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towards the harbour. She had walked this way so often that she could have done it blind, let alone in a heavy mist.
    At the foot of Sea Street she turned left and made her way along the row of inns, warehouses and workshops that lined the waterfront. The mist made everyone who was out and about keep their heads down and their voices low. There were oars rattling in a boat, invisible out on the water somewhere, and a few half-hearted shouts rang out. A handful of stallholders were setting out their wares on the quayside, but they did so in a subdued manner, as if they did not wish to disturb the melancholic fogs.
    “It’s a bad moir cest , eh, Cailla?” Merric called to her as she entered his shop.
    The old woman swung her yoke off her shoulders and rested it against the doorpost. “I’ve seen worse and better.”
    “Well, so’ve I. I’ve seen more better than worse is all I’m saying.”
    “Fair enough. Perhaps you’re right.”
    “Perhaps I am,” Merric said, sounding pleased to have wrung this concession from her. “Look here, you’ll have your pick of a good haul this morning.”
    He gestured at a row of pots set along a table. Every one of them was filled with shellfish, bathed in sea water. Cailla peered into each of the pots in turn.
    “You’ve many guests up at the Tower now, eh?” Merric said. “They’ll not have tasted the like of our Kolkyre shells down where they’re from.”
    “That I wouldn’t know,” Old Cailla said. “All fresh, Merric?”
    “I’d not try to pass anything but the freshest on you, you know that. You were buying from my father when I was still at my mother’s breast. You’d sniff out a stale shell faster than I could myself, wouldn’t you?”
    Cailla grimaced at him: an indeterminate, gap-toothed expression that might have signified anything from disgust to amusement.
    When she emerged a short while later, Cailla bore two lidded pots strung from her yoke. They swung heavily in time with her stride. A few steps from Merric’s door, having felt the balance and sway of the pots, she paused. She knelt, lowering her burden to the ground, and made a few swift adjustments to the knots. Satisfied, she made to rise, one hand pushing against the cobbled surface of the path.
    No one paid any great attention to Cailla on her weekly journey from the Tower to Merric’s shop and back again. Had someone watched the old kitchen maid, they might have noted that every time, week after week and year upon year, she paused thus to adjust the balance of her yoke. Every time, she knelt in exactly the same place on the roadway, and rose with exactly the same touch of one hand to the cobblestones. They might note it, but would still have thought it nothing but the habit of a woman old enough that to change anything in her routine would be beyond her.
    This time, there was a difference. No observer, however keen-eyed, could have caught it. Nevertheless, it was a difference profound enough to set Cailla’s heart pounding in her chest as she made her slow way back up Sea Street. For the first time in several years, her finger had caught the edge of something nestled in the seam between two of the cobbles. A subtle flick had freed it and folded it up into the palm of her hand: a thin piece of wood into which was cut a single short line of script. Cailla had not looked at it. She did not need to. A brief examination with practised fingertips told her what the message was, and it bestowed upon her a great task in a worthy cause; the final shedding of the lie she had worn for a life all these years.
    It was all the old woman could do not to laugh exultantly as she trudged on towards the mist-wrapped Tower of Thrones with her two heavy pots of shellfish.

III
    “Allow me to offer this gift, Thane.” Mordyn Jerain pressed a small bundle wrapped in the softest deer hide into Orisian’s hands. “It is nothing much. Just a token of our High Thane’s support for your cause.
    And of our