Rain had been falling since before dawn, the kind that turned the lower wards into a reeking grey soup. Nella Vross walked through it with her collar turned up and her satchel pressed flat against her ribs. The brand burned in her memory like a coal held too close: a curl of smoke wrapped around a broken sword, pressed into wax the color of old blood. She had seen it twice in her life. The first time, it had been pinned to her mentor's door the night the Red Riot swallowed the clinic whole. The second time, it had been waiting for her on a dead man's tongue, stamped onto a coin the corpse had been choking on when she found him in the gutter behind the salt warehouses.
The Gullet squatted at the end of a crooked alley where the canal met the slag heaps, half its foundation sunk into black water that never drained. Its sign was a painted eel with its mouth open, the letters long since weathered into bruises. Smoke leaked from the doorframe even in daylight, thin and sour, the color of bad meat. Nella pushed inside.
The taproom was a cavern of damp timber and low lanterns. A dozen men sat hunched over bowls of something that pretended to be stew. No one looked up. The barman was a thick-necked woman with a scar that split her top lip and gave her a permanent half-smile that was not a smile at all.
"Davos Reen," Nella said.
The barman wiped a clay cup with a rag that had stopped being clean a week ago. "Not here."
"He's here. He owes me for a poultice and a lie he told the night magistrates." Nella set two coppers on the bar. "Tell him it's the watch. Tell him it's me."
The half-smile twitched. The barman jerked her chin toward a booth at the back, half hidden by a curtain of greasy rope netting.
Davos Reen sat alone, a clay pipe in one fist, a cardknife in the other. He was not using the cardknife on anything. He was simply holding it, the way a man holds a thing when his hands need to be busy. The scar on his face was older than the city's memory, a seam of white tissue that ran from temple to jaw and gave his mouth a permanent downward cast, as though the world had long since disappointed him and he had stopped being surprised about it. His eyes were the pale grey of old ash.
"Sit," he said, without looking up.
Nella slid into the booth across from him. The wood was tacky with condensation. She put her satchel on the table between them, and from it she drew a folded cloth, and from the cloth a coin. She set the coin on the table with the careful precision of a surgeon laying out a blade.
Davos looked at the coin. His pipe stopped halfway to his mouth.
"Where," he said.
"The salt quarter. A man named Tovar, farrier by trade. He wasn't dead more than an hour when I found him. The brand was on the coin, and the coin was in his throat." She kept her voice flat, the way she had learned to keep it in the years after the clinic burned. "I cut the coin out. I still have the throat in a jar of brine at the watch house, if you want to come see."
Davos set his pipe down. He turned the coin over with one thick finger, studying the broken sword, the curl of smoke. His jaw worked once.
"You know what this is," he said.
"I know what it looks like."
"No." He looked up at her then, and his grey eyes had the flat, steady weight of a man who had spent too many years carrying other people's deaths. "You know what it looks like. You don't know what it is."
The rain drummed against the tavern's sagging roof. Somewhere in the back, a man laughed, the sound trailing off into a cough. Nella waited.
Davos leaned back. The cardknife disappeared into his sleeve with the ease of long practice. "The brand is old," he said. "Older than the Ember Guard. Older than the watch. It belongs to a guild of killers who used to keep the peace in this city when the peace needed keeping in a particular way. They called themselves the Wardens of Ash. When the Crown consolidated its forces, when they formed the Guard, when they formed the watch, the Wardens were supposed to be retired. Pensioned off. Folded into the new order." He turned the coin again. "Most of them were. Some of them weren't. Some of them learned that the Crown's Smoke Authority had a use for men who could make problems disappear without a trial, without a record, without a body that could be found."
"You're telling me the Authority kept a wetworks guild on retainer."
"I'm telling you there was a guild, and it had a brand, and the brand meant a contract." Davos's voice dropped a register, into the cadence of a man delivering a field report. "When a name was given to the Wardens, a kill-warrant was struck. A coin was minted with the brand on one side and the target's identifier on the other. The coin was carried by the assigned blade, and when the job was done, the coin was returned to the guildhall as proof. If a blade died with the coin still in his possession, it was recovered. Always. The dead man's tongue was the traditional place to carry it in, because the throat was the one part of the body the crows wouldn't get to first."
Nella stared at him. "Tovar was a farrier."
"Tovar was a farrier who, six nights ago, broke the leg of a horse belonging to a clerk named Rusk at the Crown's Smoke Authority. The horse threw Rusk into a brick wall. Rusk survived. The horse did not." Davos reached for his pipe, packed it with his thumb, did not light it. "Three days later, Tovar is dead in a gutter with a guild coin in his throat."
"You're saying Rusk put a contract out on a farrier."
"I'm saying Rusk put a contract out on the man who embarrassed him in public, and the contract was carried by a Warden blade, and the blade is still out there because the coin is still out there." Davos set the pipe down again. "You found the coin. Which means the blade knows the coin is missing. Which means the blade is going to come looking for the coin. Which means, Nella Vross, you are now holding a thing that very dangerous men need to have returned to them, and you brought it here."
"I brought it here because you are the only man in this city I trust who knows what this brand means, and because I need to know why my name is on a warrant."
Davos went still.
"Show me," he said.
Nella reached into her satchel again and drew out a second coin. This one was not stained. This one was bright. The brand was on one side, freshly struck, the smoke and the sword crisp as a fresh scar. On the other side, etched in the small precise hand of a guild minter, was a name.
Nella Vross. Surgeon. The Salt Quarter.
Davos did not touch it. He looked at it for a long time, his grey eyes unreadable.
"Where," he said.
"Pinned to the clinic door. The new clinic, the one I've been running out of the back of the watch house since the Riot." Her voice was steady, and she was proud of that, and she hated that she was proud of it. "Three nights ago. I found it when I came in from rounds."
"Anyone see you take it down?"
"My runner. The boy."
"Your runner is twelve."
"Thirteen. And he is the fastest thing on two legs in the lower wards."
Davos grunted. He reached into his coat and drew out a small leather case, the kind used for reagents. From it he took a sliver of beeswax and a stub of candle. He lit the candle with a match from his belt, and he held the coin over the flame, turning it slowly in the heat. The wax on the brand's surface began to soften, and from beneath it, in a hand even smaller than the minter's, a second line of text emerged.
Nella leaned in. The words were tiny, but she had spent years learning to read the small print on vials and the tiny labels surgeons used to mark their trays.
The words said: By order of the Smoke Authority. Priority: Red. Pay: Open. Contract standing.
"That's not a guild contract," Nella said.
"No." Davos's voice had gone very quiet. "That's a Crown contract. Someone in the Authority used the old guild brand to strike a warrant, and they used the guild's minter, or they had the old die, and they paid the old rate, which is to say they paid in coin and silence." He blew out the candle. The smoke curled up between them. "This means one of two things. Either the Authority revived the guild and is running it as a quiet arm of the Crown, which would be the worst thing that has happened to this city since the Riot, or the Authority has been infiltrated by someone who knows the old ways and is using them for their own purposes."
"Rusk," Nella said.
Davos's eyes flicked to hers.
"The farrier's name. Rusk. You said he embarrassed a clerk named Rusk. And you looked at me when I said it like you were waiting to see if I would put it together." She kept her voice level. "Who is Rusk?"
Davos was quiet for a long time. The rain intensified against the roof, a steady percussion that made the tavern feel smaller. When he spoke, his voice was careful.
"Rusk is a senior clerk in the Smoke Authority's Office of Domestic Hazards. He has held the position for nine years. He has the ear of three councilors and, by rumor, the Lord Chancellor himself. He is the man who signs the permits for the city's furnaces, who certifies the boiler inspections, who decides which chimneys get swept and which get left to rot." Davos paused. "He is also the man who, six years ago, signed the inspection waiver for the clinic where you trained."
Nella's hand moved before she could stop it. She pressed her palm against the coin on the table as though to hold it down, as though it might rise and bite.
"The waiver said the chimney had been swept that month," Davos continued. "It had not. The flue tile was cracked from the winter before. When the Riot came, the fire reached the tile and the tile poured fire down the back wall of the clinic and there was no one inside to put it out because the inspector had already gone home and the watch had already been told the building was safe." He looked at her. "I read the file. I read it because I am the captain of the Ember Guard and I read every file that touches a fire. The waiver was signed by Rusk. The inspection was never performed. The clerk who was supposed to perform it had been paid six silver to initial the form and go home."
"You never told me."
"You were a surgeon's apprentice. You were sixteen. You had no rank, no standing, no platform from which to accuse a senior clerk of the Crown. What would I have told you?" He picked up his pipe again, and this time he lit it, drawing the flame in with a slow breath. "I told the magistrate. The magistrate told the Lord Chancellor's office. The Lord Chancellor's office told me, in writing, that the matter was closed because the clerk who took the bribe had died in the Riot and Rusk's signature alone was not sufficient evidence to proceed."
"Rusk's signature on a false waiver that killed seven people."
"Rusk's signature on a form." Davos exhaled a long thin column of smoke. "Forms are not people. Forms are paper. Paper does not burn, except in this city it always does."
Nella sat very still. The coin was cool under her palm. She could feel the broken sword, the curl of smoke, pressed into her skin.
"Why would Rusk put a contract on me now?" she asked. "I was a child then. I am a watch medic now. I have never made any public accusation. I have never even mentioned his name in a report."
"Because you are a witness who is still alive, and because six years is long enough for a man to forget that a witness exists, and because three nights ago something reminded him." Davos tapped his pipe against the edge of the table. "What happened three nights ago?"
"I treated a boy from the ragpickers' yards. Burned hands, severe. He said he had been playing near a furnace in a closed yard behind a tannery. I asked him whose furnace. He said he didn't know. He said a clerk had chased him off."
"Did he describe the clerk?"
"Smooth-shaven. Expensive coat. Walked with a limp he'd been pretending not to have."
Davos nodded once. "Rusk. The horse threw him eight days ago. He has been moving about the wards with a cane and a bad temper and a list of every man who ever saw him stumble." He drew on his pipe. "The boy saw him. The boy talked. The boy talked to the watch medic who treated him. The watch medic is a woman who happens to share a name with a kill-warrant that was struck the same night the boy was burned."
"You think Rusk saw me."
"I think someone saw you, and reported it, and Rusk decided to clean up a loose thread while he was cleaning up the boy who made him fall off his horse." Davos's voice was very even. "The boy's name was Pell. He worked the ragpicks at the tannery yard. He was found in the canal yesterday morning with his burns still fresh."
Nella closed her eyes. Pell. She had wrapped his hands herself. He had not cried. He had only asked if he could still work.
"The coin," she said, without opening her eyes. "What do I do with the coin?"
"You do not spend it. You do not show it to anyone in the watch. You do not take it near the Smoke Authority. You bring it to me, and I bring it to a man I know who used to work the guild's mint, and we see if the die can be traced." Davos paused. "And you do not go home tonight. You do not go to the clinic. You do not go to any place you have ever slept."
"I have the watch house."
"The watch house has a door that faces the street. The street has eyes. You need a door that faces a wall."
"Mev," Nella said.
Davos looked at her.
"Mev has a back door that opens onto the slag heap. It is barred from the inside. The forge is stone. The chimney is stone. There is no wood in that building to burn."
Davos considered this. He nodded, once, the way a man nods when he has decided to trust a thing he cannot verify.
"Go to Mev. Show him the coin. Tell him what I told you. Tell him if anyone comes asking for you, he is to say you never arrived." Davos stood, and his height seemed to fill the booth. "I will find you tomorrow. I will find you at the forge, and I will bring what I learn from the minter, and we will decide what to do about Rusk and the warrant and the blade that is still out there looking for a coin it needs to return."
He turned to go. At the curtain of rope netting he paused, and without turning back he spoke.
"Nella."
"Yes."
"The boy, Pell. The one you treated. You did everything right." A pause. "What happened to him after was not your doing."
Then he was gone, and the rope netting swung once and settled, and Nella sat alone in the booth with two coins on the table and the rain hammering down.
The watch house basement smelled of lamp oil and damp brick, and Nella sat on the cot with her coat still damp against her shoulders, listening to the rain drum a tattoo on the street above. She had not gone to Mev's. She should have. Davos's orders sat in her chest like a swallowed coal. But the watch house had a lock she trusted and a clerk on duty who knew her face, and the warrant in her pocket felt too hot to carry through the lower wards at night.
She slept in her boots. She slept with the knife under the pillow. She did not dream, which was a mercy, because the last time she had dreamed of Pell, she had woken with her hands shaped like they were still holding a throat she could not save.
Dawn came grey and wet. The clerk brought her bread and a cup of something hot that tasted of chicory and regret. She ate standing up, and she watched the street through the narrow window, and at half past seven the door of the watch house opened and a runner came down the stairs with a summons in his hand and the look on his face that men wear when they have been sent to deliver something rotten.
"You are to come to the Plaza," he said. "The Captain sent word. There is to be a spectacle."
She did not ask what sort of spectacle. She asked nothing. She pinned the warrant deeper into her coat, against her ribs, where the leather of the lining made a small pocket that pressed cold against her skin. She climbed the stairs into the rain.
The Plaza of Cinders was a square of soot-stained granite that had once been a market, before the guilds had grown bold enough to claim the open air for their own grim theatre. Nella had been there twice before, both times as a medic, both times wishing she had been elsewhere. Today the rain had kept the crowd thin, but thin in the Plaza still meant hundreds, pressed along the low walls and under the awnings of the closed stalls, their breath making pale ghosts in the wet air.
At the centre of the square stood a brazier the height of a man. Its iron cage was black with old burns, and the coals inside had been heaped high and fed with something that made the flame blue. Not the orange of honest wood, not the yellow of coal, but a cold, steady, hissing blue that smelled of salt and copper and made the eyes water if you looked too long. Guild flame. The sort that burned hotter than any natural fire, the sort that left nothing to bury.
Davos found her at the edge of the crowd. He did not greet her. He pressed his shoulder against hers and looked straight ahead.
"You are to watch," he said, very quietly. "You are to stand here and watch and let the wardens see your face. They are looking for anyone who flinches."
"I have not flinched since the Red Riot, Davos."
"I know. But they do not. They need to see you stand still."
A horn sounded from the far side of the Plaza, low and long, and the crowd quieted the way a crowd quiets when it knows what is coming and has come to see it. A file of wardens in their long coats of boiled leather came through the archway at the north end, eight of them, marching in step, and between them walked a man whose hands were bound behind his back with wire.
Nella did not know his name. She knew his face, though. A clerk, like the one at the watch house, only older. A man who had worked the ledgers of some small guild house down by the tanneries. She had stitched his thumb once, years ago, when a ledger had fallen on it in a cellar and the corner had bitten through the skin. He had tipped her a copper and complained about the cost of ink. A small man, a careful man, a man whose life had been the inside of a counting house.
They brought him to the brazier. They stopped him two paces from the iron cage. The warden at their head, a tall woman with a face like a hatchet and a badge of office on her breast, stepped forward and unrolled a paper and read it in a voice that carried without rising.
The man's crime was conspiracy to defraud the Crown's Smoke Authority. The man's sentence was to be made an example. The man's name was spoken, and Nella heard it, and then she stopped hearing words at all.
The warden folded the paper. The warden nodded to her fellows. Two of them took the man by the arms. The third took the wire that bound his wrists and looped it once around the rail of the cage, fixing him in place, his back to the blue flame, his face to the crowd.
Nella felt Davos's shoulder press harder against hers. She understood. If she moved, if she cried out, if she so much as shifted her weight forward, the wardens would remember her. They were watching the crowd the way a cat watches a thicket. They were looking for any motion that did not fit.
The warden with the paper drew something from her coat. A small glass vial, stoppered with wax. She cracked the wax against the edge of the brazier and let the contents run down into the coals. The blue flame leapt higher and turned, for a heartbeat, a colour that had no name, a colour between violet and white that made the teeth ache in the jaw.
The man at the brazier began to weep. He did not beg. He wept the way a man weeps when he has understood that nothing he says will change the hour. His shoulders shook. His mouth worked. Tears ran into the rain on his face and were lost.
Nella stood still. Her hands were at her sides. Her nails bit into her palms and she let them bite, because the pain in her palms was smaller than the pain in her chest, and she needed the smaller pain to keep the larger one from spilling out through her mouth.
The warden reached through the bars of the cage and took the man by the collar and pushed him backward, into the flame.
The sound was not a scream. It was a breath, drawn long and high, that did not end. The blue fire took him the way water takes a stone. For a moment he was a shape inside the light, and then the shape was gone, and there was only the flame, and a smell that came to Nella across the Plaza like a hand laid over her mouth. The smell of salt and copper and something sweeter underneath, something that had no right to be sweet, the smell of a man being unmade.
Davos did not look away. Nella did not look away. The crowd did not look away. They watched, and their silence was the silence of people who understood that the silence was the price of the air they breathed.
When it was over, when the flame had settled and the wardens had dragged what remained of the man from the brazier and laid it on the wet stones in a sheet, the warden with the paper turned to the crowd and spoke again.
"This is the wage of treason. Let every man and woman here carry it home to their hearths. The Smoke Authority protects the Crown. The Crown protects you. There is no fire that burns without our leave, and no man who sets one without our leave who will not share this fire."
The crowd began to disperse, slowly at first, then faster, the way water runs downhill. Nella stood where she was. She could not feel her feet. She could not feel her hands. She could feel the rain on her face and the warrant against her ribs and the shape of Davos's shoulder against hers, and that was all.
"Breathe," Davos said, beside her.
She breathed.
"Now walk. Walk with me, slowly, and do not look back at the brazier."
She walked. Her legs moved under her because she told them to. She walked through the dispersing crowd, and the crowd parted around her the way crowds part around a woman whose face has gone the colour of tallow. She did not look back at the brazier. She looked at the wet stones under her boots, one after another, until the archway took her out of the Plaza and the rain came down on her bare head and the air came back into her lungs.
Davos guided her to a doorway two streets off, under a lean-to that had once been a fish stall. He made her sit on an upturned crate. He crouched in front of her. He took her wrists in his hands, one in each, and held them until she felt her fingers again.
"I am sorry," he said.
"You did not light the fire."
"No. I made you watch it. That is worse, in its way."
She looked at him. His face was grey. His eyes were the eyes of a man who had watched the same sort of thing done in the Ash Wars, and had done some of it himself, and had never found a way to make the weight of it lighter.
"Why me," she said. "Why did you want me there."
"Because the wardens are looking for the woman who treated Pell. The woman who treated Pell is known to be a former apprentice of a surgeon whose clinic burned. The Surgeon's clinic burned in the Red Riot. The Surgeon's clinic was burned by wardens acting on information. The wardens will be looking for that woman in the crowd today. If she is not in the crowd today, they will wonder where she is. If she is in the crowd and stands still and does not flinch, they will mark her face and let her go."
"So I am bait."
"You are cover. You are the version of yourself that the wardens can see and file away. The woman who watched and did nothing. The woman who is no trouble. The woman they do not need to chase."
"And the woman I actually am."
"She goes to Mev's. She goes tonight. She does not come out until I send word."
Nella sat on the crate and looked at her hands. The nails had left half-moons in her palms, and the half-moons were filling with rain that dripped from the lean-to's edge.
"He had a daughter," she said. "The clerk. I remember him saying. He had a daughter who worked the dye shops down by the river."
"Then the daughter will learn what the wards have learned," Davos said. "That is the order of things. That is the order they want us to believe in."
"And what order do you believe in, Davos?"
He looked at her. The rain ran down his face into the collar of his coat. He did not answer for a long moment.
"The one I can still look at in the morning," he said, at last. "It is not a pretty order. It is not the order of the Plaza. But it is mine."
He stood. He helped her to her feet. He took her by the elbow and walked her, slowly, through the back lanes towards the lower wards, and the rain hid them, and the morning hid them, and the warrant against her ribs pressed cold through the wet leather, a coin she could not spend, a key she did not yet understand.
The lane behind the chandler's yard was empty when Davos parted from her with a single nod, but Nella did not trust empty lanes. She kept to the wall, one shoulder brushing the wet stone, and counted the gaps where a body could hide. Three. A stack of broken crates. A doorway with no door. A drain-channel wide enough for a child.
The rain had thinned to a grey haze that tasted of chimney-smoke and fish from the morning carts. Her boots left prints that filled in behind her. The warrant in her bodice was a rectangle of cold against her sternum, and she could feel her heart beating against it, a small animal tapping at the bars of a wicker trap.
She cut through the cobbler's alley, then the alley behind the tallow works, and came at last to the rear of her own building. The stair to her room was a ladder of rusted iron rungs set into the wall. She climbed it with her knees aching and her teeth clenched, and she did not look down, because looking down meant thinking about the height, and thinking about the height meant thinking about the fall, and she had already had too much falling for one morning.
Her door was still shut. The latch she had rigged with a thread of black wool hung limp and unbroken. She touched it with one fingertip and felt the small, clean relief of a thing still in order.
The key turned. The hinges did not creak. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her and stood in the dark, listening.
Her room smelled of lamp-oil and dried lavender and the particular stale warmth of a bed that had not been made. The shutters were closed. A thin blade of grey light lay across the floorboards, and in it she could see the shapes of her few possessions: the cot, the basin, the chest where she kept the clothes she did not wear, the shelf where she kept the books she did not read. The room was the size of a generous closet. It had been hers for nine years.
She hung her wet coat on the hook by the door. She crossed to the basin and poured the dregs of yesterday's water over her wrists, and the cold of it made her gasp. She pressed her palms flat on the rim and breathed.
In. Out. In. Out.
The smell of rain and lamp-oil and lavender settled around her. She could hear her own pulse in her ears. She could hear the building's old timbers ticking as they dried. She could hear, faintly, the carters below calling to one another in the yard.
She let her head drop. She let her shoulders drop. She let her hands drop.
Then a voice said, from the dark corner by the chest, "Don't move."
She moved.
Her hand went to the knife at her belt. Her body dropped low. The corner of her eye caught a shape unfolding from the shadow, and a second shape from the side of the cot, and the smell of them reached her before she could place it: tobacco. Cheap, acrid, the kind sold in twist-paper at the corner stalls. Two young wardens, smoking in her room while they waited for her to come home, and the smell of them had hidden the smell of rain.
"Nella Vross," the first one said, stepping into the blade of light. He was thin, pale, with a clerk's soft hands and a warden's hard eyes. He wore the grey half-cloak of the Smoke Authority, and pinned at his throat a brass badge shaped like a curling wisp. "By warrant of the Crown's Smoke Authority. You are summoned for questioning in the matter of the late Clerk Aldredge. You will come with us now."
"On whose authority?" she said.
"On mine," said the second warden, stepping forward. He was broader, ruddier, with the look of a farm boy who had found a smarter trade. His hand rested on the truncheon at his hip. "Name's Rusk. This here's Mev. We're to bring you in comfortable, but comfortable's not a promise, it's a preference. So let's have preferences, eh?"
"The warrant," Nella said. "Show me the warrant."
"Warrant's in my pocket, love. You'll see it when we're at the Hall."
"Then I don't go."
"Then you go anyway."
Rusk smiled. It was the smile of a man who had been told he was charming and had believed it. He took a step closer. Mev took a step to the side, flanking her towards the door. The room was very small. The bed was behind her. The door was in front of her. The chest was to her left. The basin was to her right. There was nowhere to go that was not towards one of them.
"Last chance, sweetheart," Rusk said. "Mev, get her arm."
Mev moved.
Nella moved first.
She did not think the spell. She did not speak the words. She half-remembered them, the way one half-remembers a song learned in childhood, and what came out of her mouth was not the spell as Old Maerlyn had taught it, but the spell as she had heard it in a dream of smoke, years ago, in the burning of the clinic, when the smoke had poured over her like a veil and she had walked through it untouched.
The syllables left her like a cough. They tasted of iron and of ash. They hung in the air for a heartbeat, and then the air in the little room thickened, and a pale grey cloud bloomed from her open palms and rolled outward across the floor.
It smelled of nothing. It smelled of every fire she had ever tended. It was warm and it was cold. It moved like water and like dust.
Rusk swore and swung his truncheon at where she had been. He hit empty air and staggered. Mev stumbled backwards into the cot and went down in a tangle of blanket and pipe-smoke. The cloud rolled between them and her, and through it she could see their faces, white and wide, and their hands reaching for her and finding only smoke.
She did not wait to see what they would do next.
She wrenched open the door, shouldered it wide, half-fell down the first three rungs of the iron ladder, caught herself on the fourth, and dropped the remaining distance to the cobbles in a bruising jar that bit her ankles and her knees. The rain was still falling. It washed the smoke from her face and from her hands. She ran.
She ran across the cobbler's alley. She ran past the tallow works, where a man with a ladle stared at her from the doorway. She ran down the lane that ran behind the fish-stalls, where the cats scattered at her heels. She ran until her lungs burned and her side ached and the warrant at her ribs felt less like a key and more like a coal, and only then did she let herself stop, in the lee of a stack of barrels outside a brewery, and bend double, and breathe.
The smoke-veil had cost her something. She could feel the place where the magic had been drawn from, a hollow behind her sternum, a small, cold emptiness that ached when she swallowed. Hours, not days. She had bought herself hours. The spell would not come again so easily, and when it did, it would cost more.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her hand came away grey. She looked at it for a long moment, then tucked it into her pocket.
Hours. She had hours.
She straightened her coat. She pushed the wet hair from her face. She turned, and walked, slowly and steadily, towards the lower wards, and the forge, and Mev, and the long work that would have to be done before morning.