The vendors and market-goers stared, but Alba paid them no mind. All her years of being on display as the oracle’s apprentice, for the first time—in the butcher’s wife’s rough-spun tunic—she felt nearly invisible.

She stopped at a wall tacked with parchments and postings. She remembered, vaguely, in her former life perhaps having seen such a thing—but no villager she’d known then could read.

A list of babes born—four girls, three boys.

A list of deaths. Two by age, three by illness, two by hunger, one by horse, one by boar.

Alba perused the notices, at turns smiling and frowning over the celebrations and sorrows.

The notice of an arrest. A man had stolen a goat. And another—a woman had stolen two fruit pies… from a neighbor.

Two marriages. A potter to a swineherd, a blacksmith to a tanner.

Coming to the center placard, she stopped.

Oh. Oh!

She flushed with anger. Here was the notice the butcher had mentioned—the search for the children. The demand to prove parentage. The edict to take away children who might threaten the realm.

Children threatening the realm. Alba glared at the posting, at its fat, waxy, officious seal. Around her, people came and went, glancing once or twice, seemingly unheeding… only now Alba noticed the market was empty of children.

How they must be hidden away. How the parents must be living grieving and terrified. And now that she was looking—how could she have failed to see?—she saw mouths pinched into tight lines, eyes shadowed with worry. Alba chastised herself: She’d been passing through the market unnoticing, and all around her was sorrow that had roots in her own words.

“Not really a mirror at all,” she whispered, wishing she could still cling to the oracle’s refrain. Well, she could do something about her words now.

Behind her were shepherds nearly hidden by clouds of lofty fleeces they had stacked to sell. She crossed to their booth and leaned over their display.

“Excuse me, do you have any lampblack?”

“Lampblack?” An old woman, bent over a pile of fleeces, looked up, her expression startled and pained.

“My family were goatherds… sometimes my father would polish hooves with lampblack when he was trying to sell an old billy—”

“We have it.” A gray-whiskered man, rushed, brusque, turned with a small pot. Seeing Alba, he blenched, and the brusqueness softened. “Here.” He leaned over the table and pressed the pot into her hands. “Keep it,” he whispered. “And go back to your family. Quick now.”

“No, I—” Alba began, but the man, eyes wide, waved her away.

“Hurry, hurry, child.”

Alba saw then, beneath the fleeces where the old woman was kneeling, a set of toes. Gray, dust-smudged, they had scrunched themselves into smallness, but still, they jutted from their hiding place.

She looked again at the old woman’s ashen cheeks, the old man’s wide eyes, and understood. “Thank you.” It was all she could say.

Even more determined, Alba returned to the wall and placed herself in front of the king’s posting. She dipped her finger into the pot, blackening it with pigment.