Dearest Zann,

A little green bird flew down and perched on my head. I felt my legs walk me out of the chamber, away from Fornan and the moderator. I tried to stop walking, and the bird said, “Stop that.” Then I tried reaching up to swat the bird away, and my arms wouldn’t move, and the bird said, “I will have obedience!”

With the bird on my head, I walked down some corridors and up a staircase. Eventually I was sitting down at a large table in a small bureau. The bird hopped off and flew to the stool opposite me.

“I am the wizard Rheux,” it said. “You are Ybel?”

“Ay.”

“And you know aught about the wizard Ambe?”

“She’s my friend.”

The bird snorted. “I didn’t know Ambe could make friends. I thought her acquaintances fell into two categories. ‘Annoyed’ and ‘Regretful’.”

“Why are you all so angry with her, anyway? Did she do something wrong?”

Rheux tilted its bird head. “Ambe doesn’t accept the Council’s authority over her. She’s a renegado. It’s a challenge to everything we’re trying to build here in Crideon.”

“And what will do you do with her if you find her?”

“That depends on her.”

I felt like I was in a fairly strong position. There was no way these wizards were going to send me back to Ladal. At the worst, they’d send me on my way without helping me. “Well. If Ambe doesn’t want you to find her, then I don’t want that either. I can take a message to her, perhaps. But I also need some help.”

The door opened and a stout, mustachioed man in well-cut merchant’s clothes entered. He drew a dagger and struck! it into the table before me. “Are you talking?” he demanded.

I picked myself up from the corner of the room, where I seemed to have dived.

“Really, Sandavin,” Rheux said. “That’s not necessary. Ybel here was just attempting to bargain with me.”

“Bargain? Bargain?” Sandavin said, turning my chair to face me and sitting down in it. “He’s no place to bargain with us. Produce Ambe! Then mayhap we’ll talk about other things.”

“I’m not a wizard. I don’t have to listen you anything you say.”

“Strange choice of last words,” he said, a green glow forming around his hands. “‘Sandavin,’ they’ll say, ‘did poor Ybel say anything before beginning his new life as a dungfly?’ and I’ll say, ‘Well, he did mention something about not being a wizard, but it didn’t seem important’.”

“You’re bluffing,” I said. “A freelance wizard might do that, but not a Council wizard. Not one that believes in the Council so much that they still want to hunt Ambe down with the city burning up all around them.”

“Prepared to risk your life on that reasoning?”

“Do you want my help enough to help me with something?”

“Let’s hear him out,” Rheux said. “It might not be too bad.”

“I’m in the city looking for a woman named Wande. She has a half-lauran daughter named Jhusdhe. I went to our roost and they were gone. I want to know where they are and if they’re not safe then I want them to be safe. In return I will help you negotiate with Ambe.”

“No bargain,” Rheux said. “We don’t know that she didn’t leave you because you beat her or tried to swive the daughter.”

“Fair,” I said. “Then find them, make sure they’re safe, and take messages between us like I will with Ambe.”

Rheux and Sandavin glanced at each other. “What were you doing with Knarrett?” Rheux asked.

“Our roost is in Ladal’s territory. They caught me and wanted to ransom me to someone, and Knarrett stole me away to come here.”

“And what the golden piss is that coin around your neck?” Sandavin said.

“I don’t know. I found it. Ambe said it was very old and only a little magical.”

He came closer to get a better look at it. “Reminds me of something,” he said. “Something from… No, I can’t remember. But I’d take it off, if I were you.”

“I’m getting kind of attached to it,” I said. “Do we have a bargain?”

They shrugged and sighed. “Tell us about this Wande.”

Love,

Ybel

Dearest Zann,

The bald wizard–Knarrett called him Fornan–led us to a nearby door and said. “Wait here. Don’t come in until I bring you in, or I’ll set fire to your spleen.” Knarrett grinned and leaned against the wall.

Fornan bustled through the door. I couldn’t get much of a view of what was inside, but I heard a lot of voices. I heard Fornan say, “The wizard Knarrett, my notables, with a matter of some import,” in a commanding voice. Then there were more other voices that I couldn’t pick anything out of.

The door opened and Fornan beckoned us in. The room was a… small round theatre, with four rings of seats ascending around a central stage at the bottom, where we were entering. It smelled of old wood and old wax. About half the seats were empty, and the others were filled by a fascinating collection of people.

The wizards here were men and women and other things, with skin pale and dark and green and silver. Some were normal-looking townspeople and some could have been ambassadors from alien worlds. I saw one wizard who was a human-shaped cloud of black-burning candles, and another who looked like a column of ash covered with peacock-feather eyes. Half of them tried to hoot Knarrett down as we entered, and the other half were bored.

A moderator sat at a slowly revolving table in the centre, a man wearing a purple visor. He called out to the other wizards, “Recognize the wizard Knarrett!”

Other wizards yelled down, “Get him out of here!” “The wizard Knarrett can sniff my piss!” and “I only see a traitor to wizardkind!” The moderator made annoyed patting gestures in the air to try to calm them down. “Where’s that robber Ladal? Isn’t he holding your leash?” “Go back to your banditti! You stinking renunciate!”

Knarrett raised his voice to be heard above the shouts. “I never renounced this council! I was only trying to make a living, as is my right as a wizard of the third rank, and I came back here, didn’t I? With something you stupidheads want!”

“The only thing I want from you is the smoke from your remains!” “What do you know about what a wizard wants? You couldn’t even spell it!”

“Ambe!” Knarrett said.

I was watching the wizards’ reactions. Some of them leaned forward, interested. Others threw up their hands in exasperation.

One wizard, her red hair long enough to almost obscure her well-tailored green suit, said, “This council has more important things to worry about than Ambe. Frankly, we always did. But now, with the city in chaos? We need to concentrate on the problem of Lord Clear.”

“Not so!” said a pale-blue coconut crab. “We must always emphasize the unity of our community! I refer to the fool Knarrett as much as the intolerable Ambe.”

“Notables, please,” said a gilded clock. “You backward children are continuing in your usual patterns of flawed ideas. The great benefit of a council such as ours is that we have many minds, some of them almost sentient, that we can set to different problems. Surely there are some among our lot capable of independently interpreting Knarrett’s infantile babblings and discerning Ambe’s whereabouts from them.”

“An excellent suggestion,” said the moderator. “Notables Sandavin and Rheux? You’ve been pressing for us to do something about Ambe and some of our other renegades. Will you take this on?” I didn’t see which ones responded, but they must have agreed silently, because the moderator said, “Very good. Fornan, who is this other?”

“He’s mine,” Knarrett said. “He’s Ambe’s friend, and I found him.”

“Yes, yes, thank you, Knarrett,” the moderator said. “If we have him, do we need you?”

“Not at all,” I said.

Knarrett raised his hand to shut me up, and the moderator gestured. Knarrett disappeared soundlessly. A couple of wizards applauded.

“Your name, sir?” the moderator said.

“It’s Ybel.”

“Notable Rheux? Please escort Master Ybel from this chamber and begin your inquiries…”

Love,

Ybel

Dearest Zann,

Even though Ambe and I had been friends for some time, I had never seen her use magic the way Knarrett did. When Ambe cast a spell, it was in response to some problem that Candur or somebody had brought her. She’d think about it, and then do something to solve the problem. But Knarrett wasn’t in a situation where he thought he could be relaxed and reactive like that. Knarrett had urgent things to do and didn’t mind using magic to get them all done, so he was casting lots of spells and keeping them all going at the same time. It gave me a new appreciation for how dangerous wizards could be.

What he wanted to do was to take me across Crideon without anybody knowing about it. I didn’t know what he had in mind, and I wasn’t interested in helping him do anything to Ambe, but if he could get me away from Ladal I was happy to cooperate.

Knarrett already had a binding spell on me, and some kind of protective spell for both of us. Next he put on a ring, which gave a purple glow to his hand anytime he clenched his fist. Finally he… I don’t know how to describe it any better than this… he grabbed a sheet of air out of nothing and wrapped it around the two of us.

“What’s that?!” I said.

He grinned nervously. “Just a cheap trick,” he said. “It’ll make people not notice us. Basically it’s pretty good against most people but doesn’t do a curst thing against wizards. Good news is I don’t think we’ll have to trick any wizards right away. Still. Don’t talk and don’t piss around on the street. Keep your head down. No point having some pissard with a lot of willpower suddenly see us.”

And, just as easy as that, we walked quietly downstairs and out into the street. Ladal and some of his marauders were in the common room, but we went right past them. It didn’t seem like it ought to work–and Knarrett was just as nervous as I was–but it did.

Once we were well away from the tavern, Knarrett exhaled. “Hardest part’s over,” he murmured. “I don’t want to spend too long wandering around, though. Where’s–oh, I know what.” He turned to me and said, “Get down on your hands and knees.”

“Why?”

“So we can get out of here. Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as being turned into a frog.”

I didn’t want to do it. “No way. I don’t trust whatever you’re going to do.”

“Can’t ever be easy,” he said, and pulled down, with his hand, on the empty air, and the symbol on my forehead hauled me down to a kneeling position. He pulled forward, and I lurched forward so that I was on all fours. Then he sat on my back.

There were other people around, and none of them were staring at us, but when Knarrett swung his leg over my back I thought I saw a couple of them frown slightly, as though they were trying to remember something. Then Knarrett took out a feather and touched my arms with it, and said some words that slipped through my ears without pausing to let me hear them.

And I felt some kind of shape form around us, something like a man on horseback, something like a bird, and we started moving. I wasn’t doing any of the work, and he wasn’t even putting much weight on me; there was just a magical phantom idea carrying us quickly through Crideon. Knarrett was sweating again, with all this magic. “I’ll sleep tonight,” he said.

We whipped through the centre of town. I could see burned buildings and corpses and different gangs everywhere. I had been hoping for a glimpse of Wande, somewhere, but my luck wasn’t in. Finally we turned a corner I could have sworn wasn’t there and stopped in front of a tall and handsome brown building. “You know some wizards here?” I asked.

“They don’t like me much,” he said. “But they’ll love you.” He looked around for threats, saw none, and let a couple of spells drop. We stood upright and noticeable, and Knarrett put his ring away. He led me through the front door and down a hallway. It smelled nice in here, like herbs and oils and wood and things.

We turned a corner, and a fellow in an open bureau there said, “You can’t–Knarrett! You can’t go in there! The Council is meeting!”

“I have business with the Council!”

He came out of the bureau. A bald man with a half dozen large wooden earrings. “No you don’t!”

“This fellow,” Knarrett said, slapping me on the arm, “knows where Ambe has been. He’s her friend.”

The bald man stared at me. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Well. Let me announce you, then.”

Love,

Ybel

Dearest Zann,

I came out of memory and saw Knarrett staring me in the face. He had pimples and his breath smelled of duck.

“I’m learning a lot from you,” he said to me. “I had never heard of that sauce elfpiss before. And now you get turned into a frog? You’re great. I wish you remembered details of what Logoya’s glyphs had looked like. I could probably get a lot out of that.”

“Could you untie me, please?” I asked.

He laughed. “It’s a shame Ladal wants me to kill you. You’ve got all kinds of great memories to read. And you’re not a stupid pissard, which is rare these days! That’s the bad part of everyone rising up against Lord Clear. The worst people get power. Look at Ladal. He’s not so bad compared to a lot of other street bravos, but to have him making decisions for people? Gods protect me. Anyway, it’s almost worth trying to find a way to save you.”

“Anything I can do to shift that balance?”

“Probably not. Now let’s see what else you remember.” The brass hemispheres were still glowing peacefully, and he caught my gaze again. “Maybe something about the palace. Hmm. Guard politics, that’s boring. Oh, there’s Lord Clear! What’s this animal? Anteater, never heard of it. Wait!” He dropped the brasspiece in his hand and it clanged against one of the ones on the floor. Their light winked out.

Knarrett sat back on his bed and ran his fingers through his hair. He was, again, astonished.

“Ybel? You’re an amazing fellow. I’ve never been surprised as many times in a day as I have been since Ladal brought you in here.”

I tested the ropes tying me to the chair. Still very secure.

“All right,” he said, leaning forward. “Tell me everything you know about Ambe.”

Ambe? “She’s my friend,” I said.

“I know she’s your curst friend! That was obvious. Look. Your Ambe’s a wizard? Young woman, big body, lots of junk in her hair, likes to know more than you do?”

That was her all right. “Ay.”

“And she’s with the Rosollas? You can find her?”

“No.”

“No, no what? She’s not with the Rosollas? I saw her there in your memories!”

“She’s my friend. I don’t want her to end up tied to the chair next to me.”

“It’s not up to you,” he said. “Piss a walnut. This changes everything.” He gathered up his brassware, and some other items from around the room. “Ybel, I don’t believe it, you shifted the pissing balance. Now how can I do this.”

Knarrett took a piece of chalk and made some delicate marks on one of his brass hemispheres. Whispered to it for a minute, until it glowed purple for a second. Then he wrapped it in a soiled pair of drawers and tied it to the ropes around my chest.

“That’s protecting us on the street,” he told me. “Don’t shit around with it.” Then he considered, and concentrated.

I hadn’t thought Knarrett was that powerful for a wizard, but through sheer will, it seemed, he created a glowing symbol in the air between us. He didn’t draw it or anything; it just appeared. He took it between his fingers and touched it to my forehead. I thought it was going to burn, but it didn’t; it didn’t feel like anything. “What did you do?” I said.

He sat back on the bed. “Whoof,” he said, and wiped sweat off his forehead. “I could eat another one of those curst ducks. I wish I had time. No, Ybel, you’re too tricky a fellow. I just bound you to me with magic so you can’t run off. And you need to come with me and talk to some wizards.”

Love,

Ybel

“A frog?” I asked Logoya.

“A juggernaut frog,” she corrected me. “They’re armored and they have strong fangs and claws. Pretty big, too, for frogs. No point in sending a regular frog into a nest of hundreds of casket rats; it wouldn’t last a minute.”

“But why any kind of frog?”

She shrugged. “Frogs are how the magic works. Do you want me to explain Barene magic to you?”

“Well, this part of it, yes, please.”

“That’s a shame. Pull up your trouser leg.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Do you want your leg healed or not?”

“Don’t harry me! I need to think about this.”

“What is there to think about? If you want your leg healed, pull up your trouser leg.”

“And then you’ll turn me into some kind of fighting frog? And I’ll go down into those tunnels–” I could see them there, dark holes underneath the squatting stone crypt. “–and fight some death rats and bring this ring back up to you?” I could spot a casket rat now, scuttling along the carving at the bottom of the crypt. Grey, slimy, and sinewy, with some kind of brambly black growths around its foul ears.

“That’s exactly right.”

“It could take me days to find a ring down in all that.”

“Then you’d better get started.”

I didn’t want to do it. Of course I didn’t. “Isn’t there some magical way you can bring the ring to the surface?” I asked.

“There is, actually. I could cast a spell to turn a soldier into a juggernaut frog, and then–“

“All right, all right. Isn’t there something else I could do for you instead?”

Logoya shrugged. “I told you that you got here at the wrong time. Three swings ago I would have had you digging out raspberry cane. But you’re here now and I want that ring.”

I hadn’t realized until that moment how delightful it would be to dig out raspberry cane. I sighed, and pulled up my trouser leg.

“Thank you,” she said. She took a small bottle and brush out of her cloak, and painted my scar with the contents of the bottle. I remember it smelled metallic. But my leg felt the same.

“It still hurts,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “That wasn’t the part that heals you. This is,” and she began drawing elaborate patterns in light all around me, with a beech twig for a quill. I turned around and around trying to see all of the symbols and images she created on all sides of me, hanging in the air like mist, glowing like embers. I was careful not to touch them. I don’t remember how long it took her to complete her work. Less than an hour, certainly. When she finished, she examined it all carefully, and reached out and touched a part of her light-painting that looked like a star. She said, “Ybel, become a juggernaut frog, and find Aara’s ring.”

**

I don’t remember what happened after that. No, that’s not true; I do remember that my leg stopped hurting. But I don’t remember being a frog. The whole thing was long enough ago that some of the details would have faded anyway, but I never remembered anything that happened underneath that crypt. There was a vagueness, kind of like the Great Nap, that went on for some time. Then, after that time, I realized I was myself again. I sat on the ground surrounded by Logoya’s light-designs, gasping and shuddering, covered with mud and with hundreds of tiny faint bite and claw marks that didn’t quite break my skin. Logoya was smiling over the ring she had just pulled out of my mouth.

“How does your leg feel?” she asked.

I tested it. It felt like a perfectly normal leg that had nothing wrong with it. I spit out some grit and rat fur and said, “It feels wonderful. Thank you.” I stood up. I could put weight on either or both of my legs. I stepped and jumped and ran. It really did feel wonderful. I remember that it did. It still does, when I think about it. I pulled up my trouser leg to see. There was still a scar, but differently shaped and not so angry. “It’s better than I hoped it would be. Why can’t I remember anything from when I was a frog?”

“It’s like that for some people,” Logoya said. “Do you want to remember it?”

There was blood under my fingernails, and little shreds of flesh and fur. “By every drop of piss ever spilled, no,” I said. “Never. I don’t even want to remember this. How long was I underground?”

“Five days and nights,” she told me. “After the first few hours I set a spell to watch for you and went back to my cottage to read poetry.”

“Five days and nights,” I said. “I should be starving to death.”

“Oh, I imagine you had plenty to eat down there,” Logoya said, and I puked all over the entire forest for the next couple of hours.

Her name was Logoya, and she was originally from Barenum. Her fingers poked terribly at my leg scars as I clung to her bench. “Mm,” she said. “Was it a shipwright, a scullion, or a drunken clown who first treated this wound?”

“Ow,” I said.

“I’m not surprised it still hurts. I think the other fellow’s sword is still in here.”

“Really? Like a splinter of it, or–“

“Not really.” She gave my calf a gentle slap, and sat up.

“Can you fix it?”

“Ay, I can. Got your crutch? Come with me.”

I planted my crutch and used my good leg to hoist myself upright. I had gotten better at doing that, but this bench was a different height than I was used to, so I did fall down once. Logoya waited patiently for me.

She led me away from her cottage, back into the woods. We weren’t really on a path; she seemed to be looking for landmarks. There were more rocks and deadfalls and things to step over, and I stumbled more often. Logoya, not wanting me to lose sight of her, paused every time while I recovered my feet.

“Are we going somewhere to gather herbs?” I asked. “Or is there a magical pool somewhere, or a silver deer, or–“

“Nothing so pleasant.”

“Oh.”

And then all of a sudden we were there. I didn’t see it until we were very close to it, but there was a stone crypt, all overgrown with scrub and moss, surrounded by trees. “Here we are,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s an old crypt. That’s not the important part. I could tell you the history of who’s inside and how she got there and why I care about it, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. The part you need to know is, there’s a ring that was lost underneath the crypt. It’s gold and it’s set with two pearls. Do you understand so far?”

“I think so.”

“Underneath the crypt is a giant nest of casket rats. The ring is somewhere in their tunnels. I need you to go in there and get it.”

I had a number of questions.

“Do you have any questions?”

“I do. A number of them.”

“I thought you would,” she said.

“For instance, why don’t you go in there and find the ring?”

“Because it’s horrible! Casket rats are vicious, and I don’t want to have to fight them off and dig through years of their dried shit after a ring!”

“And I do?”

“No… but you do want me to fix your leg.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I conceded. “But how can I do that? I can’t go crawling through rat tunnels.”

“I’m glad you asked. I propose to both mend your leg, and also prepare you for invading rat tunnels, by turning you into a juggernaut frog.”

I remembered.

I remembered limping through the forest. My leg hurt, and my arm was over a crutch that Dobdo had helped me carve out of a tree branch. Dobdo had been one of my comrades in the Wallentorp army. The path was rough, and I had to go slowly, so that I wouldn’t trip and fall. But I did trip and fall a lot.

There was a healer in these woods. Everybody said so. He, or she, was supposed to be a strange sort. A foreigner, but, more importantly, someone who didn’t always want money. Sometimes she, or he, wanted some other service. It could be as normal as chopping wood or catching fish, or as weird as painting a thirty-foot pine tree yellow, or standing on your toe for an hour.

And of course the first thing you had to do was find him. I had asked as many people as I could for good directions to his cottage. The ones who claimed to know something all agreed that he was on this side of the ridge, on the edge of a clearing. I had already trudged through four clearings, and the maddening thing was that I had found three cottages, all ruined and abandoned, with no idea if they were the right one. I had to hope not.

The wound on my leg, my calf, had healed long ago. But it healed poorly. It was closed over, and there had been no infection, but it still hurt, and I couldn’t put weight on it. I had to get it healed.

I know now why I so wanted to get it healed. At the time I wasn’t even thinking about why. I just knew that I did want it. Part of that was the pain, of course; that was no mystery. It was a constant stab. Didn’t really matter what position my leg was in; it still hurt. It hurt less if I soaked my leg in hot water or cold water and it hurt more if someone whacked it with a stick. (Which did happen a couple of times.) But to understand my reasons it’s important to remember just what had happened.

When we all woke up from the Great Nap, I woke up in the Wallentorp army. I was vaguely aware of some of the things I had done during the Nap, but this was the first time I had the chance to pay attention to them, to realize that I was far away from my home, my friends, my family. That was harder than having to live like a soldier, squatting in the mud outside some pisscan castle that nobody ought to want anyway. And I couldn’t leave until the war was over, because the lauran officers hunted deserters for sport. And of course there was now something that I wanted more than friends and family: sauce.

Then when the war did end, I was in no shape to go home or go after the sauce. I could hardly walk. What was I going to do, beg? I was a young man! I could do anything! I could, for the first time in a long time, choose something. And I knew one thing: if I ever got a hold of a spoonful of the sauce, I wanted it to taste right. It didn’t taste right for me the first time, and it wouldn’t now, either, not with my leg like this. I just knew this somehow. I had to get my leg fixed first.

The trek through the woods was so miserable I don’t remember the details very well. I know I had to go back to town once, and I know there was one night I spent sleeping in the woods. And I certainly remember trying one path I had seen before, and thinking, “Oh, wait, this must be the one, I should have come this way before.” And I was right! It took me to a clearing, pretty little place with a brook, and a cozy-looking cottage on the far side of it, surrounded by beehives and herb gardens.

I stumped up to the front gate of the little fence around the cottage, and rang the bell politely.

A dark-skinned woman stepped out of the cottage, drying her hands on a cloth. She looked me over.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re here to have your nose shortened.” I liked her immediately.

“What’s wrong with my nose?”

“Nothing at all. It matches your ears perfectly.”

“If you’re trying to sell me extra surgeries…”

“For only a little extra I’ll reduce your gland of suspicion. It seems to be overactive.”

I leaned on her stone fence. It felt good to have the weight off my leg and armpit. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t keep up this level of wit for much longer. Do you think you can help me with my leg?”

She pulled out a bench for me to stretch myself out on. “Probably. I’ll have to take a look at it to make sure. But your problem is that you got here just in time for the price to be very high. I can help you, but you’re not going to like this at all.”

And then I remembered more…

Beloved Zann,

I didn’t want to think too long. First, the longer I stayed in there, the hungrier I was going to get. Second, nothing would be easier than for me to think and think and think and lose my chance of doing anything. I liked an easy pace, but Srix had literally beaten into me the lesson that the best pace was always the fastest one that I could control.

My main problem was that I had nothing. Not just no money, no weapon, no tools, but also, no reason why anybody should do anything I wanted. No influence, no leverage, no power.

But if I did, what would I do with it?

I didn’t quite have a plan, but I’d never have more of one, and if I hesitated I’d lose my nerve. I got up, squeezed past my fellow prisoners in the dark, stepping on a couple of feet, and slapped my hand on the door twice. “Hoy!” I called.

“Don’t do that!” some man said. “Are you crazy?” said some woman.

I heard muttering outside. One of the Half Sun Squares opened the door, reached in and grabbed me, and held a knife to my throat. “Don’t waste my time,” he said.

I didn’t resist. “Tell Ladal that I’m not talking to him,” I said. “I know why he’s locking me up, and I don’t care how long he keeps me in here. I’m not telling him anything.”

“What the piss are you talking about?” There were a couple of other Half Sun Squares there watching. Too many to start a fight with.

“Just tell him,” I said, broke his hold, and stepped back into the shadows of the kegroom.

The door closed, and I spent the next couple of hours telling myself that I was an idiot and that this couldn’t possibly work.

Turned out I was right and wrong about that.

Love,

Ybel

Most beloved Zann,

My problem was I didn’t know where Wande would go if she had to flee to somewhere. Her parents were dead. Her sister lived far to the east and they didn’t get along anyway. She’d never go to Jhus’s father. She did have friends here in Crideon but the closest ones were Ostavon’s wife Geme, who was already missing anyway, and a couple of people from the scentmakers, who I had no idea how to find.

I went back to our roost. The city was strange. There were fewer people around than usual, and the ones I could see were skulking and afraid. Some of the shops and taverns were open and some were not. I saw some more corpses among the grey mist of the late afternoon.

By the time I had climbed the steps to the roost, I was weary. Still weak from the oubliette. I opened the door and heard something.

I stopped.

There was no sound.

I sparked one of the wall lights and he was there. A man I had seen before, somewhere, and he struck at me with some huge weapon. I fell down backwards, out the door. I tried to shut the door and he swung again, knocking it open. I rolled down the stairs, scrambling to my feet.

“Lauran-loving pissard,” he said above me. “Your time’s over now.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I answered, skittering downstairs as fast as I could.

“I want to,” he said, and pounced downwards at me.

Looking back on it, I have a hard time believing it, but I did the exact right thing. I dropped flat. It hurt when he landed on me, but it was a lot better than being knocked downstairs. I stood up as soon as I could, sending him farther down the stairs. I turned and kicked out at him, not very effectively.

He was getting up. I came closer and put a foot in his ribs. We continued like this until I had kicked him all the way to the front door. One more hoof and he spilled out onto the street, and I followed.

There was a squad of somebody’s soldiers. When they saw us, they raised their weapons. My attacker grabbed for a knife at his belt, and they shot him dead. Then they grabbed me and threw me in a cart.

Love,

Ybel