It was midday and the passageway quiet and cool. The stone walls kept out the heat while the openings near the high ceilings admitted some of the sun’s fierce light. Midday, and the houseboy was gone on an errand, probably stealing a nap somewhere, so I was alone at the door to my master’s apartments, holding my head in my hand and cursing myself for an idiot. I was not prone to stupidity, but I’d made a foolish mistake and was paying the price. My knees shook and I would have leaned against the wall for support, but it had recently been whitewashed and the blood would stain—I did not want to be reminded of this moment every time I passed until the stones were whitened again.

Sighing, I tried to think through the fire in my head and my shoulder. I wanted a place where I could withdraw until the pain had eased, but my usual retreat was an alcove off the main room of my master’s apartments—on the other side of the door in front of me. I was absolutely not going through that door until summoned. I’d invited disaster already that day by offering my master an evidently entirely inappropriate glass of remchik. The bottle of remchik was smashed, the glasses were smashed, and, judging by the pain in my shoulder and my side, the small statuette of Kamia Shesmegah formerly resting on his writing desk was smashed as well—from which I gathered that the emperor had not, in fact, offered my master the governorship of Hemsha.

I rubbed my head and checked my hand to see if it was still bleeding. It was, but not much.

In my defense, it had not been unreasonable on my part to assume that my master would become governor. He was still the nephew of the emperor and the brother of the emperor’s chosen heir, the prince Naheelid. The governorship of Hemsha, a minor coastal province with a single small harbor, was not outside his expectations. I am the first to admit that he has a habit of overreaching, and I had been very quietly relieved that he had set his sights so low.

After the debacle in Attolia, he’d taken us to rusticate on his family estate. We’d hidden there for more than a year while the laughter died down, my master fighting with his wife the entire time—she had been, unsurprisingly, unenthusiastic about his attempts to marry the Attolian queen. Finally, we had returned to the capital, where my master found that even his oldest friends had turned their backs on him. When he’d applied for the post of governor, I’d thought he was conceding defeat. I’d thought that if Hemsha was far away from the capital, at least it was equally far away from his wife. I would have sworn on my aching shoulder that there was no reason for him to be denied such a reasonable request. Which is why, when he returned with one of his cousins, I had been waiting for him with a tray of glasses and a newly opened bottle of remchik, ready for congratulations.

“I so hate presumption in a slave,” I’d heard his cousin say, as I crept out of the room.

I sighed again. I hated being beaten. Nothing could make me feel so stupid and so angry at myself, and on top of everything else, I’d have to deal with the smirks and pitying remarks of other slaves. It did my authority no good to be seen with my face covered in blood, but I really couldn’t go back into my master’s apartments.

“Kamet?”

I had already bowed and begged pardon before I realized that it was Laela beside me. She reached to touch my shoulder and I flinched.

“Dear Kamet,” she said. “Is it more than the face?”

I nodded. My shoulder wasn’t going to heal for some time, I could tell.

Laela had been one of my master’s dancing girls. When she fell out of favor, she’d asked if I could do anything for her—afraid of where she might be sold to next. I had persuaded my master that she should stay with the household as a matron over the other girls, and she was one of the few slaves I could trust to do me a favor. “Come to my room,” she suggested.

Shaking my head slowly, I said, “He will call me back.” He always did, sooner or later. I needed to be closer than her rooms, which were deep in the slaves’ dormitories.

“I’ll make sure the houseboys know where you are,” she said, and took me gently by the arm to lead me down the hall.

As matron, Laela had a narrow room much the same size as the alcove where I slept. With the curtain pulled across the doorway, it was almost dark inside. She watched me lie down, then went to fetch a bowl with cool water and a cup to dip in it. After I’d had a drink, she soaked a cloth in the bowl and laid it on my face, wiping away the blood. It made her bedding wet, and I mumbled an apology.

“It will dry,” she said. “Faster than your face will heal. Whatever did you do?”

“Offered him a glass of remchik.”

She made a puzzled sound, though she and I both knew that slaves were beaten for all sorts of reasons and sometimes for no reason at all.

“He didn’t get the governorship of Hemsha.”

“Ah,” said Laela. She wasn’t a dancing girl anymore; she was as experienced as I was in listening to rumor and sorting out its meanings. “Well, you couldn’t have known,” she told me, but I didn’t agree.

“I’m a fool,” I said.

“You handle him well,” Laela reminded me. “Don’t blame yourself.”

Her words helped as much as the cool cloth on my face. My expertise had been painfully acquired over the years, but it was mostly reliable. I did usually handle my master better than I had that day, and I was proud of my skill.

“I should see to the girls. They’ll need to know he’s in a mood,” Laela said. “I’ll come back if he sends for you.” And she went away, leaving me to rest while I could.

When Laela came to fetch me, it was already dark. She lifted a lamp to my face and winced.

“You look like a pomegranate,” she told me.

“Thank you so much,” I said. My voice was mocking, but she knew I was grateful. I was stiff as well as sore, and she had to steady me while I got to my feet. She walked me as far as the entrance to the dormitory, then left me to make my own way.

“Kamet, you look like a pomegranate,” my master said.

I said nothing.

“Get your clothes off so I can see the rest of the damage.”

Slowly, I peeled my tunic off, in order to allow him to inspect his handiwork. He always did, after a beating, partly to be sure that any serious injury was seen to, and partly just to admire the bruises. When he was done with me, I was shaking and sick, my skin prickled with a cold sweat, but he had wrapped my chest and shoulder in bandages and given me a dose of lethium to put me to sleep. He helped me over to the cot in my office, then gently covered me with a blanket, checking to see that I was as comfortable as possible before he went back to his own sleeping room.

I moved very gingerly for the next few weeks, in part because of my healing body and in part because my master was still in a dangerous mood. It was best to stay out of his sight as much as possible until his temper evened out. I kept the curtain pulled across my alcove, though it was stifling in the small space, with no movement of the air.

The quarterly accounts had come in, and they kept me busy. The allowance for household costs was delivered to me four times a year, mostly on the basis of these accounts, and they had to be examined thoroughly. I oversaw all of my master’s finances, not just for the palace household but for his outlying estates as well. His slaves and servants answered to me, and I in turn to him. Reading between the lines, I suspected that the steward at the family estate was at his wit’s end trying to keep my master’s wife’s expenses in check. I might have had some sympathy for him—she was very strong-minded—but I’d been unimpressed by what I had seen of his management. I decided to cover the added expense for the quarter, but I thought that I would replace him soon. I could move a man I had in mind from one of my master’s smaller estates. The incompetent steward was a free man—he could be turned out without the trouble of selling him.

When I heard the houseboy open the apartment door, I twitched the curtain on my alcove aside. My master was out and Kep, the houseboy, could only be coming in to speak to me.

“It’s Rakra, Kamet, about his pay.”

I nodded and the houseboy showed Rakra in. A burly man in his thirties, he’d been a houseman on the family estate and had returned with us to the capital. In the palace, he had little to do to earn his pay and had perhaps too much free time to sample the pleasures of the city.

Rakra looked me over, his eyes lingering on my bruised face, and I felt my own eyes narrow. Pomegranate? I wondered, but he didn’t say it, just snorted. Honestly, I looked a little more like an overripe melon at that point—purple and green.

“I’ll need more money,” Rakra said. “Same amount as before.”

Quite a few of my master’s palace servants came to me for advances on their pay. I made loans out of the discretionary funds in my budget and charged them a fee, deducted from their pay at the end of the quarter—in this way making a bit of money for myself. There was an embroidered bag holding all my savings sitting in my master’s cashbox under my desk. Unlike Rakra, most of the people in need of a loan arrived at my threshold with some embarrassment, not with bold demands.

“Better our master doesn’t know about our business, eh?” Rakra suggested.

“Ah,” I said.

This was exactly the sort of loss of discipline I hated to deal with after a beating. Rakra assumed my loan-making was a secret. He’d heard a rumor that I was in disfavor and thought he could threaten me with its revelation. In my experience, crooked men assume others are crooked as well, and I was reconsidering Rakra’s character. He opened his mouth to say something even more unpleasant, I was sure, but I held up a hand to stop him.

“Very well,” I said. “I will take what you owe from next quarter’s pay and charge you no fee.” I bent under the desk to lift the cashbox, and opened it with the key on a tie around my waist. I counted three coins into his meaty palm while Rakra looked pleased with himself.

“I’m sure my master is well aware of the payday loans,” I told him. This voided the power of his threat, and was also true. There was no reason my master should not know of my loans, and I had always assumed he did. Rakra’s eyes narrowed, belatedly wary, but I dismissed him with a wave of my hand toward the door and looked back down at my work. Rakra hesitated, but I went on ignoring him until he left. I could have discharged him from my master’s service—I had that kind of authority—but Rakra had been hired by the steward at the family estate, the very one whose accounts were out of order. I resolved to check the expenses more thoroughly, and I did not want Rakra returning in disgrace to the estates too quickly, as it might alert the steward to my suspicions. I would soon know if there was a larger problem to address. If there was, I would bring it to my master’s attention and possibly he would be pleased with me.

Once the accounts had been attended to and the money disbursed, there were housekeeping arrangements to be made. My master’s rooms were growing shabby, and if we were not to be displaced to Hemsha, he would expect them to be updated. The lingering ache in my shoulder reminded me that I needed to find him another statue of Shesmegah. I called in various merchants to discuss new rugs and furnishings, doing as much as I could from my little office. The tradespeople had representatives in the palace and they were wise enough to show no sign they noticed my bruises. Unlike Rakra, they knew the authority I wielded over their purses.

Laela stopped by to fill me in on some of the stories circulating among the lower echelons of the palace—the laborers and slaves. They knew little and made up more. She told me that Abashad had been named general and admitted to the Imperial Council of War. She said she thought the poor little country of Attolia was doomed, but that was not news. Our emperor continued to pretend he did not mean to invade the Little Peninsula and had browbeaten the Attolians into exchanging ambassadors, but all of the city-states there, Eddis and Sounis as well as Attolia, were doomed. We all knew it. I think Laela had a friend among the servants set aside for the Attolian ambassador. She told me that Ornon was a pleasant enough man who didn’t harass the slaves or otherwise increase their labors.

“Little countries get eaten up by larger ones,” I said with a shrug. “It is the nature of the world. They will be better off once they are integrated into the empire.”

I used some of my funds to purchase a bracelet for Laela to thank her for her good turn for me, because people like Laela and me cannot leave debts outstanding.

After my bruises faded, I resumed my other business for my master. Not everything could be arranged from my office, and anyway, I liked to exercise my privilege to go in and out of the palace at my own discretion. My master’s previous secretary, who had trained me as a child, had warned me that I must not spend every day looking into ledgers by the light of a smoking lamp or my eyesight would suffer. My eyesight is poor, but probably would have been worse had I not taken his advice to go out of doors as often as possible.

In fact, if my eyesight had been better, the whole course of this narrative might have been different. I would have seen the Attolian waiting ahead of me in an empty hallway of the palace in time to dodge into one of the side passages used by the menial slaves and servants. Instead, I approached, unaware that he was an Attolian until it was too late to change direction without drawing his attention. Thinking that we had met by chance, I kept my eyes down and moved a little faster.

He was a very large Attolian, by size and dress a soldier. When I saw him casting glances up and down the passage to see who was nearby, my stomach sank. My master had tried to usurp the Attolian throne. His failure had endeared him neither to his wife nor to the emperor. He may have been a laughingstock in the emperor’s palace, but I doubted that anyone in Attolia was laughing.

“Kamet,” said the Attolian with a firm nod of greeting. This was growing worse and worse. I didn’t think anyone in Attolia knew my name, and if this soldier did, he probably also knew that I was the one who had set fire to our rooms to create the distraction that would allow my master to escape the fortress at Ephrata. Our meeting in this hallway was not an accident.

The soldier stooped to bring his lips close enough to my ear to say very quietly, “My king blames your master for the loss of his hand.”

That, too, was an issue—and a perfectly reasonable sentiment on the part of the Attolian king. The Thief of Eddis had been arrested in Attolia’s capital city, and my master told me he had deliberately stoked the queen of Attolia’s rage, hoping to prompt war between the two countries. Attolia had exercised an old-fashioned option for dealing with thieves, and my master had been quite pleased. Only now, that same Eddisian thief was the king of Attolia—the queen had married him to save her throne, choosing him over my master. Oh, my poor face, I thought, and oh, my poor ribs—they’d just recently stopped hurting every time I tried to stand up or bend over to tighten my sandal. I could only assume the Attolian meant to exact a petty revenge on my person. It wasn’t my fault that my master was an enemy of his king, but I doubted that mattered.

At least the Attolian was still talking. The longer he talked, the better my chances that someone might come along. Thank the eternal gods he was a chatty Attolian, or so I thought at the time.

“My king wants your master to suffer the loss of his right hand,” the Attolian was saying, and I admit I was distracted as he grabbed my wrist and it took me a minute to realize that he was speaking metaphorically. He meant me—I was my master’s right hand. It dawned on me that I might be facing something far, far worse than a casual beating in one of the back passages of the emperor’s palace. I tried to pry his fingers apart as I looked desperately up and down the corridor for help. There was no one, not even a blurry sign of movement in the distance that would indicate a witness was coming.

Surely the Attolians understood it was uncivil for a guest to beat to death someone else’s property in a deserted hallway of his host’s palace? Maybe not. They weren’t very civilized, and it would be a significant revenge, petty, but intensely disruptive. I was an expensive slave and my master relied on me—his entire estate was going to fall into chaos until he found a replacement secretary—but when all was said and done, I was still just a slave. Maybe the Attolians would pay some small percentage of my worth to my master as an apology and in so doing add a little more insult to injury. Given my master’s uncertain position at the emperor’s court, they might get away with it. The Attolian king obviously had a deep well of spite and I would have appreciated his low cunning more if I hadn’t thought the Attolian was about to wring my neck.

“Meet me at the Rethru docks after sunset,” he said.

That sentence made so little sense that I stopped picking at his fingers to stare up at his face. I was close enough, as he had me by the wrist, to see him quite clearly. He was a typical Attolian: sandy-brown hair, a broad face, light-colored eyes. Altogether he had a simple, straightforward look to him, and he seemed perfectly serious. He put his hands to my shoulders and stared back down at me, as if he thought I was stupid or didn’t understand his heavily accented Mede. He could have just spoken in Attolian, but instead, he used very simple sentences. “I will help you escape your master. Come to the Rethru docks. Be there after sunset. And I will take you to Attolia. You will be free in Attolia. Do you understand?”

It was like being lectured by an earnest, oversized child.

I realized my mouth was open and shut it. I nodded. “Rethru docks,” I repeated after him.

“After dark. Can you be there?”

I nodded again. Certainly I could get to the Rethru docks after dark. The Attolian nodded back, then checked the corridor again and hurried away.

I watched him go, my knees weak with relief. I staggered to the nearest alcove and slipped behind the large urn standing in the center of it. I wrapped my arms around myself and had a long, if quiet, laugh. My ribs hurt, but it was worth it. It had been a difficult few weeks, and it was good to laugh again.

I could be free in Attolia. If only I could have shared the joke with my master, but he wouldn’t have seen the humor just then. Another time, I would have told him and he and I would have laughed until we fell down. I could be free in Attolia—a place more backward than anywhere I have ever known, with its stinking sewers and its smoking furnaces and its preening idiot aristocrats. Gods support me, they were still memorizing all their poetry because none of them knew how to read. The only beautiful thing in the whole country was the queen, and she had sold herself into a marriage with the Eddisian Thief, the very one whose hand she had cut off. There was a match made in hell.

As a slave in the emperor’s palace I had authority over all of my master’s other slaves and most of his free men. I had my own money in my master’s cashbox. I had a library of my own, a collection of texts in my alcove that I carefully packed into their own case whenever my master moved households. I not only could read and write, I could read and write in most of the significant languages of the empire. My master had paid good money for it to be so. Someday he meant to make a gift of me to his brother, and then, as the next emperor’s personal slave, I would be one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in all the empire. I wouldn’t have taken the Attolians’ offer even if I’d believed it was sincere—and I didn’t. They meant to slice my throat and toss me in a sewer, I was sure.

When my amusement passed, leaving my ribs aching, I shook my head at the self-aggrandizement of the Attolians, and headed back to my master’s apartments. There is freedom in this life and there is power, and I was ambitious for the latter. I looked forward to the day I would be in my master’s confidence again—I would tell him about the Attolian, and he and I would laugh together. In the meantime, I thought, I would be anywhere that evening but out on the Rethru docks.

I was still smiling when I saw Laela ahead of me. I knew her first by her robe. It had been a gift from our master and was dyed a deep blue that was expensive and unusual. I made out her face only as she drew nearer. Normally as warm toned as myself, she was sickly pale. She raised a hand to her lips as she approached, and silently she turned me around to pull me through a curtained entrance into the nearby serviceway. We stood in that narrower connecting passage, the slatted roof just above our heads admitting sunlight that striped Laela’s face and clothes. When she’d checked to be sure we were alone, she leaned close. I could smell the cosmetics on her skin, and when she spoke, I was reminded of the Attolian’s warm breath on my ear.

“Nahuseresh is dead,” she whispered.

For the second time that day a statement was too nonsensical to understand.

“Poison,” Laela said, looking at my face for some comprehension.

Dead. She meant, murdered.

“His meeting was cut short. He came back to the apartments and called for the doctor but when the doctor came, he was already gone.” She turned my unresisting body away from her. “Go,” she said, putting her hands to my shoulders and pushing me down the serviceway. “Go.”

I turned back, reaching for her hand, but she pulled it free. Her face was in shadow and she put both hands to her cheeks, as if to hide her tears. “Save yourself, Kamet,” she whispered.

I nodded as tears pricked my own eyes and started moving, one stumbling foot in front of the other.

“When?” I asked, over my shoulder.

“Just after the noon bell,” she said as she, too, turned away, pulling the scarf at her shoulder to hood her face as she passed back through the curtain.

I needed to make a plan, but my thoughts ran in all directions at once, like rats in a grain store when the door is thrown open. I considered the Attolians—I’d already guessed they meant to kill me, not set me free. Had they meant to use my disappearance to implicate me in the murder of my master? It made no sense. They’d wanted me to leave that night and while they might have wanted to murder Nahuseresh, they couldn’t have carried it out. I had been free to run errands in the city only because my master had meant to spend the entire morning with his brother. When his powerful friends had failed him, he had staked everything on the support of Naheelid, and he had been absolutely certain his brother would help him. If what Laela had said was true—if my master had returned directly from that meeting—then he had been fatally mistaken.

My master’s brother was served by the emperor’s own servants, his food provided from the emperor’s own kitchens. The slaves who oversaw this process had served the emperor for years, and as most, if not all, would die with him—sacrificed at his funeral and buried in his tomb—they were fanatically loyal. There were only two men who could have poisoned my master—his brother, or the emperor himself.

The reversal of my master’s plans in Attolia—that had not just been a personal humiliation. My master had showered the Attolian queen in gold, the emperor’s gold, and then had nothing to show for it. The emperor had committed troops on my master’s recommendation, troops that had been overwhelmed by the combined forces of Eddis and Attolia. Afterward there had been painfully expensive goodwill gestures to placate the Greater Powers of the Continent, alarmed as they were to find the emperor encroaching on what they thought of as their territory. It had been in every way a disaster, and every bit of it laid at my master’s door. He had since schemed tirelessly to restore his position and he’d failed. Failed utterly.

I cast about for any possible alternative. My master could have been poisoned earlier, but he would have died more slowly. I had eaten dinner with him the night before, and I was fine. Neither of us had eaten in the morning—my master had ignored his breakfast tray, as he often did, and I couldn’t touch his leftovers if he hadn’t eaten first. He would hardly have taken anything on his way to meet with his brother. I retraced what I knew, reordering my knowledge, trying to deny my conclusions, but they were too clear. It was not as if the emperor hadn’t poisoned people before. There had been a number of imperial dinners that were the stuff of nightmares.

Trying to move more quickly, but not so quickly as to attract attention, I was still turning at random, distancing myself from my master’s apartments.

And from Laela.

When a man is murdered, his slaves are tortured. If any confess, then all are executed whether they share in the guilt or not. No one will buy them and they can hardly be freed—what a temptation that would put before the enslaved population. In the case of a poisoning, where the administration of the poison is unclear, the slaves are put to death on principle. The Medes fear little in quite the way they fear their own slaves.

The torture begins with the most intimate servants, the valet, the secretary. If a slave implicates another in his confession, the rest of the slaves will be fiercely interrogated as well, but if not, there may be no torture for the others, just death. After the recent beating, I would be doubly suspect, and if anyone had seen Laela warning me, she would be in greater danger as well. That it was the emperor who was guilty, that everyone would know it, changed nothing. We would be arrested and tortured not just into confessing, but also into implicating our fellow slaves—all of us judged an infection in the body of the empire, to be cut out at any cost. The houseboys, eight and twelve years old. Hormud, my master’s cook, and Mirad, his valet. The men in the stables, the dancing girls. None of them could leave the emperor’s palace. Of all my master’s slaves, only I had that privilege.

The only thing I could do for them was go. If I escaped, blame might fall on me alone. I might be a loose end that the emperor would tolerate—my successful flight bolstering an official story that I was involved in a conspiracy to murder my master, that the emperor had nothing to do with his death. A chance to die quickly instead of slowly was all I could give them.

So I walked on.

I hadn’t known my master was in such danger. I blamed myself for that. A man like my master is not eliminated without hints and foretellings running through the palace first, like a fracture through glass before it breaks, but I had been cooped up in my little alcove hiding my bruises. Had my master’s brother ordered his death, or had the emperor? Eternal gods, I thought, what if the emperor had turned against his heir and both he and my master had been killed? I shuddered at the chaos that could be coming to the entire empire and stumbled over my own feet.

Laela had said that my master had died not long after noon. I’d heard the great bell ring just after I spoke to the Attolian—while I was laughing at him from the alcove. Who was laughing now? I thought, before I wrenched my attention back to the matter at hand. The wheels of the palace turn slowly, but they would be turning. I had some time, but not much, before the doctor would call Nahuseresh’s death poisoning and officially inform the emperor, and then the guard would be sent to arrest all of my master’s slaves. I needed to leave the palace before all the gates were closed to keep me in.

I touched the pocket on my belt. I’d visited the tailor in the city that morning to order a robe for my master, one he would now never wear, and I had the money left over from that. My own savings, in the little bag inside my master’s cashbox, were out of reach. My scrolls, my own small damaged statue of Shesmegah, goddess of mercy . . . I dared not return to the apartments to collect any of my things, and I knew it, but my thoughts kept circling back to my little office alcove. I wanted so much to be seated at my slanted desktop, with my cot behind me and my account books in front of me, my only problem in life my master’s temporary dissatisfaction. My treacherous feet kept slowing down and I understood the impulse of small animals that hold themselves motionless until they are eaten. I felt a kinship for the rabbit sitting perfectly still, hoping that the lion would somehow pass him by.

I lifted my chin, forced myself to move faster. I didn’t want to draw attention, and it was not like me to creep. I needed to move more briskly about my business. I passed a few other slaves without any acknowledgment, and they deferentially dropped their eyes.

The serviceways, narrow and only partially covered, lay between the walls of various apartments and ran throughout the palace in an endless warren, their sand floors silencing the footsteps of slaves and servants who carried out the work of the palace out of sight of its privileged inhabitants. This was where the slop jars were carried, where the laundry went on its way from the beautiful apartments to the washhouses and back again. It was an easy place to get lost, with as many twists and turns as there were dead ends, but I had known this labyrinth since I was a child newly brought to the palace by my master. I was only an apprentice to his secretary then and had had plenty of time to learn every path through it.

I passed into darkness where the passage was roofed over and then back into the sun as I turned this way and that, choosing the narrowest, darkest, and least-used route that would carry me toward one of the work gates where the wagons came in and out, carrying all that was needed for the inhabitants of the city inside a city that was the emperor’s palace. There were several such gates, but I wanted the one nearest the stables and the emperor’s zoo, with its cages of lions and wild dogs and other animals. I’d visited it often over the years, feeling sorry for the sad-eyed gazelles tapping nervously about, so near to their predators. There was a giraffe and several zebras, as well as lions and cheetahs. There had been a white bear once, a gift from the Braelings in the north, but it had died in the heat. My mind was wandering again, and I forced it back to the present.

The narrow passages grew wider and became alleys between separate buildings. Where there had been apartments and gardens on the other side of the high walls around me, there were now storage sheds and dormitories. I came to open ground near the enclosure where a placid giraffe stood chewing as he gazed off into space. Between the animals in the zoo and the working animals in the stables, wagon after wagon of dung had to be hauled out every day, usually at about noon when the morning cleanout was completed. I didn’t use this gate often, but I would be allowed to pass through without question and probably without any notice so long as there had been no news of my master’s death yet, no call for my arrest.

Taking a deep breath, I stepped out toward the open gate.

“Kamet,” one of the guards called like a curse out of a clear blue sky.

Even before I recognized him, I smiled politely. Well trained, I would have smiled so at my executioner.

“On your way out again already?” he asked. He’d been at the main east gate earlier that morning and we’d said hello to each other as I’d left to see the tailor. I brought up the story I’d prepared, just in case.

“More orders for the feast my master plans for the emperor’s birthday,” I said.

“Is it going to be as big as the one he sponsored before you went abroad?”

“Bigger,” I said.

“Will you get me onto the guard duty for it? We ate like kings at the last one.”

I promised that I would, the lie easy on my lips, and waved a good-bye to him as I passed through the gate.

I crossed the wide boulevard that surrounded the palace and headed directly into the narrow streets on the other side. In a few steps I knew I was out of his sight. I still hurried around several corners and deeper into side streets before I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I made my way to the tailor’s.