There were any number of possible explanations. Angrim was a big city. Nobody had been looking for her at the time; she might have slipped through the gates unnoticed, and gone to ground well enough that they just couldn’t find her yet. She might have ridden slowly, stopped along the road, so that even though she had a head start they had beaten her here—after all, she had saddle sores.
She might not have come to Angrim at all.
Amas still said she probably had. “Her parents lived in a town, or maybe it’s a small city—she’d be more comfortable here than I am. She knows she can hold her own in a fight, and she doesn’t have much to steal. She’d be on the streets. Not in an inn.”
Plenty of street urchins in Angrim; easy to vanish among them. But still—“With a horse?”
Wisp went back out with a better description of Indera’s bay mare. And there, at last, they struck gold: It was in a stable on the western side of town, not far from where Mirei and the others were staying. Not being boarded, though; Indera had sold the animal, and for a pathetically low price.
Well
, Mirei reflected,
horse-trading and haggling weren’t skills I’d gotten around to teaching yet
. But it meant that Indera had coin enough to keep herself fed, at least for a while.
“She won’t be in the west, though,” Amas said, and Mirei agreed. Indera was smart enough to get away from that clue. But where would she have gone?
Mirei created a map on the floor of their room at the inn, using odds and ends from her saddlebag to demarcate the different areas of Angrim. The main temple district, the various markets, the residential quarters; she had to explain to Amas that yes, they were all called “quarters,” even though Angrim’s growth over the centuries meant there were far more than four of them. Lehant knew surprisingly little of the city for someone who had been living just to the north of it—Mirei supposed that Thornbloods, at least new ones, must not be let out often—but she was the one to make the next suggestion.
“There,” she said, pointing at an area Mirei had identified as the Knot, which was currently being represented by a donated bootlace. “Easiest to get lost in.”
She was right about that much; the Knot was a warren of streets where the overhanging structures had made good on their threat to merge together. The alleys were tunnels, and the buildings were roads. “But Indera doesn’t know the city,” Mirei said. “And that’s
far
from where she sold the horse.”
“She might hear about it, though,” Amas said. “And I know she decided to run away from you, but that doesn’t mean she’s forgotten what you said about the witches who want to kill her. I think she’d be looking to hide from
everybody
.”
Mirei sighed and sat back on her heels. “Couldn’t you tell me she would absolutely have picked, say, the temple district, where we won’t have to spend a year combing the place for her trail?”
“You could smoke ‘em out like rats,” Lehant suggested. She was proving to be rather disturbingly bloody-minded. Mirei tried to convince herself not to chalk it up to the Thornblood influence, and failed. Lehant wasn’t the only one with prejudices to get over.
“Don’t tempt me,” Mirei said, and remembered Wisp once warning her not to burn Angrim down.
She reached for the lace and began to thread it back through her boot. “Okay. In the absence of any better clues, we’ll try the Knot. Goddess help us all.”
“We?” Lehant said, looking up alertly. “You’re going to let us help?”
“You two know what Indera looks like, which is more than I can say for the other people helping us search. And under an illusion, you should be pretty safe.” Mirei cast a glance around, and scowled at the room; the walls were flimsy and thin. “But first I have to find a place where I can sing in privacy.”
Few people would notice the addition of three new street rats to the Knot’s population.
Some of the more charitably-inclined sects occasionally sent people into the warren to bring food or medicine or their flavor of faith to the children and vagrants there. Occasionally the Lady’s town guards went in, to chase down someone who had gone to ground. And if you were too poor to pay anyone with training, there was muscle for hire in the maze of its streets. But few people paid attention beyond that.
The street rats paid attention.
Mirei found that out the hard way before she’d gone more than a street in.
She sent Amas and Lehant off on their own, with strict orders not to split up, and to scream their heads off if anything went wrong. Mostly she wasn’t afraid for them, though she didn’t say so. Even with the little training they’d gotten, they were more than a match even for children larger than them, and if they died—well, they would come back. She’d prefer them not to find that out the hard way, but it meant they had a margin of safety. The only
real
threat would come from witches, who would be unlikely to spot them. And Mirei could take care of herself just fine.
There were other kinds of trouble, though.
Six of them ringed her as she turned her first corner, where a fortune-teller’s five-eyed sign leaned up against a wall. Mirei heard them moving into place, but didn’t react until they showed themselves. There was more to disguise than just the surface.
“You ain’t one of ours,” the leader of this little pack said challengingly, crossing his arms over his chest. Mirei guessed him for thirteen or fourteen, to her own apparent ten.
She stuck her chin out and looked like she was trying to look unconcerned. “So? ‘S a street. I can walk down a street.”
“Not if your leg’s broke, you cain’t,” one of the others put in. But he was scrawny, his voice shrill; he was here to follow the other’s lead. Mirei kept her attention on the important one.
“
My
street,” the leader said. “I say who gets to walk down it.”
“Oh yeah?” Mirei said scornfully. “Ain’t what I heard.”
Standard posturing turned into indignation. “What do you mean?”
“I heard some girl came through here, some new girl, not from the Knot, an‘ she’s been going anywhere she likes, an’ beating up people who try to stop her.” If what Amas said about Indera’s temper and arrogance was right, then she probably was doing exactly that.
“Not
here
, she ain’t,” the leader insisted, and there wasn’t the insecure edge that would hint at a lie. “I’d pound her into mush, any girl like that came here. She’d cry an‘ run home. Girls always cry.”
As Mirei’s illusion was that of a boy, she didn’t bother to argue. But she was done here; none of these had seen or heard anything about Indera. Time to move on. Ideally without getting into a fight.
“Look,” she said, dropping her tone confidentially and coming a couple of steps closer to the boy. “I ain’t gonna stay. I just wanna find that girl. She beat up my little brother real bad the other day, an‘ her father told her she was gonna get a hiding, so she run off here. I wanna get her for that. Lemme on through, an’ I’ll get her out of here.”
It came dangerously close to insulting the boy’s strength. “You think we cain’t get rid of her ourselves?”
Mirei responded with her own indignation. “It weren’t
your
brother she beat up. I got a
claim
on her. Ain’t gonna let her walk away from that.”
Revenge and the restoration of pride were motives these children could understand. The leader couldn’t just back down, though; he had to make it into a favor, generosity on the part of the big man. “You just walk on through,” he said, stretching to loom over Mirei. “You don’t stop. You don’t stop until you get to the Cripples’ Corner, understand? I don’t want you on my streets. But I’ll let you through them.”
Mirei assumed the Cripples’ Corner would be easy enough to identify. “Thanks. I’ll find her before long.”
And that much, she hoped, was true.
She spread the same story in other places, knowing Amas and Lehant were peddling their own version from the other side of the Knot. At least they had started out at opposite sides; in the murky tangle of alleys, tunnels, bridges, and rooms that made up the place, it was impossible to keep a sense of direction for long. Mirei just hoped they’d all be able to find their way out at the end of the day. She should have made some way for them to contact each other. But putting spells into objects was even more finicky than illusion work, and not something she had ever tried before.
“I don’t know where she is,” the ninth or tenth kid she spoke to said. This one was a real piece of work, filthy, pox-scarred, and missing half her teeth. “But I can help you look. I can guide you through the streets.”
Help couldn’t hurt; Mirei had already gone in circles twice, thanks to the tortuous layout of the Knot. Still, she had to keep up her act. She gave the girl a suspicious look. “What do you want for the help?”
The girl thought it over for a moment. “If you give me a wheel, I’ll do it.”
“You think I got a
silver
?” Mirei said incredulously.
The girl looked defensive. “You might. But I’ll help you for ten coppers.”
“Two,” Mirei returned. “You ain’t big enough to be worth ten.”
“Five.”
Warrior’s teeth, but she’s bad at bargaining
. “Three.”
“Very well,” the girl said, and led her up a rickety staircase.
They explored an upper level for a while, but ran afoul of a pregnant woman who threw a kettle at them. Then it was back down to the street—at least Mirei thought it was the street. Up, down, through buildings, out doors, with only occasional lances of sunlight to show that the sky was still there.
Mirei’s “guide” was not much use. She didn’t seem to have much idea where she was going, and Mirei still had to do all the talking, questioning people for hints of Indera. And then they squeezed through a gap between two buildings and found themselves back at an intersection they’d passed through not long before.
The girl squirmed when glared at. “If I wanna go in circles, I don’t need you to help,” Mirei said.
“I’m sorry,” the girl muttered, and chose a new direction.
“You’re dumber than a cowpat,” Mirei said, following her, and wondered at the ineptitude. Why offer to be a guide, if she didn’t know her way around?
And then other oddities began to click into place.
The way the girl looked so much dirtier, so much less healthy, than the other street rats Mirei had seen.
The way her speech didn’t match her appearance—too polished, her grammar too good.
The way she seemed to be eavesdropping when Mirei questioned people.
A voice swam up out of her memory, from the Miryo part of her mind. The voice of Edame, the Fire Hand adviser to the Lord and Lady of Haira, when she dropped her illusion and revealed who she was.
“A tip, oh green one: If someone seems odd, check them for any kind of magic. Sometimes it’ll be a fellow witch in disguise. Sometimes it’ll be someone spelled by a witch, for any one of a number of purposes. Sometimes it’ll just be somebody odd. But it’s always good to know.”
But how to do it without the girl noticing? A few streets on, the problem solved itself. A clump of children were playing a game with stones and singing a song to go with it, some vulgar rhyme about dead rats. One of them was on pitch enough to call up a resonance from nearby spells.
Like the one on the “girl” who was her guide.
Mirei’s steps stuttered for a moment before recovering; she didn’t think the girl noticed. Walking on as if nothing were wrong, she resisted the urge to swear.
A witch, or someone spelled by a witch? Either way, it’s somebody who never learned that there’s more to disguise than just the surface. Fortunately for me
.
She was tempted to just take a rock to the back of the girl’s head. Witch or not, that would remove her from the situation. But then Mirei would be stuck with an unconscious body, and no Indera. Not ideal.
She decided to wait.
They’d moved into an area where there was even less light than usual; what there was filtered down through the structures above and didn’t give Mirei any help in judging the time. Amas and Lehant were under orders to leave the Knot at dusk and go to a nearby safe house Wisp had set up for them, but Mirei was considering staying. There might be things to learn in the Knot at night. Like, for example, how anyone saw where they were going once the sun went down in a place where lighting even a candle posed a serious risk of torching the entire mess.
Then she heard shouting up ahead, in the high-pitched voices of children, and hoped her search might end before it came to that. Trouble could be a sign of Indera.
When she and her false guide came to the source of the sound, sure enough, there was a figure backed up against a pile of splintered wood left behind by a collapsing wall. The floor of two conjoined buildings above their heads, barely visible in the murk, slanted dangerously, as if the whole thing might be in danger of caving in. Several street rats had formed an arc facing their target, and some of them had crude weapons in hand—but the figure they had trapped was a scrawny boy, not Indera.
A scrawny boy Mirei recognized quite well, because she had carefully detailed what he should look like earlier that day.
She cast a swift glance around, but there was no sign of the disguised Lehant.
Void it—I
told
them not to split up
! Mirei wondered whether she’d prefer for Lehant to be lying dead or unconscious somewhere instead of wandering on her own. It depended on how badly this turned out.