Dalia had once believed the kind words that men spoke to her. Her earliest memories included many instances of her father telling her that she was a good helper. A relatively recent immigrant to the city, fleeing with his wife, daughter, and brother from religious persecution in the Tiberian Empire, her father spent much of his initial wealth to purchase admission into the metalworker’s guild and, within a decade, was established as one of the city’s finest craftsmen.

As a young girl, Dalia would stand beside her father’s workbench and hand him the tools he needed to put the finishing touches on his newest ring, bracelet, necklace, or tiara. The gold’s glistening shine seemed a fitting companion to the precise patterns and scenes he engraved into the metal. Each piece of jewelry represented one part of the key that was intended to open the doorway to her future. With each sale, her potential dowry rose, and the chance of a noble match grew correspondingly higher. She rarely needed to be told to help; she volunteered willingly.

Her father also told her how beautiful she was, and she often heard that statement from the pleasing stream of young suitors that called on her as she approached her sixteenth birthday. Many of them undoubtedly meant it, but some would have said anything to increase their chances of claiming her, and her dowry, as theirs. Much of her father’s spare time had been occupied with the negotiations, and Dalia occasionally wondered how beautiful she could really be if her future still depended on the number of gold coins that came with her. She believed, though, that her father was telling the truth as he saw it.

But then he died painfully and relatively quickly during the plague outbreak, her uncle claimed her father’s coin as his own and clearly resented having to spend any of it on her, she ran away from the house late on a warm summer’s night, and soon all respectable doors in the city were closed to her. Kimmelsport was a harsh crucible for any resident without a steady source of income, and many who lived there preyed on its weaker denizens. The next two years were difficult.

Dalia was stronger than she looked, but she had to rely on other qualities to survive on the city’s streets. So far, she had managed to avoid serious harm because she was smart, alert, agile, and fast. Very fast. She could outrun a number of the boys living on the street. But the struggle never ended.

She was tired.

Now eighteen, she rarely earned or scrounged enough food to fill her belly. So when the innkeeper’s scullery boy had not shown for work this morning, she had thought herself lucky. The innkeeper had offered her meat, cheese, and a mug of cider in exchange for scrubbing away the fat drippings and scrapes of chicken skins that had dried into a hard coating on his roasting pans. Dalia had quickly accepted his offer, even though it kept her at the inn until well past dusk.

Looking out at the gathering darkness, each lengthening shadow an enemy of unprotected street girls like herself, she almost decided to beg the innkeeper for permission to sleep in his stable, even though she would risk having to fend off a late visitor.

Kimmelsport was an independent trading port located just south of the Tiberian Empire’s border, which gave the city a certain appeal in the eyes of freebooters but also meant that its criminals were the lords of the streets after the last glow of sunlight drifted below the horizon. Walking at night was dangerous, dangerous even if the Night Watch was patrolling this section of the city because, after all, the guardsmen always numbered fewer than the criminals. It had been a good day, though, and Dalia decided to trust her luck. That was her second mistake.

The first had been stuffing her growling stomach too full of bread and cheese. Lethargic as she left the inn with a belly that felt stretched, she had been careless when she left the inn’s smoky common room and headed for her usual sleeping place—a hidden corner of a warehouse loft. She never heard or saw her attacker until the man’s hand closed around her arm.

He was far stronger than she was, Dalia realized as she struggled to free her arm. It was clenched in the scarred and callused hand of a sailor who reeked of rum and urine. She glimpsed long black hair streaked with gray and a face whose skin was burned brown as shoe leather. Her attacker was older than most of the other sailors who frequented the inn, perhaps two or even three times her age, but no evidence of infirmity showed in the muscles of his hand. He was squeezing hard enough to leave bruised welts on her flesh. She had never felt such a ruthless grip before; it hurt.

Dalia threw her weight back on her heels and tried to free herself by bending back one of the man’s fingers. But even drunk, the sailor successfully grabbed her wrist and protected his hand.

“No way, girlie,” he wheezed, slurring his words. “You been acting the tease all night, but I’ll show you what you’re good for.”

A sudden yank nearly pulled her left arm out of its socket as the man began to drag her into the alley beside the inn. It loomed like a gaping doorway into the blackest of her nightmares. Burning torches in the main thoroughfare were too far away to push back the shadows that ruled in the city’s alleys, yet she was reluctant to scream because, as all the girls and women who found themselves in this position in the city of Kimmelsport well knew, a scream did not always attract brave helpers. Sometimes, it merely signaled your presence to other ruthless attackers.

No, you bastard, she thought, pouring all her strength into the fight. If she could simply free her arms and gain a step or two on him, she might reach the relative safety of the city’s main thoroughfare. No man this large and drunk would catch her in a quick sprint out of the side street and toward the lights. The thoroughfare was a fairly safe area in the city, because the council had to maintain at least a reasonable amount of law and order to attract legitimate merchants. So the Night Watch patrolled it in force, which was easy enough to do with a few dozen men because it was the only street they patrolled at night. Even at night, few people were troubled there.

She failed. The sailor was too big and too strong, and he was apparently the veteran of many tougher combats. Everything she tried—kneeing him in the groin, poking at his eyes, biting his hand—was blocked or smothered, and he soon was behind her and wrapping her in a bear hug. They reached the corner, and he propelled her into the alley’s enshrouding darkness.

Her chin hit against the rough stone façade of a building hard enough to make her teeth snap together as he bent her forward and pinned her down over a low row of foundation stones. A hand groped at the tattered gray linen of her dress. Her cheek was smeared into a patch of warm moisture on the stones beneath her. She tasted saltiness; it was blood from her chin.

Dalia stopped struggling and took a deep breath.

“If you scream, I’ll cut you.” The man’s voice was flat, and these words were not slurred. She believed him.

The sailor’s threat, and the sick interest in following through on it that Dalia heard in his voice, might have been enough to cow her into fearful submission, leaving her only with the bitter hope that somehow she would survive what was to come. She would never know.

In the same moment, a rippling flash of intense white light and a boom hammered forcefully against her eyes and ears. For an instant, she was pressed against the stone as if a giant invisible hand was smashing down upon her. Her assailant flew off of her like he was a rag doll thrown toward a trash heap. Then the pressure was gone, and she sank to her knees.

Her thoughts seemed disconnected in her head, but her eyes cleared after an indeterminable time. The sailor’s body, unconscious or dead, was crumbled in the mud and heaped garbage nearly ten feet further down the alley.

A law of the street was that there was always someone stronger than you. Dalia had met her match, and now the sailor had met his. He looked like a clothed bundle of broken sticks, small and fragile. But the sight of him settled her attention upon one thought: he might still awaken again.

With a shuddering gasp and then a curse, she grabbed the dagger he had dropped and crawled on her hands and knees toward him to make sure he was dead. Unfortunately, she bumped almost immediately into what seemed to be two tree trunks.

She hesitated, glancing upwards in confusion.

“Leave him, girl. He is finished,” a man’s voice said. The tone was soothing but also commanding, and the speaker clearly expected her to obey.

Two hands under her shoulders lifted her to her feet.

Dalia’s mind still was not quite working properly, or surely she would have realized both the unfairness and foolishness of her next action. Or she was simply furious that yet another man had put his filthy paws upon her. Whatever the case, she had a weapon in her hand and she tried to use it.

That did not work.

Her rescuer stopped her with a forceful twist of her wrist and the dagger fell back onto the mud.

“Is this what passes for gratitude here these days?”

She heard the astonishment in his voice and felt faintly embarrassed. But only faintly. A tide of crimson anger coursed through her. A hand lifted her chin, and she stared into a pair of calm brown eyes. Crow’s-feet in the corners of the eyes marked his face, yet although the alley’s dimness blurred her vision, he seemed much closer to her age than the sailor had been.

“Don’t try that again,” the man said. “I am not your enemy. But I’ll not let you stab me.”

His blunt tone, and the implied threat, broke through her shock, and Dalia started to tremble uncontrollably. Her legs buckled underneath her, yet one hand reclaimed the dagger from its resting place before she let him help her back to her feet. She slipped the blade inside her dress’s sleeve.

Steadying her with a grip that was both like and unlike the sailor’s, the man held out a scrap of cloth, which she accepted and pressed to her chin to stop the flow of blood. The cut felt small under her fingers, small enough for the blood to close it and start the healing. It might still putrefy, but she could cleanse it in salt water if she went down to the sea wall.

With a wave of his arm, her rescuer offered her the right of passage to the main thoroughfare. “Come. I will see you safely back to the main street.”

She spit some of the blood in her mouth toward her dead attacker. “Why should I trust you? Who are you?”

“I’m Randolph,” he said, “and this line of reasoning demeans you. If I was a threat to you, we would not be talking.”

She could see him more clearly now as they exited the alley, and he was older than her first impression had led her to believe. But his short brown hair, soft hands, and rounded cheeks spoke to her of a life or wealth and comfort. Frankly, he looked too friendly to be a mage, to be a man who wielded such powers.

“You’re a mage,” she said, with something like an accusation in her voice. She could not remember ever hearing a single positive comment about a mage from her father, mother, or any of their friends. According to the stories, either they killed for the powerful or they killed the powerful and everybody else around them. This man—Randolph—was certainly a killer. She had seen the evidence with her own eyes.

He smiled and shook his head slightly. “I am also a mage. It is more accurate to say that I am first a scholar.”

That was almost as bad as being a mage, according to the stories Dalia had heard. She had never before met someone in either group, and she was not totally happy about meeting someone who was both at the same time—power and knowledge in the same person often meant arrogance and a willingness to hurt those who were perceived to be in the way. On the other hand, Dalia was not currently being raped because this man had power.

“Well, be you mage or scholar, I owe you for saving me, sir,” she said. “You must let me repay you.” Then she realized how the statement could be misconstrued and hurried on. “I am not a whore; I was earning a meal by washing pots before that one attacked me. I can pay you with a meal, or perhaps a glass of your favorite wine. I am not wealthy, but I have coin enough to do that.”

Randolph was spending most of his time surveying the alcoves and shadowy places on the side street, but he glanced briefly at her and smiled. “It’s like seeing a ghost, isn’t it? Trust me; we’re really not that bad.” He frowned. “Or most of us aren’t, anyway. I’ll accept your thanks, but you can save your coin. I am not short on food.”

They were almost to the main thoroughfare when he halted her by stretching his arm in front of her. The light from the oil lamps penetrated this far, and he was staring at her chin, apparently seeing her wound’s full extent for the first time.

“I will tend to that gash if you will allow me,” he said. “This city is too filthy to risk allowing it to heal naturally.”

She hesitated. The thought of letting him use his power on her was unsettling; after all, she had seen with her own eyes what it could do. But the cut was still bleeding, and he was waiting for her permission, which was, in itself, a novel experience. So she nodded quickly, before she surrendered to her doubts.

Ignoring the blood, he cupped her chin in a firm grip. She watched as his eyes sharpened their focus until his will seemed to float as a tangible presence between them, and then she felt a warm prickliness centered on her chin but threading down into her torso. For a brief instant, her chin felt as if he were pressing an open flame against it, but the sensation faded even before it could be labeled as painful. When he removed his hand, she touched her chin. The skin was whole and blemished only by a low, thin ridge of scar tissue.

She waited until his eyes focused on her and he shrugged. “Healing is not one of my strengths,” he said, “but I have enough skill to deal with small wounds. You will be hungry for food soon, and will need rest. The scar will fade a bit with time.”

It was irrational, she knew, but in that moment, she seemed to see a smiling image of her father’s face where the face of this stranger who had rescued her should have been, and a wave of sadness and desperation rippled through her.

“Thank you,” she said, clutching his hand. “My name is Dalia.”

For the first time, he looked at her with the appraising male gaze that she was growing so used to receiving. “Dalia. You will meet that one’s kind again, I suspect,” he muttered, as an aside to himself, before raising his voice. “Men like him will not give you a moment’s peace once they get a good look at you. Keep that dagger. Learn to use it.”

She touched the pocket of her dress where she had hidden the dagger. He had seen her retrieve it, despite the darkness of the alley. “I will need a teacher.”

He nodded and stepped back, as if he were preparing to close a gate. “Yes, you will,” he agreed. “I wish you the luck of finding a good one. And I truly wish you well, Dalia. But you must excuse me.”

“You’re just going to leave me here?” She heard and hated the whining incredulity in her voice.

“Child, I’m sorry, but I have work to complete, and then I want to leave this city as soon as possible. You should leave too. Or go to a church and join its lay servants.”

Without another word, he turned and walked away, leaving her standing in the street by herself.

Her mouth dropped open, which she felt happening and hated—it made her feel like a drooling idiot—but she could not help but react that way. Nobody in her experience on Kimmelsport’s streets ever did a good deed without expecting payment in full measure. Now, the one man she had ever met since her father’s death who apparently followed different rules was walking away from her.

It was baffling. Intolerable.

#

When Dalia’s father died, his brother—her Uncle Gaspard—had assumed her guardianship. A gruff but innocuous man, he was a trader of goods, not a goldsmith, so he sold her father’s tools and converted the workshop and store into a storage room. He had told Dalia that she was beautiful, too, but oddly, no other wealthy young men surfaced in his wake to echo his statement.

Less than a month after the gravediggers had thrown the last shovel of dirt on her father’s grave, Uncle Gaspard came into her room after dinner and told her that he had arranged for her to marry Tom the Tanner’s son. He still insisted that she was beautiful, but he said he did not have the coin to give her a dowry that might interest a wealthy family. She knew he was lying. He clumsily tried to be kind, telling her that she could still be happy and she could share his wine.

She could have cooperated. She really could have. But the last advice her mother had given her before dying of a cancer, back when Dalia’s own future seemed to be assured, was to never settle for less than her own choice of happiness in life. And Dalia was nothing if not stubborn.

So she talked with Uncle Gaspard, and filled his wine glass, and cooked for him, and filled his wine glass until, eventually and fortunately, he had fallen into a drunken sleep. Immediately, she slipped from the room and quietly dressed herself in travel clothes. Her father had kept a purse hidden in his workshop; it contained a number of silver and a few gold coins, and it fit neatly into a pocket inside her cloak. From the kitchen, she took cheese and bread and walked out onto the city’s streets.

Her uncle apparently did not follow her that night, probably assuming that she would come crawling back to the house in the morning, hungry and cold and compliant. But she didn’t.

Two months later, the Night Watch found her uncle lying dead in an alley in the Waterfront District. Someone had stabbed him in the stomach. Perhaps he had been looking for her. Perhaps he had been looking for a cheap prostitute.

His death left no adult to inherit her father’s estate. And in the eyes of the district’s Watch lieutenant, Dalia was most likely long dead, or sold into slavery, so the agents of the city’s governing council had happily confiscated her father’s estate. She only learned the news weeks afterward, and was wise enough to calculate the odds of surviving an attempt to retrieve her father’s wealth.

Still, life was getting harder. Dalia never expected to encounter such difficulties in securing work. Work that she was willing to do, that is. She missed her old life. She missed the house. She missed her father.

#

Dalia followed Randolph that night.

He might have more important matters to attend to, but she did not. So she waited until he was a few hundred feet ahead of her before crossing the thoroughfare and trailing after him. The thoroughfare was still fairly crowded with couples, small groups of sailors, Watch patrols, and young nobles returning home after a day at the chariot races and an evening of revelry—those engaged in debauchery would be returning home much later, if at all. When possible, Dalia kept other walkers between her and Randolph to reduce the chance that he would see her if he looked back. But even if he did look, she was not the only woman walking by herself in this direction, so she still might escape his attention.

At the gate to the Old City, the guards passed her with a smirk. A boy of her age might have been turned away, or at least passed through by a less conspicuous route, but it was an open secret that hundreds of young prostitutes spent their evenings entertaining the wealthy nobles and merchants who resided in the mansions protected from the city’s rabble by the inner wall. The wealthy and the powerful citizens in Kimmelsport only used the city’s brothels when they felt like they needed to hide their activities from a husband or wife, or a parent. At all other times, they exercised only the barest minimum of discretion and gave the street preachers ample reason for new sermons on hypocrisy and iniquity.

Randolph led her past many of those mansions, and on occasion, one or more of the other women on the street with her turned into the lanes leading to a servant’s or delivery gate. Randolph, though, never turned until he reached the very end of the thoroughfare. Then, just before the gates of the palace, where the council’s duke, a weak and ineffectual figurehead, spent his days and in which each of the councilors maintained a large apartment and, according to the stories, competed with each other for the honor of possessing the most lavishly furnished residence in the city, he turned left and entered the courtyard of the Cathedral of Saint Lucian.

Sighing with relief, Dalia still bit her lip in frustration. The palace guards certainly would not have allowed her through the gate, and the entryway to the cathedral compound’s courtyard was unguarded. But following him through it was almost certain to draw another kind of attention. She was a single woman alone at night on the streets of the city, and the church’s priests had quite a bit to say about such women on their meandering journeys into the city’s poorer districts and unguarded alleys. She most certainly was not here to join the church’s sisterhood.

Yet she had come too far to turn back now, so she hurried into the courtyard. Randolph’s tall silhouette was still visible in the light thrown by the torches set at regular intervals along the cobblestone roadway. He was climbing a stairway leading to the doorway of the large building next to the cathedral. Dalia followed in his footsteps, and managed to cover half the distance before her fear was realized.

A priest exited the building that Randolph had just entered, and marched in her direction on stout legs. His head was down and he seemed to be muttering to himself. After a brief hesitation, she tried to hurry past him.

Unfortunately, he lifted his head just before she drew even with him. Even partially masked by a black beard, his face was all sharp angles and fierce intensity, and judging from his quick frown and the bunching of his eyebrows, he did not like what his eyes were telling him.

Dalia tried a quick bow and a rapid pass, but he placed his sturdy body in her path.

“Stop,” the priest commanded. “This building is not open for those who wander in from the streets in search of sanctuary.” He looked her up and down. “If you are what you appear to be, you have good reasons to enter the cathedral, not the library.”

Her only hope was to ride Randolph’s coattails through the door. “I have a message for Randolph, the man who just entered the library,” Dalia lied. “He is expecting me to meet him there.”

The priest snorted. “Even Randolph of Khartras isn’t that disrespectful. I am not as much of a fool as you, and he, apparently think I am.” He grabbed her arm. “There is a simple way to get to the bottom of this.”

In fairness to him, he could not have known that grabbing her on this day was a mistake of immense proportions. The instant his hand touched her arm, most rational thought fled from her mind. Not again, she thought, and she might have screamed it among the inarticulate screeches and hisses suddenly escaping her mouth. Afterward, she couldn’t remember a word that had. But what he said branded itself into her memory like metal searing its mark into a calf’s flank.

“Easy, you crazy harlot! I’m not going to hurt you.” He shook her like she was a naughty child in need of correction.

It was not his fault that he was dealing with a person who had more in common with a wounded bobcat than a rascally boy in one of the church’s classes. But he was still the one who would suffer as a result; left with the simple choice between fight and cooperation, Dalia fought.

She lunged toward the priest, raking at his eyes with her fingernails. A knee aimed at his groin missed, but only barely. He was not a sailor used to hard brawling and dangerous balancing acts on wooden spars high above a merciless sea. A second knee landed on target and weakened his grip. Then, when she bit the hand holding her hard enough to draw blood, he yelled and finally released her.

Dalia almost made it out of the courtyard. Unfortunately, though, the noise had brought several men out into the yard from the library and the smaller buildings near the gates. Two of them blocked her path and one tackled her to the ground. By the time the priest hobbled over to stand before her, they had pulled her to her feet and were holding her firmly by the arms.

“Good work, brothers,” the priest said. He scowled at her. “I will give you one chance to explain yourself. I cannot imagine that you have any good reason for entering our grounds, but I will listen to your story. Otherwise, we will let the Night Watch deal with you.”

It was simply too much to bear, and she started to sob sporadically.

“What is happening here?” A familiar voice asked.

“I was hoping that you might tell me,” the priest hissed. He was still bent over slightly and flushed scarlet with both anger and pain. “This . . . woman . . . tried to use your name to gain entrance to the library. Then she attacked me without cause.”

A hand lifted her chin, for the second time this day, and Dalia found herself staring again into Randolph’s baffled eyes. Calm eyes, still, though. Perhaps remaining calm was easier when you wielded the kind of power he did. Living would be easier too, if you were under the protection of someone with that kind of power, she realized, and after two years on the streets, she found the pull of that imagined future to be almost irresistible.

“You again,” he said, with some surprise in his voice. “I do not envy you the day that you are having, Dalia.”

The priest looked at both of them in turn, his glare hot enough to boil water. “You know this woman?”

Randolph nodded. “I do. I saved her from a rape at the hands of one of your city’s many barbarians earlier this evening.”

“You told her she could spend the night here?” The priest sounded both disbelieving and appalled.

“No,” Randolph said, staring at her ruefully. “She has ideas of her own.”

Dalia had regained some control, but she kept silent as the two men looked at her with vastly different expressions. She tried to smile at Randolph. It was a poor effort. The tattered shards of her composure shifted erratically under her skin.

“I suppose that you could stretch your guest rights to include such an offer,” the priest said stiffly, “but I hope that you will respect this place and send her on her way.”

“Does not the Book say, ‘Mine should show mercy to the weak if they expect to receive it when they stand before me on the Last Day’?”

The priest nodded. “It does,” he admitted, biting off each word as if it were being pulled out of him against his will. “But it also says, ‘If a woman gives of herself to any man before she is married, she may be stoned to death for her sins.’ We do not follow that scripture literally; in fact, you might not have noticed within the sheltered hallways of your university that the church admits that perhaps its early writers imperfectly perceived the Creator’s will. But I do not think that our Creator and his Prophets were talking about letting an unrepentant harlot into his libraries when they charged us to care for the weak. You will notice that I took the brunt of the damage from this hellion?”

“You are equivocating. I dare say that she attacked you because she was afraid and she felt fear because she was the weaker party in your struggle. I will happily argue the application of scripture with you on the morrow,” Randolph said. “For tonight, you will simply have to trust me when I say that this girl is no harlot, and if Creator does not welcome her anywhere on these grounds after the events of this day, then I willingly will pay the price for allowing it.”

The priest threw up his hands. “On your head be it then,” the man said, before stalking away. His brothers trailed after him, sparing no attention for her but stern glares for Randolph.

Dalia was left alone with him in the courtyard. She scrubbed at the tears on her cheeks with the sleeve of her dress. The open gate loomed like a living presence at her back as she endured the weight of his impassive stare.

She coughed. “So you’re a priest too?”

“No,” he said, in a wry and somehow frustrated tone of voice, “but I can quote scripture just as opportunistically as some priests do. Fortunately, some aren’t as pigheaded as that one.” He sighed. “I should admit that he is not a stupid man. Now, what are you doing here?”

“I didn’t want to stay here,” she told him. “But I still owe you a debt, and you are not working now.”

He grunted and then laughed. He pointed at the large building behind him. “That’s a library. I work in such places. But—but if I let you buy me a meal, will you consider us to be even and go about your affairs? I’ll never get anything done if you continue to dog my footsteps.”

Everything inside her head felt stretched and frantic. She had reached, she felt, a crossroads in her life, but she could not see the other paths clearly. Dalia only knew that she did not want to retrace her steps and return to her recent past. A thought leapt to the fore of her mind.

Dalia grabbed his shirt in both hands, pulled herself to him, and then kissed him on the lips. Even after their exposure to the chill night air, his lips felt warm under hers.

His eyes widened and he pushed her back. “Child, I think that you might be confusing me with that bastard in the alley.”

“I am not a child,” she said. “Don’t try to pretend that you see me as such. I see how you look at me. So for once, I’d like some say in how my life turns out. That priest is not far wrong; I may well end up as a harlot if I don’t get off of the streets.”

“You see, but you do not understand. So, yes, you still are a child.”

For the first time, she let the baffled anger escape. “What is wrong with you? Everyone else who looks at me sees a harlot. Why don’t you see what they see? Why don’t you want me?”

“You’re not humble, are you?” Randolph cleared his throat, and then laughed suddenly, a short but surprised bark. “I think that my wife would like you.”

“Why should I be humble? I see how men look at me. You saw what happened to me tonight.” She was furious, but most of the anger really was not directed at him. “I live with that every day, and eventually I will not be so lucky. So I need to go after what I want.”

He sighed. “You’re also just as stubborn as she is.”

“I’m not talking about your wife.”

“But I am,” Randolph said. “If she were here, she would tell you that the fault lies not in me but in the men of this city. They are sadly lacking in virtue.”

She went still, and stared desperately at him. “I’ll marry you.”

He actually took a step backwards. Later, she would remember that simple but revealing motion. “I am already married.”

“So? In the inn, I hear men talk about kingdoms to the south where men have more than one wife.” She stared at the rough cobblestones coating the church’s courtyard. “If you don’t want me as a wife, you could take me as a mistress. The councilors do that.”

“Your city’s councilors are depraved wastrels. I didn’t save you to turn you into a whore, and those men in the inn were talking about ‘kingdoms’ of nomads.” He gestured at the library. “Do you really want to live down to his expectations?”

“Why did you then? Save me, I mean.”

For the first time, his face twisted and a dark flush mottled his throat and cheeks. “Because you needed help,” he said, pausing for an extra beat between words. “Creator, this city must have sunk nearer to barbarism than I realized for something so simple to be so surprising.”

She did not know what he was talking about half the time, but she knew that the city he thought she was living in was not where she was now, with him. “I don’t understand you at all,” Dalia said. “I really don’t.”

Randolph rubbed at his temples. “That is not my fault, or yours,” he said, and then sighed. “You have been shaped by this place, and correcting its flaws was the responsibility of people with too much power and too little wisdom. But believe me when I say this: I am no better than dozens of men I know. Many good men share space on this world with the rest. Surely you can find one to be happy with.”

“Until now, I’ve only met one.” She hesitated, remembering what might have been if her father had not died. “Well, two.”

“You will meet others if you get off of the streets, even in this decadent hellhole.” He reached inside his tunic and removed a purse, which he handed to her. “Take this,” Randolph said. “Feed yourself. Buy some new clothes. Then decide on your next step.”

Dalia opened the purse. It was filled with gold coins, at least several dozen of them. Unlike the last time she had held a new purse and opened it to count the coins inside, she now knew how to stretch a coin—he had just given her enough wealth to offer her one last chance for a better future. Standing there, she felt as if he had used his powers to destroy a wall without openings that had been blocking her path and replaced it with a row of open doors. Yet he was holding closed the one she thought she wanted to walk through. “My next step?”

“Apart from serving the church, an option you’ve rather effectively removed from the table, I fear that this city will only allow you two options: marry or find some way to make money off of your beauty. Perhaps you might try dancing in the taverns frequented by the fans of the chariot racing.”

She shook her head. “I will marry you, or I will not marry,” she whispered.

Randolph looked for the first time like a tired old man. Finally, he shrugged. “Dancing, then. You certainly have the beauty for it, especially if you scrub off some of the dirt, and the main groups of fans treat their favorites very well. You might even find a worthy husband if you are careful. I know a place where you can stay tonight. It shouldn’t be difficult to arrange; I still have some contacts in that world, and when the man I’m thinking of gets a look at you, he’ll immediately offer you a job.”

Perhaps it was evidence that his negative judgment of the city was accurate, but he had just given her a compliment and she thought that it was the nicest thing anyone had said to her in years.

Dancing. She supposed she could live with that. For now.

“I will become a dancer,” she said, “if you promise to come and see me dance at least once.”

For the first time, Randolph seemed disconcerted, and to her delight, he actually blushed. Dalia let him suffer for a moment before smiling at him.

“Agreed,” Randolph finally muttered. “This will take some explaining.” She thought that he hadn’t meant to say that last part aloud, but if so, he rallied quickly. “I’ll take you there now.”

She nodded. He was offering her a new beginning, and he was denying her first choice for her future. The power to do so was his, she admitted.

But she did not need to make it easy for him. She had her own kind of magic, and from now on, she was going to put her power to work for her own ends.

#

By the time they left the church’s grounds, it was nearly midnight. They walked down into the city’s Waterfront District, onto a street only a few blocks away from the docks.

Taverns lined both sides of the street, and groups of drunken sailors and laborers staggered in and out of buildings. Small bands of racing partisans also passed them. Each member was wearing a colored scarf to represent his favorite team’s colors, and most were singing one or another of the racing songs. Some paused to urinate against walls. Some saw her and yelled lighthearted but crude suggestions to Randolph.

He led her inside one of the larger taverns. They collided with a wall of noise, a din composed of shouted conversations and loud whistling, and of appreciative observations shouted at the dancer currently moving on the stage at the back of the room. Randolph exchanged a few words with a rugged-looking bartender, before taking her elbow and leading her into a back room.

It was a common dressing chamber, and filled with almost a dozen women, all in varying stages of undress. A big man entered the room from another door just after they did. A former soldier, Randolph had told her, Helmar apparently had gained even more weight since leaving the ranks; he must have weighed twice as much as any of the women in the room.

Dalia watched as his eyes settled on one of the other dancers and as he stalked across the room to stand in front of the girl.  The red flush creeping up the sides of his neck was a bad sign: an enraged bull was among what he saw as his herd.

“I have had enough of your laziness,” Helmar ranted as he swept a bowl from the small table and loomed over the young dancer. The bowl broke in two pieces when it hit the floor, although probably nobody but Dalia noticed. “Get off of that chair, and get out there. Or keep walking right back onto the streets.”

The girl, a willowy youth with blond hair and blue eyes, was flushed and terrified, her eyes darting back and forth between the door leading out onto the tavern’s stage and the angry hulk glaring down at her. At that moment, Dalia realized the crude effectiveness of Helmar’s method: by screaming at the girl, he made the stage less frightening than the dressing chamber. And everyone in the room knew that the street would always be worse than the stage.

It worked. The girl scurried from the room like a frightened doe.

Helmar shook his head and snorted, like an actor on stage in his own drama. Then he glared at the other women in the room, all of whom were diligently pretending to ignore him while still keeping one eye on him. His expression only lightened when he looked around the room and noticed Randolph. And noticed her.

“Randolph!” He rolled across the room like a juggernaut, his eyes raking up and down Dalia’s body. “You have brought me another peach. Best be careful, or you will gain a reputation as my leading procurer.”

To her surprise, Randolph shook the offered hand without hesitation, and even chuckled sourly. “This is Dalia,” he said. “She needs work.”

Helmar grinned, and for a second, he almost seemed like a young boy. “Work? I have all sorts of work that she can do.”

“Only dancing,” Dalia interjected. She tightened her grip on the dagger and met the tavern owner’s appraising stare with hers. She didn’t look away.

Helmar shrugged. “That’s what you all say at first,” he said. “But you have spirit, girl. The men will like that. And you have a beautiful face. You will be a great one, I predict.”

“Thank you for the job,” she said to Helmar. Graciousness cost her little.

“You can start tonight,” he said as he left the room. “Clean up first.”

Dalia looked at the other women in the room; many of them were gazing hostilely at her. She understood their reaction—she and they would be competing for the same money. But then, it was as if she saw the room through Randolph’s eyes for a moment. She noted the habitual wariness, the careful watchfulness, shadowing the faces in the room. On the streets, you learned quickly that anybody, anybody, might be the next person to hurt you. These women had learned that lesson.

Randolph coughed, and then whispered, “This is the best I can do for you, Dalia.”

“It is more than enough,” she told him.

Randolph hesitated before he left her. “Helmar is not a soft man,” he said. “But he’s better than most men in his trade. Dance well, and he’ll treat you . . . well enough.” He paused. “I’ll be back in the city in four or five months. I’ll check on you.”

“I will be waiting. You can watch me then.”

Her comment did not seem to ease his mind, but he left the room anyway. A lot could happen in five months, they both knew. But Dalia was not, and would never be, a street harlot. After two years on the streets, though, she was most certainly a realist. She disrobed, poured water into a large basin, and began to scrub the dirt from her body. She would clean herself. She would dance tonight. She would survive.