The performance over, I followed the Attolian on shaking legs as he made his way out of the amphitheater. The sun had some time before dipped below the horizon, and only the last of its light was glimmering in the clouds overhead, making them smudges of gray against the darker sky. As he walked, the Attolian pulled the hood of his cloak up over his head, and it was much harder to pick him out of the crowd. I worried that I would lose him in the deep twilight, but he went straight back to the docks and waited there for me to catch up.

“Ornon, our ambassador, has arranged for passage on a riverboat called the Anet’s Dream. Our bags have been sent ahead,” he told me. “You must get us aboard without revealing that I am Attolian. You are a slave with your master, and you do the talking.”

I nodded. With the cloak over his breastplate and his hood up, he could pass for a Mede merchant, so long as he didn’t speak.

“Can you do this?” the Attolian asked. He seemed entirely sincere. I am a good judge of men, and if he meant to slit my throat and drop me in a sewer, he was a far better actor than any of those I had just seen on the stage.

“Of course, master,” I said. I might have been like a headless chicken crisscrossing the city that day, but on my own behalf, let me point out that I was not, in fact, dead. I had escaped the palace, and retrieved the money from Gessiret. I had survived that long, and I knew I could get onto the riverboat. I just didn’t know—couldn’t know—if the ambassador who had arranged for our flight had already sent a message to the Anet’s Dream that would put an end to it. The whole palace would know of my master’s death, but the gates that would have shut me in might have trapped any messenger as well. If there had been any alternative, I would have taken it, but I could see none, and there was no time for hesitation.

I walked up the docks looking for a ship named the Anet’s Dream. If only it would leave the city before the Attolian learned that my master was dead, I might be free. I could evade the Attolian far more easily than the palace guard.

I found the ship quickly. There was no sign of anything amiss on the deck—the crew seemed to be preparing to leave the wharf. It was an unremarkable riverboat with a shallow draft and an outrigger. Designed to travel up and down the river under sail, it had only a small galley for rowers. The crew probably did the rowing when necessary. Most of its profit would be in its cargo, but there were a few cabins for passengers on the deck at the bow and stern.

I took a breath and walked confidently up the plank. I spoke to a deckhand, explained that my master and I had arrived and would require dinner. When he directed us to one of the cabins at the bow, I led the way, the Attolian silent behind me. Unfortunately, the captain came to join us before we were halfway to the cabin. I smiled and bowed. The Attolian bowed. The captain bowed. The awkward moment lengthened. It had been entirely appropriate for me to speak to the crew member on my master’s behalf. The captain of the ship, even a shabby riverboat like the Anet’s Dream, was a different matter.

Bowing again, I said, “My master has taken a vow of silence while the star of Mes Reia is in retrograde.” I’d never heard of anyone taking a vow of silence for such a reason, but the retrograde of Mes Reia is supposed to be a time of confusion when communication can be broken and misunderstandings are more likely, and I hoped the excuse would carry water. The Attolian bowed again, a little more deeply, as if apologetically. The captain returned the gesture, deferring to his piety.

“Journey in your god’s favor,” he said, and waved a hand to a ship’s boy who was hanging about nearby. “Xem, light the way to the cabin. Our deck is too crowded to have gentlefolk wandering in the dark.”

So Xem lit a torch from the one at the top of the gangplank and carried it ahead of us. The deck was piled with cargo, though I couldn’t make out what kind. The bright flame ruined my ability to see our unlit surroundings, and I probably would have been safer walking the cluttered deck in the dark, but there you have the disadvantages of courtesy. We followed Xem to the cabin and ducked through its curtain to find it lit by a much smaller and more useful oil lamp.

I stood blinking while my eyes adjusted. When they did, I realized that the Attolian was looking me over, and I dropped my gaze to the decking under my feet—I didn’t need to be so bold as to return the favor. I’d had ample time to watch him in the amphitheater as he had looked up at Immakuk and Ennikar pounding back and forth across the stage.

In our first meeting at the palace and again at the docks, I’d been close enough to see his face, and there were none of the signs there that made slaves anxious. If there was not much intelligence in his features, there was no sign of cruelty, either. He was large, as I already knew, and a soldier. He had the scars on his hands and forearms and the unmistakable muscles that developed from swinging a sword day in and day out. I had no doubt he was good at what he did—he rather reminded one of an ox, very strong, not terribly quick—but I thought killing was his work, not his pleasure.

He was well dressed, but not wealthy, his clothes no doubt provided by his king. He had a gold ring in his ear, dangling a polished cylinder of stone—the stone was solid black, semiprecious at best. That and a ring on his right hand were his only jewelry. The ring was finely worked, with the emblem of his god, probably Miras, the Attolian god of light and arrows, the one most Attolian soldiers prayed to, but it wasn’t heavy, so not very valuable. He moved easily, so he was no veteran crippled in his country’s service, but he was too young to have done his twenty years—my own age, or perhaps younger. He was almost certainly not educated. He spoke Mede, but with a heavy accent, so he hadn’t been trained as a child. His king trusted him at a long distance, but stealing someone else’s slave was not what I would call a prestigious task. I guessed that he was probably not a favorite in the court, nor a very highly ranked officer, although I couldn’t be certain—the king himself was a thief, so what did I know about what he valued? Still, it did not seem to me that the king of Attolia was investing one of his best men in this petty revenge of his.

He told me his name, as if he expected me to use it. He slowly circled, looking closely at the heavy gold chain around my neck, fixed with my master’s seal. I knew he saw the flogging scars on my back, where they were visible above my collar, but he said nothing.

I looked around at the tiny cabin, trying to think of a polite way to ask when we might leave the dock. There was no polite way to ask if he meant to wring my neck and throw me in the river during the night.

“We leave within the hour,” he said. I thought the ambassador must have paid a fortune to send a riverboat downstream at night. The ships that went down the Ianna usually left in the morning. I had traveled often enough with my master to know.

“We aren’t going downriver,” said the Attolian, to my surprise. “We will go north instead, to Menle, and then follow the emperor’s road to Zabrisa, on the coast. An Attolian ship will carry us across the Middle Sea from there.”

It would take longer to leave the empire than if we went down the Ianna and boarded a ship across the Southern Ocean, but perhaps we would throw off any pursuit. There would be a bounty posted for me, but by the time bounty hunters realized we weren’t on our way south, we would be halfway to Menle. Or anyway, the Anet’s Dream would be halfway to Menle. If the Attolian truly meant to carry out this journey, he probably meant to do it alone, but I began to hope he might let me go without killing me. I couldn’t think why the ambassador would have planned such a complicated and expensive trip for the Attolian only to have me knifed while still at the dock. And if I was to be carried alive out of the city, why bother to kill me then? In an alley in the city, I would have died without fuss. On the riverboat, it would be messier.