“We can still get our skins filled at the stable,” said the Attolian.

“It will be faster to pay for new skins with Ne Malia’s water than refill ours.” If the Namreen were nearby, we wanted to leave as quickly as possible, and crossing the city by way of the water sellers would keep us well away from the judicial square.

The Attolian didn’t agree, and I had to persist even though I knew I might be arousing his suspicions. We had reached the edge of the square before I convinced him to turn aside toward the street that led to the water sellers, and then, fool that I am, I let my eyes be drawn to the bills pasted on the side of the steps leading down from the governor’s justice building to the plaza. To me, they were incomprehensible blurs, and I immediately pulled my gaze away, but it was too late. The Attolian noticed and turned to look as well.

“Never mind, Kamet,” he said. “No one but that slave would connect you and me with the notice, and we’ll be outside the gates in no time at all.”

I nodded my head sharply a few times, thanking the gods he wasn’t calling me a murderer and a liar. “Yes,” I said, “everything will be fine.”

“I’m sorry we came into the city,” he said, blaming himself for bringing us to see the stepwell instead of blaming me for giving us away. “I thought we were well ahead of any pursuers from Perf. I did not think we would leave a trail in a city this size. I took a stupid risk.”

I should have apologized—it was my fault as much as his—but I didn’t. I was too busy thinking of the bill, wondering if he could have seen it and not understood its implications. Maybe my bill had been posted on the other side of the stairs and he hadn’t seen it. Maybe he had seen it but couldn’t read it from that distance. Maybe he couldn’t read at all—the bills were read aloud every week because many people couldn’t. Very likely he was as illiterate as most Attolians. I breathed again. He hadn’t yet learned how I had deceived him.

At the main gate we separated, each of us tagging along in a different crowd. Once we were through, I turned to walk along the city wall, and the Attolian followed. When we reached the stables, I felt him take my elbow and kept walking. I could see the Namreen in their distinctive vests and didn’t need him to explain—the mules and our saddlebags were lost to us. It was a good thing, after all, that we’d bought Ne Malia’s water in fresh skins. We walked on in the growing darkness away from the city on the road leading west, among the farmers and merchants who had come to the city markets for the day and were on their way home.

“I can be silent if you can get a place for us,” the Attolian whispered in my ear.

I started onward, looking for a likely group to approach, but his hand on my arm slowed me. “You must not give us away,” he added. It was said without censure, but his meaning was clear. I had revealed too much in Koadester. My pride wanted to remind him we shouldn’t have gone into the city to begin with, but I swallowed it and instead led the way through the discrete groups of people around us, looking for an opening to join one.

My problem was a lack of familiarity with ordinary free people. I knew how to be a humble slave around my master and how to be an arrogant slave as I did my master’s work. None of that would help me now to pass as a free man. I thought about how the Attolian treated people, but I didn’t have the bulk to move with his confidence. I thought of the leatherworker dealing affably with the Attolian, but his demeanor came with age. I considered the tailor Gessiret, back in the city, and his long-suffering response when I had retrieved the money I had given him the day Nahuseresh died. The tailor hadn’t complained to me, but I didn’t doubt he had complained to someone that day—his wife or his mistress, or a friend in a wineshop—just as slaves complained to each other. Everyone complained. Complaint was universal.

I picked a farmer walking beside the horse that was pulling his two-wheeled cart. I assumed it was his wife and daughter traveling with him. Slowing my pace just a little, I fell in next to him and nodded when he briefly looked up. “A good day?” I asked. “Or more money going out in taxes than comes in for profits?”

As I’d hoped, the prompt was all that was required. We walked together—the silent Attolian, the farmer, trailed by his wife and daughter, and me—while the farmer cataloged his woes and railed against the officials who ran the markets in the city and took away his money as fast as he made it. I only needed to nod my head and say something agreeable as it grew darker and darker around us. Nothing could have been more companionable than all of us traveling down the road until at last the farmer came to a turnoff and we bid him good-night. No one would have guessed that we didn’t share the farmer’s interest in city management. That we had taken every opportunity to glance behind us, checking for the light of torches issuing from the city gates. That our ears perked up at the sound of hoofbeats, no matter how slow moving.

Once the farmer had left us, we continued only a little farther and then, under the cover of the ever-blacker night, picked our way over the road’s drainage ditch and a low stone wall onto a freshly plowed field. The land around Koadester was green and profitable, not dry like the plateaus farther south or on the road to Perf. Afraid of leaving footprints in the tilled dirt, we walked along the harder ground near the stone walls, moving away from the road until we found a cluster of pomegranate bushes the Attolian thought it was safe to sleep underneath. We crept in, the branches scratching at our exposed skin, until we were confident we wouldn’t be seen as soon as the sun came up. Then we settled down for the night.

I lay looking up through the branches at the starry sky striped with filmy white clouds like bed-curtains and a few denser clouds like pillows, thinking of the comfortable beds in the inns back at Koadester. I’d been dreaming of them on the road from Traba. I admitted, if just to myself, that the hard ground I slept on was not the Attolian’s fault. I had wanted to go into the city, too.

We’d seen no sign of the Namreen on the road. Heard no rumors about them from other travelers. They hadn’t set out after us from Perf and must have come up directly from Menle. I should have considered that possibility, but I’d been imagining them following in our tracks, as if I were leaving a line across the landscape behind me like a crack in a china cup. I’d only been looking over my shoulder, not thinking of the emperor’s command as a stone thrown in a puddle, scattering drops in all directions, sending the Namreen east to Perf, north to Koadester. Were they in Zabrisa looking for me now? Were they at Iannis on the Southern Ocean? We were lucky. We could have met them on the road with no warning at all, and if we hadn’t gone into the city, we might have. Better sleeping in a field on the hard ground than in the Namreen’s tender care.

“They are very determined,” the Attolian said beside me. I knew he was mulling over the same thoughts.

In the early-morning light we crossed more fields until we came to a narrow footpath that paralleled the road we had left the night before. We hiked all day at our best pace, continuing into mostly uncultivated land. The ground was flat and open all around us, and I felt very exposed. There were no other travelers to hide among. The only comfort was that people on horseback were easy to see from a long distance, and all of them were far away on the main road. Eventually our narrow route curved toward the north, where the land rose as the scrub grew thicker and higher. Ahead were the first of the hills that lay between us and Zaboar, and our path soon joined a wagon track that skirted their southern flank. We stopped there for a rest and to eat.