The market woke like an opened wound red spices bleeding into the air, citrus and sweat and the sharp metallic breath of the river.
Banners, stitched in the old lords' colors, flapped above the stalls and threw stripes across faces.
Sellers hawked in the same rhythm the city had known for a thousand years: a litany of claims and bargains that braided the wealthy and the poor into a single, humming fabric.
It was the sort of place where names became cheap and reputations cost more than a suit of chainmail.
She moved through it as if she belonged and, perhaps because she did, the crowd parting for her without thought.
Her cloak was the color of wet iron, not ostentatious, but heavy with the sort of plainness that invited no curiosity.
A single guard walked half a pace behind, his hand never leaving the haft of his spear. Men turned; women tightened their wraps.
Children dared each other to follow but most kept to the edges. When a hawker shouted of fresh dates and honey, their voices refracted off the stones and came to her with a kind of ordinary life that could have been balm or poison, depending on the sort of face that met it.
She liked the market in ways she never told anyone. It felt honest. There were no sycophants there, no embroidered smiles designed to test a reaction.
Power, in its nakedness, out in the open, smelled of fruit and leather and animal grease. She liked the small economy: five coins for a bit of bread, a favor for a favor crude transactions that did not care for titles.
Once, long ago, she had thought that to know the pulses of such places was to know the true heart of the realm.
"Stay close," the guard said, his voice a lowered pipe.
She paused beneath a lattice of carved wood. A woman with a basket of figs looked up and blinked, struck by the quiet command in the foreign man's tone.
The guard's eyes stayed on her, patient and sharp as a whetstone. He had served her house for years; his loyalty was polished like a blade. It made her chest feel heavy, an armour she had learned to discard in private.
"Go." She said it simply.
The guard's mouth tightened. The city had rules and the first rule was that those in power were never alone without cause. "My duty..."
"I know your duty," she interrupted, and there was no malice in the sentence, only a fatigue that felt like winter at the spine. "But some things are better done without an audience."
He frowned, and for a moment the market with its shouts and smells dropped away and she saw the years that lay between them: a boy she'd once known who had learned to keep his face impassive, who had once carried her satchel in the rains and now straightened when a noble passed their way.
"If you say so," he said at last, because saying no would be a risk he could not afford and because, beneath the obligation, he trusted whatever she chose.
He stepped backwards, the length of his spear halved between them, and then melted into the press of bodies.
She watched him go, an odd ache in the hollow of her ribs. She'd thought that trust could be bartered with coin, that loyalty could be bought and stacked like wood for a long winter.
But some debts ran deeper than the coffer and were not readable in the flow of ledgers and accounts. She turned her face back to the market and moved onwards, choosing the humblest of alleys as if to avoid watchers who only looked for banners and not for the plain cloaked figure weaving through the crowd.
A child brushed her gown and stared, mouth parted, at the sharp blue of her eyes. She pretended not to feel his curiosity; the act of being anonymous had become a kind of power as practical as a knife.
To be unknown in the wrong place was a kind of safety she had learned to cherish.
She found the house by its chipped eaves and the way its shutters sagged like tired eyelids a narrow, three-story thing that had once belonged to a midwife and now served odd tenants.
A matron stood in the doorway, her jaw loose with surprise as if a coiling snake had suddenly uncoiled in her kitchen.
The woman clutching the basket of figs the same woman who had blinked at the guard had followed her into the yawning hum of the street, and now there were other faces leaning out of windows, the thread of curiosity taut and ready.
The matron flinched as the figure approached. "Who....?" she began, surprise tumbling into a question that might turn into accusation.
She was old enough to remember the burning of a certain house in the capital and the days after, when men who had been nothing stepped forward with polished words and asked for positions.
The wrong name asked at the wrong moment could set a room to trembling.
The woman who had come so far slid through their little circle like a fish slipping between rocks.
She stopped a pace before the matron. "Forgive me," she said, and her voice was as soft as a coin being set on a palm.
She reached into the folds of her cloak and drew out a handful of silver too much for a simple visit and an odd hush spread.
The matron's hand, lined and quick, came forward as if drawn by the silver tide.
"Keep it," the woman said, pressing a coin into the matron's palm before she could speak.
The coin was cool, old-fashioned the king's crest stamped with a gentle hammer and for one breath the matron's eyes widened as if the coin had a light in it. "For your trouble," she added. "For water, or bread, or the boy's fever."
"It is...." the matron began. She looked toward the windows, toward the mouths ready to open with gossip. "Who are you?"
Before the matron could finish the question the woman stepped back. She always preferred movement to words motion could hide intentions and ease the rise of suspicion.