I leapt across the empty ditch and onto the road as if I had wings on my feet. I heard no one following me but still ran on until I was spent, finally stumbling to a halt. I tried to wipe away the stinking flour from my clothes. I tried to shake it out of my hair, but it mixed with my sweat and stuck to me. I could feel it on my face however hard I scrubbed with my hands, and my mouth was thick with the taste of it. I spit and spit again. Then I turned and looked at the empty road behind me. The Attolian was dead.

I’d meant to leave him in Zaboar. I’d liked him—more than I’d ever expected to, but I’d still meant to leave him. I would have slipped away—he would have boarded a ship back to Attolia. There was no other choice. There was nothing for me in Attolia. I’d never meant to go to Attolia.

Nothing about my plans had changed, but I stood for a long time staring down the empty road, my arms hanging useless at my sides, waiting, as if he would appear, as if the world would settle back into its proper course, like the wine in a tilting wine cup saved just before it tipped too far. But the cup was overturned, the wine spilled. My master was dead. Now the Attolian was dead as well. I was free to go wherever I chose, and at last I started toward the city.

The day grew hotter. I refused to think of water. When I came to the next town, I marched straight through without turning my head to stare back at anyone who might be staring at me. Eventually, though, I came to a spot where a wooden bridge crossed over a narrow irrigation ditch, and I slipped down beside it, ducking my head into the brackish water to wash away the last of the flour. I rinsed out my shirt and twisted it dry, trying not to think of the ice-cold water in the fountain just a few days earlier. I didn’t notice the piece of waterweed that clung to the shirt until I unwound the fabric and saw the green stains. I sat staring at it, despairing, but in the end, instead of trying to rinse out the mess, I just put the wet shirt on and kept going.

The road was eventually hemmed in by the walls of gardens and stables and then by inns and shops and ever-larger buildings. There were blocks of apartments, three and four stories tall, and I still hadn’t reached the city walls. Dusty ruts were replaced with paving stones, and intersections grew more frequent. When it wasn’t clear anymore which was the main road into the city, I turned at random and walked blindly through the streets. I stopped for a drink at a public fountain and washed my face again.

I saw a weapons shop and went in to sell my knife. The man behind the counter offered me a pittance, far less than the knife was worth. Then he looked me in the face. Whatever he saw prompted him to quadruple the price and cautiously slide the money across the counter to me. My hands shaking, I swept it up and left without a word.

Later in the day I arrived on the waterfront. I still hadn’t seen the walls of the city, having somehow circled around them. My rage at the hapless man in the weapons shop had drained away, leaving me embarrassed for myself and exhausted. All I wanted to do was rest. I found a spot of wall not blocked by a vendor’s stall and leaned against it, closing my eyes. I would have sat there in the shade of the neighboring stall, but too many people had used the space to piss.

I had no money. I had lost the bundle with my blanket and supplies—it had fallen in the mill yard when I was running away—so I had the clothes I stood up in and nothing else. I could scribe, could offer my services for a fee, but I had no means to buy pens and inks, vellum or paper to demonstrate my skills. I had my life, I reminded myself. I had my freedom. I had followed others’ directions long enough. But my thoughts were like birds that wouldn’t settle, flying around in my head. I heard again and again the single yelp and the silence from the well, saw the miller’s smug animosity, smelled the stink of the flour, and felt again the pounding of my footsteps as I ran away.

CHAPTER NINE

“You’re certain he’s dead?” someone asked.

My eyes flew open, and I straightened up. A stranger stood before me, taller than the Attolian and slim, very elegant. He had a long, narrow face darker than my own and a heavier beard than I will ever grow. The patterns at the edges of his soft skullcap, and the ones around the collar and hem of his belted shift, marked him as a traveler from beyond the Isthmus.

“Your pardon, sir?”

The man repeated himself, and this time I heard him say, “Is there a pain in your head? You look unwell.”

“No,” I stammered. “Thank you, I am quite well.”

“Ah, I see it is grief, not illness, that strikes, but there are rumors of plague in the city. It is perhaps unwise to lean so sorrowfully against a wall, you see?”

I did see.

He said, “You have lost a friend?”

“He was not my friend,” I said automatically, then wondered why I’d said anything at all.

“Hmm,” said the man, thoughtfully tensing his lower lip. “You know, I think you are mistaken about that,” and he smiled, very kindly.

I thought back to the many dead in my life. I had told the Attolian as we sat among the stones above the tin mines that I had seen many deaths, and I had. Young and old, the houseboys of a fever, Jeffa of the same—other slaves and free men, associates of Nahuseresh, by age or disease or violence. All were alive one day and dead the next, as instantly as the Attolian, and yet this feeling was new, this particular loss, as if some part of me had been hollowed out, leaving me at a standstill and directionless.

The man said gently, careful to avoid offense, “You will forgive a man who has given you one bit of good advice if he gives more, won’t you? If you are wrong about whether he is a friend, perhaps you are wrong as well about whether he is gone, hmm? Sometimes we mistake these things.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Be certain before you let go of him. I once was lost, and my friend came for me.” He patted my arm and waved a good-bye before heading away into the crowded market.

I didn’t dare lean back against the wall. He was right that rumors of plague could be dangerous for the sick and the well. They didn’t always check for plague signs before they tossed anyone who appeared to be ill into plague houses. Better to be on the safe side, they would say, never mind the poor soul going to certain death.

The stranger had had an immense dignity about him. It had been inconceivable to be rude to him, in spite of his intrusion into my private affairs, but the Attolian had not been my friend. The Attolian had been no more to me than a convenience.

“Sometimes we mistake these things.”

The Attolian was dead. There had been no sound from the well. Only the yelp of the dog and then silence, echoing up from the depths. I looked back over the crowd in the market for a glimpse of the man in the patterned cap, as if I could go to him and insist that he was the one who was mistaken, but by then he was out of sight. I closed my eyes briefly and saw an image of the Attolian lying at the bottom of the well, not dead but dying. His legs or his back broken, calling for help. For a drink of water in the dark. Begging the miller to save him. I shook the image away.

What could I hope to accomplish by returning except to waste a chance to put myself further from the reach of bounty hunters or the Namreen? He was dead. There was nothing I could have done but run away. I would have ended up in the well myself if I had stayed. How long might it take the Attolian to die, if he was alive in that well, if he was alone there? Someone bumped against me in the crowd. Startled, I lifted my eyes from the ground, looking around to see who had bumped me, but I couldn’t tell. I looked up at the impersonal blue sky over my head, thought of flying up and away in Anet’s Chariot, and then I began to retrace my steps to the mill.