Chapter 14: Rain

"Where did you learn that?" Fenn said.

His voice came out strange and thin.

I tied off the last roll and put it in Dulcie's basket.

"From my father," I said.

"No. That count. Where did you learn to count like that?"

I stood up and brushed the grass off my skirt.

The neighbors had gone quiet. The widow was watching us over her poker.

"I taught it once," I said, "to a man who couldn't dance."

He made a sound like I'd hit him.

I picked up the basket and walked past him.

I didn't look back. I could feel him standing there, all the way to the gate.

We took a room at an inn on the river, by the Old Bridge.

It was a narrow house with a crooked sign and a cellar cut into the river wall, cold as a well.

The innkeeper took one look at Cassian and tried to say they were full.

Cassian tilted his head and waited.

"We have two rooms," the innkeeper said quickly. "And the cellar, if you want it for those barrels."

We wanted it.

Dulcie and I carried the barrels down ourselves. Cassian couldn't fit through the cellar door without folding in half.

By afternoon, word had got around the city.

People found reasons to walk past the inn. Then they found reasons to walk past it again.

A boy threw a cabbage at the window. It missed.

Dulcie went out and threw it back. It didn't miss.

"You can't stay shut up in here," I told Cassian at dusk. "You'll go mad."

"I've been shut up in a castle for eight years. I'm good at it."

"Then you need practice at the other thing. Come on."

"Where?"

"I'm going to show you my city."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he put his hood up and followed me out.

Avenmoor at night was all lamplight and wet stone.

I took him the long way, by the lanes I used to run as a girl.

I showed him the clock tower with the cracked bell, and the cathedral steps where the magistrate lived.

Then the market square with its empty stalls, and the fountain with the stone fish that spat.

People stared.

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