Carefully, cleanly, methodically, in large dark letters, she wrote over the edict, covering its words.

T-H-E-K…

She dipped again.

I-N-G-L…

Again.

I-E-S.

Alba stepped back. She looked at her words. She looked at her beetle-black finger and the butcher’s wife’s tunic. She wasn’t going to sully something his wife had kept nice for so long. Instead, she ran her finger back and forth under the last word she’d written, rubbing the lampblack onto the king’s parchment, rubbing until her finger was clean and the line dark and obvious—a cleaning, an underlining. An emphasis. There.

She had written with the soot left from flames, but it seemed to her the words were now burning.

THE KING LIES.

XXXII

ANOTHER PANCAKE, PERHAPS?

Hot under the wool Ness had wrapped around her, Rae listened miserably to the sounds of the market, unable to enjoy any of it. In the distance, she could hear piping and drumming, music carrying across the haggling voices, and straining, she could catch snatches of conversations, coming and going—

No, I can’t make it out. I’ve no sense of those marks. What does it say? What? Why are you whisper—?

And I said, I’ll give you three coins for that jug, but he wouldn’t sell for less than five—

Oh, but he didn’t—He did. You don’t say. I do in—

There you are, Apprentice. I went back to the cart looking. Do you mind, I’ll be a few more hours, it seems. But we’ll be on our way before dusk—

Have you had her pork pie? If you’re quick, you might just—

—and, breathing deep, she could smell roasting meats and warm breads and sharp spices, and she wanted nothing more than to see all the chatting people and their odd, colorful wares. But Mop and Nessa looked so worried, their faces so lined with fear—Mop pacing, even, between customers, berating himself, How could I? How could I have thought this a good idea? Oh, Nessa, Nessa, what have I done?—that she kept herself still and quiet, the scent of the fleece thick around her.

Three times, market-goers asked to buy the cart and the handsome pair of sheep tethered at their stall, and three times, Mop and Nessa hesitated.

“I don’t know, Mop,” Nessa murmured. “We may need it later to carry away… whatever we bring home from the market.”

But the fourth time, Mop relented. “The sheep, yes, we’re selling the pair.” He shook his head at Nessa, who was silently protesting. “Thirty coins for the ewes,” he announced. “See how clean their wool, how shiny their hooves. They’re trained to pull, and they’ll keep you in wool and milk for many a year.”

As the customer led the sheep away, Mop put his hand on Nessa’s shoulder. “It’s fine, Ness. I promise. I can push Rae out in the cart if I have to. Besides, no one’s come: I’ve seen no guards, and there was that girl earlier—the goatherd, you saw her, asking for lampblack—so someone else has a child here. Perhaps the risk is not so great as we thought.”