staring up at her. “Hadn’t heard from you in a day or two. I was worried. Then, you know, I heard voices—”

“And the only reason a man would darken my door is to kill me, is it?” She shifted to block the doorway. Not hard to do. It wasn’t a big doorway. “We’ve all got needs, Tallow.”

He looked first surprised, then slightly disturbed, by the idea that she might have needs. “Oh. Right.”

“I appreciate your concern.”

He stood staring at her.

She wafted her fingers off into the night. “You can go.” And she shouldered the door shut.

She leaned against the wall for a moment, holding her side and breathing carefully, not too shallow, not too deep. Then she walked back down the hall, slipped around Gorst and over to the window, twitched the shutter back a chink to make sure Tallow was on his way.