The Red grinned a feral grin. “So, there’s a little bastard in the little bastard. Good. Now get out.”

Chapter 32

Adrasteia was a slave, not a victim. She had crossed the Lily’s Stem, the bridge between the Chromeria and Big Jasper, before the sun had come up. Today was Sponsor Day. That meant no lectures, though the Blackguard would still practice. The Blackguard was too important to take days off. Every student was supposed to meet with her sponsor today, and slaves were no different from anyone else in this.

The difference was that Adrasteia’s sponsor never met with her. Instead, she gave Teia secret little jobs to do on Sponsor Day. Lady Lucretia Verangheti was not an easy mistress.

The vendors in the market were setting up their tents and stalls, laying out carpets, prodding their burros to try to get loads of produce or fish into position. There was a constant stream of people, but with the dawn it would become a flood as house slaves and wives attended to the daily shopping to feed their households. Adrasteia slipped through the mass of people as if she had somewhere to be. She kicked loose one of the laces of her boots and stopped by a wall, knelt on one knee, and pulled her skirt up enough to tie the lace.

She pulled the package out from its space between two bricks, slipped it into her boot, and went on her way. She took a few twisting alleys to make sure she hadn’t been followed—not that she’d ever been followed, but it was part of her orders—and finally found a place between two taller buildings. She pulled the package from her boot, then unrolled the letter.

Lady Verangheti rarely wrote words. She didn’t want to leave her own handwriting to tie her to the crimes she made Adrasteia commit, and she didn’t like trusting slaves or scribes with any more than she had to.

It didn’t matter. Adrasteia knew what was expected.

There was an uncannily accurate drawing of a man—Lady Verangheti could have been quite an artist if she hadn’t thought it beneath her. The next page of impossibly thin rice paper had a drawing of a snuff box, inlaid with a family crest: Herons Rising over a Crescent Moon.

From doing this before, Teia knew she was supposed to steal the snuff box, before tomorrow morning.

Adrasteia was a slave, not a fool: she knew that half the time, the victims were men or women working for Lucretia Verangheti. She’d been caught before, back home.

But she never knew which marks were real and which were decoys. It made sense, she supposed. Training worked best if failure was possible, but not catastrophic. If your trainee failed once and then was useless, you’d lose all the time you’d put into training her. If you weren’t willing for your trainee to ever fail, then you wouldn’t stretch her skills, you wouldn’t teach her where the line was.

But Teia didn’t know which was which. It didn’t matter that much, honestly. She couldn’t treat any of them like they were decoys. The difference being that if she were caught thieving from one of Lucretia’s men, she’d be thrashed, and if she were caught stealing from anyone else, she’d be thrown out of the Blackguard and the Chromeria and put in jail.

And of course, her father was counting on her. Things went well for the father of a slave doing excellent work. The other half of the statement didn’t even have to be breathed. A slave knew. Her father was a free man; she hadn’t lied to Kip about that part. But that didn’t mean that Lady Verangheti didn’t have power over what happened to him and his debts.

So Teia studied the portrait, memorizing the man’s features. Landed noble, most likely, from the clothes. Balding, short-cropped hair, wide nose, fat necklaces, wide cloak, sword belt, wide sleeves, leather gloves.

Dressed like that, Teia wouldn’t be surprised if he traveled with a bodyguard. She glanced down the alley both ways. Saw no one. She folded up the rice paper. The corners had red and yellow luxin under a thin layer of wax. She rubbed them together, scraping away the wax, and the paper ignited and burned up in a flash. Teia blew away the dust and headed back toward the market.

Like every other intersection in the city, each entrance to the market was straddled by arches that supported one of the city’s Thousand Stars. Though they were primarily intended to extend the power of drafters, in between the drafters’ uses each district could employ the great elevated mirrors for whatever they chose.

This market had rented out its stars to whatever merchant paid the most. So some focused beams of sunlight on particular shops. Others had colored filters fixed over them and focused on luxin jugglers who wandered the market, doing tricks and promoting one shop or another. Adrasteia made her way to the base of one of the stars, unlocked the tiny door with a key, closed and locked the door behind her, and crawled up the painfully narrow shaft. She had an arrangement with the tower monkeys, the slaves who kept this arch. As long as she didn’t get in their way or do any damage, they let her use one of the ventilation windows partway up as a lookout.

She opened her bag as she waited. Ordinarily, she hated her flat, lifeless hair, but this was why she kept it cut short. With a few clips, she was able to fasten a wig to her head with no problem: this time, long, wavy Atashian. Bound it with a red handkerchief. She fished about twenty bracelets out of the bag. Gaudy, flashy—anything to take attention off her face. She put rouge on her cheeks and lips, and folded her other handkerchiefs. She tucked her shawl into the bag, loosened some ties on her dress, and pulled it down—when she left the arch, she would put on tall shoes that would disguise her height, and the hemline needed to hang low enough to disguise the shoes. She pulled on a bodice and cinched it loosely around her ribs and stuffed the folded handkerchiefs into the bodice to give the appearance that her breasts were larger than mosquito bites.

Almost everything she hated about her body made her good at this work, she knew. It was doubtless part of why she had been chosen. Not too short, not too tall, skinny—that was easier to disguise with clothes than fat was—facial features pleasant, but not so pretty as to stand out from a line of other girls. As much as Kip had peeved her for saying it aloud, she could—and had—even disguised herself as a boy.

When she was finished today, though, she thought she probably looked like a woman. Lower-class Atashian wife, mid-twenties, tallish, bad taste, one tooth blackened with a mixture of ash and tallow. Which tasted awful.

The disguise wasn’t flawless, but Adrasteia wasn’t trying for perfection. The best thing about this disguise was that if she were pursued, she could take it all off in a couple of seconds.

Finished changing, she waited. Finding one nobleman among the human stockyards of Big Jasper would have been impossible on her own, much less stealing a particular item within that same day. But Adrasteia wasn’t required to find her target. He would come to her, and he would come marked.

She waited for an hour, dilating her eyes every minute. Her vision, as she’d told Kip, was alternately average, incredible, and terrible, with no logic behind which was which that she could divine. Superviolet didn’t register at all, her perception of violet, purple, and blue was merely average, green possibly average, yellow average, and then red indistinguishable from green. But then, below the spectrum that was visible to mundanes and many drafters, her sight sharpened. She couldn’t draft sub-red, but she could see it better than most sub-red drafters. Teia barely had to consciously dilate her eyes to see it; as long as she was relaxed it was as easy to her as going from focusing on something near to something far.