This was Venda.

The monster was just waking, the soft underbelly beginning to rumble and stir. A horse hitched to a dray and led by a cloaked figure ambled down a narrow street below me. Far across the way, a woman swept a walk, water spraying out to the ground below. Dark, huddled figures stirred in shadows. The dim light bled onto the edges of parapets, dipped in crenelations, spilled across scaled walls and rutted muddy lanes, a reluctance to its slow crawl.

I heard a soft tap and turned. It was so faint I wasn’t sure where it came from. The door or somewhere outside below me? Another soft tap. And then I heard the scrape of a key in the lock. The door eased open a few inches, the rusty hinges whining. Another soft tap. I grabbed one of the wooden practice swords leaning against the wall and raised it, ready to strike if necessary. “Come in,” I called.

The door swung open. It was one of the boys I had seen last night pushing the carts into Sanctum Hall. His blond hair was chopped off in uneven chunks close to his head, and his large brown eyes grew wider when he saw the wooden sword in my hand. “Miz? I only brought your boots.” He gingerly held them up as if he was afraid to startle me.

I lowered the sword. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“You don’t have to explain, Miz. It’s good to be prepared. I could have been one of those monster men coming through the door.” He giggled. “But that little sword couldn’t knock their arse an inch.”

I smiled. “No, I suppose not. You’re one of the boys from last night, aren’t you? The ones who brought in the carts.”

He looked down, and red seeped across his cheeks. “I’m not a boy, Miz. I’m a—”

I caught my breath realizing my mistake. “A girl. Of course,” I said, trying to find a way to take away her embarrassment. “I just woke up. I haven’t quite brushed the sleep from my eyes yet.”

She reached up and rubbed her short uneven hair. “Nah, it’s the buggy hair. You can’t work in the Sanctum if you’ve got vermin, and I ain’t much good with a knife.” She was willow thin, certainly not more than twelve, with no bloom of womanhood yet. Her shirt and trousers were the same drab brown as the rest of the boys’. “But one day, I’m going to grow it real long like yours, all pretty and braided like.” She shifted from foot to foot, rubbing her skinny arms.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Aster.”

“Aster,” I repeated. The same name as the powerful angel of destruction. But she looked more like a forlorn angel with badly clipped wings.

I listened to her distorted assessment of the angel Aster, clearly not what the Morrighese Holy Text revealed. “My bapa says Mama named me for an angel right before she drew her last breath. He said she smiled all full of the last glow, then called me Aster. That’s the angel who showed Venda the way through the gates to the city. The saving angel, she’s called. That’s what—” She suddenly straightened, clamping her lips to a firm line. “I was warned not to prattle. I’m sorry, Miz. Here are your boots.” She stepped forward formally, set them down in front of me, then took a stiff step back again.

“Where I’m from, Aster, sharing a few words isn’t prattle. It’s the polite and friendly thing to do. I hope you’ll come and prattle with me every day.” She grinned and skimmed her head again self-consciously. I looked at my boots, cleaned and neatly laced. “How did you come by them?” I asked.

I was pleased to learn that silence was not Aster’s strength either. We had something in common. She told me she got them from Eben. He grabbed them just before they were being sent off to market. My clothes were already gone, but he snuck the boots out of the pile and cleaned them for me. He’d be whipped if anyone found out, but Eben was good at being sly, and she promised I didn’t need to worry. “As far as those boots are concerned, they got up and walked off by themselves.”

“Will you be whipped for bringing them to me?” I asked.

She looked down, the pink tingeing her cheeks again. “I’m not that brave, Miz. Sorry. I brought them on orders from the Assassin.”

I knelt so I was eye to eye with her. “If you insist I call you Aster, then I insist you call me Lia. That’s short for Jezelia. Can you do that, Aster?”

She nodded. And then for the first time, I noticed the ring on her thumb, so loose she had to hold her hand in a fist to keep from losing it. It was the ring of a Morrighese pageantry guard. She had taken a ring from the carts.

She saw me staring at it, and her mouth fell open. “It was my pick,” she explained. “I won’t keep it. I’ll sell it at market, but just for overnight I wanted to feel its goldness all smooth on my skin. I rubbed that red stone all night, making wishes.”

“What do you mean, Aster, your pick?”

“The Komizar always gives the barrow runners first pick of the booty.”

“The governors pick after you?”

She nodded. “The whole Council goes after us. The Komizar makes sure of that. My bapa will be happy for my pick. The quarterlords, they love rings. This might fetch us a whole sack of grain, and bapa can stretch a sack for a month.”

I listened to the way she talked of the Komizar, more like a benefactor than a tyrant. “You said always. Are there many carts brought into the Sanctum?”

“No,” she said. “Used to be just goods from the trading caravans every few months, but now there’s war bounty. We’ve had six loads this month, but this was the biggest one. The others were only three or four barrowfuls.”