“I hate how much I love this city,” he’d even said to Silvy once. Said it to others too, but she was the one who’d told him it was an odd thought, and asked him why. It was the way she was. She asked questions.

They’d been in the tavern downstairs, he remembered. He’d just recited a new poem, received coins and drinks for it. And laughter. He chased laughter, Villar thought. Always had. Needed it.

In the inns and taverns he was quick with his words, was known (feared) for it. But that time he’d thought for a bit before answering her. “Because if you love something too much, you can be destroyed if you lose it,” he’d said, eventually.

She’d left it at that. She knew Jolis de Charette, too. Of course she did. Had even warned him about her. Silvy had an annoying habit of being right about things.

No time for that thought, either, just now. He needed money. He needed to do a thing tonight.

Villar found his cloth cap on a post at the end of the bed. Pulled over his ears, it made him look like an outlaw. One of the Jacquards, with their secret language and safe houses dotting the countryside, with door-knock sequences you needed to know to be admitted, not killed, and then coded phrases to speak. He even knew some of those, from a late-night conversation with a man who’d had too much to drink once.

He didn’t know the countryside at all. He didn’t like the countryside. He was a city person. This city. Which he loved. Too much.

It was holy for him, really, for all the violence and danger within it. For all that he hadn’t been born here. Orane was what he knew of the world, really.

Holy for him. He laughed at himself. He was about to take part in the robbery of a genuinely holy place. The cloth cap of an outlaw suited.

Moving cautiously in the utterly black room, trying to stay quiet, he retrieved his patched-up coat, pulled it on. Dark outside, dark in here. Dark in his heart? Not really, Thierry Villar thought. He just had needs. And perhaps one of those, beyond the fact of poverty and a dangerous debt, was for adventures such as this, with people such as the ones he was headed out to meet.

Of course calling it an adventure was to avoid certain questions. Silvy, if she’d been here and listening to him, if he’d been speaking aloud, which he might have been doing if she’d been here, might have said as much.

But she was upstairs. With Anni and Eudes. Warm in a wide bed.

He swore again. Opened the door and went out. Closed it softly behind him. Went down the stairs.