While I worked to heal, Nanaea, an apt pupil of the Koru warriors, went around to give the men in the camp a close beard trimming with Dagan’s dagger. She left them freshly shorn, if puzzled, but returned to me and Iltani with their hair trimmings in a sack and a look of firm determination on her face. We spent the next two hours stitching beards together with sticky bitumen and remnants of cloth, and shrugged into borrowed tradesman clothing to help us become the traders we were supposed to be.

Then we headed to Alu.

“It is impossible to breathe in this beard. Nanaea, you did not account for us having to stay alive while we sneak.”

“Be quiet!” I glared at Iltani. “You’re the one who insisted on going into the city as a man, too. You could’ve been safe as yourself, and you know it. So please, for Selu’s sake, stop fidgeting.”

My throat tight, I ducked under Gala’s arm with Nanaea and Iltani as he let us through the west gate. Dagan had introduced us as diminutive tradesmen from Laraak, and we pressed coins into his hands silently as we moved past to make sure he at least pretended to believe us.

Nanaea had shaded circles under my eyes and darkened my eyebrows, but I couldn’t seem to get my voice low enough to please anyone. So I was to feign muteness. Iltani, her voice pitched deeper than a drum, with a hint of a rasp, would do all of our bartering.

Dagan had been given a Laraak trader costume as well, sewn furiously by Nanaea to accommodate his height and breadth, and with the Koru’s gray paint in his beard and tiny lines expertly painted into his forehead and around his eyes, he looked twenty years older than he was.

In the daylight, Alu was even more of a mess than I thought. The impoverished section of the city along the wall wasn’t just half-burned; the residents here looked half-starved as well. My throat tightened as we walked by a little boy, his shoulder blades stuck out from his back, cheeks hollow, holding up a bowl. I dropped a handful of shekels into it as we passed, and Iltani roughly grabbed my arm.

“The street vermin will give you lice, Azizi.”

“He is dying.” My chest tightened in sympathy for the boy.

“And Laraak tradesmen are crude. Anything else will give us away.” She looked around us at the busy streets, teeming with malnourished people going about their business.

She was right, of course. If anyone was skilled in the art of conniving and trickery, it was her.

“Are you set?” Dagan whispered out the side of his mouth, around his grizzled beard.

“Yes, are you?”

Shep had asked Ensi Puzu to meet him and Dagan at the house of Widow Girru, a sympathizer to our cause. Dagan would tell him of our plan to try to get his support for a majority vote. Then Shep would hand Rish over to Dagan, and they’d go to Assata’s Tavern for sikaru. We’d meet them there so I could sew up Rish’s arm and ask Assata to help us convince the other ensis to support Arwia for the throne.