Chapter 4: Tanner's Row

I left the Warden fort in a laundry cart, under a pile of wet sheets, a little after midnight.

Doran had put a guard outside my door.

He had not put one on the laundry gate.

I could not stay.

He had been in the gallery that night, and I could not look at his face without seeing his back.

I had one person left in Carrowmere who had never walked out on me.

The laundress did not ask questions when I paid her with the silver spoon from my tray.

She set me down at the corner of Tanner's Row, where the cobbles ran down to the river and every house leaned a little toward its neighbor.

I used a crutch from the infirmary and the wall of every house, and it took me a quarter of an hour to cross the street.

At the end of the Row, over a dyer's shop, hung a faded sign with a painted lantern.

*BRACK'S DANCE HALL. LESSONS DAILY.*

The door was locked.

I knocked three times, and then twice, the old signal.

A bolt scraped.

The door opened a hand's width, and a candle shone out, and above it was a thin face with an iron-gray braid.

Morna Brack looked at me for a long moment.

"Well," she said. "You took your time."

Then she pulled me inside and held me hard, a small woman with strong arms, and I stopped being able to hold my face together.

She did not say anything until I had finished.

Then she lit the stove, put a blanket around me and set a bowl of barley soup in my hands.

"Eat," she said. "Then talk."

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