In the market you could be a thousand things simply by walking one way or another. She let her cloak fall over the silver as if embarrassed by charity.
The matron opened her mouth again, but before sound could crawl out the woman made a small, reckless thing: she vaulted.
She sprang up toward the low eaves and landed on the first rooftop with the feral grace of a cat.
There was a small gasp below and then a confusion of shouts. Fingers pointed. The wooden tiles groaned under her weight and then accepted her as if they had been waiting.
She ran, not stopping to look back, and her cloak was a small, dark comet across the sky.
The market below spooled into a narrower world; roofs became thighs of earth and chimney stacks like the ribs of the city.
She leaped from roof to roof with the ease of someone who had practiced the geometry of escape: the length of gables, the give of tiles, the resting places of shadows.
Her breath came tight in her chest, a quickness that was part exhilaration, part the small, electric terror of being seen and not being stopped.
The guard from the market huffed a moment later onto the roof where she had stood he was not as nimble, but the market was too populous for him to follow in the same way, and he had been cautious, loyal, and true.
She could see him now, a figure on the edge of sight, cursing and then clambering down to the alleys, the spear a bright line in his hands.
She allowed herself the briefest smile. He took his orders and his oaths and kept them, like so many soldiers. In the end, their choices were smaller than the people they swore to protect.
She dropped from the roof into a narrow courtyard and moved toward the shop that had been waiting like a secret lover.
It was a small place, shelves lined with jars and the faded remains of once-fine cloth.
The bell over the door gave a thin note as she slipped in, and the shopkeeper a stooped man with the look of someone who kept his eyes on the floor because the world above had cost him too much glanced up and then away without recognition.
The shop was a front, ornate but ordinary, and the rear door creaked as she pushed it open.
A ladder led down into cool stone and damp. The air smelled of earth and old wood, and when she descended the stairs the world changed.
Footsteps above were muffled, as if reality itself had dimmed a little. At the bottom of the ladder was a trap an old hatch hidden beneath a carpet and beneath the hatch a doorway that smelled of oil and old iron.
Beyond the door the tunnel waited like a lung opening. It was narrow and cut with many forked paths, the kind of subterranean architecture that made sense when ruling houses needed secret ways to move between them without the prying gaze of the court.
The tunnel had not been re-walled in decades; the stones were old and slick, and the air hummed with a memory of feet that had gone before hers.
There were signs at the forks not written for the illiterate, but marked by scratches and the tang of a hand-shaped map. She chose left, without opening the map she carried.
Left had always been the side where the river ran in older maps, toward the less-guarded district. In politics, as in tunnels, choosing the less obvious path often saved a life.
She walked quickly, not running, because haste had a certain unsightliness; rather, she moved with the lithe assurance of purpose.
The walls seemed to lean in, listening. Dampness cooled the edges of her cloak. The light at her back contracted until the world became a slit in which her small torch flickered and showed her the pale face of the stone like a thing in moonlight.
Every step made an echo like a heartbeat and, in that echo, she could nearly hear the voices of the city above caravans, prayers, the laughter of officials who thought their bargains permanent.
A scuff behind her made her hand leap to the dagger at her thigh. For one raw moment she thought herself trapped by a tail, some petty spy sent by an unscrupulous magistrate or a rival house. But the sound was only the scuttle of a rat and, for all the danger that sometimes trailed her, a certain loneliness followed like a friend. Being followed by rats was better than being followed by men.
She pressed on until the tunnel opened into a small chamber lit by a shaft of light from a crack above. At the far side, another hatch stood. She pushed and it gave with a thin shriek, and then she was looking at green fingers of leaf and a hot, whispered smell of open land. For a moment the world could have been any other a province miles away from the city's politics, free of names and titles.
But there, in a pattern of light and leaf, a woman was waiting. She stood by a horse, straight as a lance, the reins looped over her wrist as if she had never known fear.
The woman's face was like a weathered coin: hard, struck by many seasons. She had the kind of pull in her bearing that made one know she had given commands and been obeyed. When their eyes met the stranger inclined her head with the small civility of a soldier.
"You're later than I expected," she said.
"Late is a story told by those who count time on the wrong side of watchmen," the woman answered.
Her breath still smoked with the heat of the tunnel. She wiped a smear of dust from her cheek with the back of her hand and, without thinking, she smiled... a small, tired thing that made the other woman's lips twitch almost imperceptibly.
"You have a way with words even when you are running on your knees," the horse-woman noticed.
They called her by a dozen names in whispers broker, savior, poisoner, saint but there was no name on her lips now. She had learned that names were traps.
They were hooks set in throat or treasury, and every time one called her something she had to decide which end of the rope she would be tied to.
"Is there anything else?" the horse-woman asked, that phrase folded like a hinge.