The door at the top of the curling staircase lay wide open, revealing a darkened, bleak little room containing nothing but a half-full barrel of fresh water, a lidded crate, an empty sconce on the stone wall, and a little wooden stool sitting next to a stack of dirty wooden plates. Not even a table to spare for the guard on watch to eat his meals. Syr had a chuckle at the expense of the giant gaoler, imagining him eating a plate of too-cold gruel sitting on a too-small stool.

Syr slid the lid off the crate to rifle through its contents, supposing that her meager possessions could only be there. She wasn’t in the mood to waste time—that nobleman looked like the kind of man who wouldn’t hesitate to literally kick her from the room for ruining the sanctity of his shitty hole of a castle—so when the cell door downstairs slammed and she still hadn’t found her tunic and hose (and more importantly, her shoes), she grabbed an armful of everything off the top, pulled the lid back over, and bolted from the room.

A few minutes later, Syr emerged from a nearby alleyway, clothed in a shirt, cloak, and trousers intended for a man fully a foot and a half taller than herself, and turned right to join the foot and cart traffic.

Gullport was an unimaginatively named hillside city on the north shore, home to fifty thousand thronging subjects of King Emault II and (what seemed like, anyway) about a million squawking seagulls. The afternoon breeze always reeked of the day’s catch, and today was no different. But the crowds were especially thick today, mixing a familiar human stench into the humid air. The semi-weekly harvest caravan was in, bringing with it a surge of activity to board its porters and escorts and to prepare its bounties for shipment.

Syr shuffled down the street with the enormous flow of people, descending from the high district and its dingy castle toward the piers on the east end of town, meandering through sandy-colored stone buildings topped with staggered, shingled rooflines and crawling ivies. She was immensely glad for the jostling crowd and the anonymity it afforded. It spared her most of the embarrassment of her appearance as a street rat.

What it could not spare her from was the sinking feeling that she had, in fact, become a street rat.

Having put about a quarter mile between herself and the castle, Syr peeled out of the crowd, ducking under the muzzle of a horse and nearly getting bowled over by a woman carrying a basket of corn to find a staircase in an alley leading up and around the corner to someone’s back door. She perched herself on the railing by the door and heaved herself up onto the shingles, finding a nook sheltered from the sun by a higher roofline and far enough from the edge of the roof to be obscured from the street. If she couldn’t loiter up in the high district, she’d just have to loiter in the fishy portside streets.

Having finally found some shade and some quiet, Syr sat and doffed the enormous shirt, absentmindedly picking at the seams with the intention of unraveling the garment into something more useful.

Her head was quickly crowding with thoughts. Where to now? Probably to find somewhere to sleep later tonight. Food could wait. Water… wouldn’t be too hard to find. Right? Especially if it rains? But what if it rains? Would hightown be better or portside? But she was tired and couldn’t hold on to any of them. She sat on those stairs, numb, letting them circle like wolves while her fingers worked at the shirt sleeve.

It was an exhausting new life she had plunged into. No need to take it in all at once.

The sleeve tore from the body with a satisfying rip, and something small fell onto the step between Syr’s feet. She snapped out of her daze and leaned over to examine it: a small black pendant resting on a heap of dainty silver chain. She snatched it.

The hair stood up on the back of her neck.

Syr jumped to her feet and spun around, nearly missing her footing and falling backward down to the alley. Nothing. The plain wooden door beneath her and at the top of the stairs was closed. The alley below was clear of people. She peered over the edge of the roof to see that traffic on the main street kept passing the mouth of the alley by, a tiny window-slice of a parade of colors, sights, and sounds, wafting up to her little roost.

There was a presence here, she was sure of it. She’d been traveling on her own long enough now to have developed the sixth sense for a sucker punch. And that sense was screaming in the bottom of her mind, clawing at her heart, coursing in her thighs and calves, tingling in her fingertips. SOMEONE WAS OUT THERE, and that someone was GOING TO PUNCH HER.

And nobody came. Nobody punched her.

It was five full heart-pounding minutes, craning her neck to and fro, up and down, before Syr convinced herself to sit back down. She took one last look around, and then she loosened her white-knuckled grip on the pendant to look back down at it. It had the look of a coin of some sort, stamped into a square. The edges were straight and the corners razor sharp, each like a piece of flint struck to a piercing tip. One had even drawn blood from her palm as she had gripped it. Both the obverse and reverse were perfectly blank, adorned only with a small rim. A hole was bored in one of the corners, making it hang off the chain in a diamond orientation.

She looked back up. Still nobody on the roof or in the alley. Her instincts warred desperately against the evidence of her eyes and her ears.

Syr assured herself that there was nothing out there worth abandoning this spot over, and she put the pendant on.

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