The first wrong thing was the light. It flooded through the windows more strongly than it ever had before... because, she realized, she had never been in this room so late before. Gods, it had to be ten o’ the clock, perhaps later.

The second wrong thing was the sounds from below. Mayor’s House was ordinarily a peaceful place in the morning; until noon one heard little but casa vaqueros leading the horses out for their morning exercise, the whicker-whicker-whick of Miguel sweeping the courtyard, and the constant boom and shush of the waves. This morning there were shouts, curses, galloping horses, the occasional burst of strange, jagged laughter. Somewhere outside her room—perhaps not in this wing, but close—Susan heard the running thud of booted feet.

The wrongest thing of all was Maria herself, cheeks ashy beneath her olive skin-tone, and her usually neat hair tangled and unbound. Susan would have guessed only an earthquake could make her look so, if that.

“Maria, what is it?”

“You have to go, sai. Seafront maybe not safe for you just now. Your own house maybe better. When I don’t see you earlier, I think you gone there already. You chose a bad day to sleep late.”

“Go?” Susan asked. Slowly, she pulled the duvet all the way up to her nose and stared at Maria over it with wide, puffy eyes. “What do you mean, go?”

“Out the back.” Maria plucked the duvet from Susan’s sleep-numbed hands again and this time stripped it all the way down to her ankles. “Like you did before. Now, missy, now! Dress and go! Those boys put away, aye, but what if they have friends? What if they come back, kill you, too?”

Susan had been getting up. Now all the strength ran out of her legs and she sat back down on the bed again. “Boys?” she whispered. “Boys kill who? Boys kill who?”

This was a good distance from grammatical, but Maria took her meaning.

“Dearborn and his pinboys,” she said.

“Who are they supposed to have killed?”

“The Mayor and the Chancellor.” She looked at Susan with a kind of distracted sympathy. “Now get up, I tell you. And get gone. This place gone loco.”

“They didn’t do any such thing,” Susan said, and only just restrained herself from adding, It wasn’t in the plan.

“Sai Thorin and sai Rimer jus’ as dead, whoever did it.” There were more shouts below, and a sharp little explosion that didn’t sound like a firecracker. Maria looked in that direction, then began to throw Susan her clothes. “The Mayor’s eyes, they gouged right out of his head.”

“They couldn’t have! Maria, I know them—”

“Me, I don’t know nothing about them and care less—but I care about you. Get dressed and get out, I tell you. Quick as you can.”

“What’s happened to them?” A terrible thought came to Susan and she leaped to her feet, clothes falling all around her. She seized Maria by the shoulders. “They haven’t been killed?” Susan shook her. “Say they haven’t been killed!”