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put fish like that on the table every day. You’re both quite pretty, and quite exotic. I can make something out of you. Not for those oafs on our street, either, but for a better class of client.”
    “You—you want us to—?”
    “It’s only difficult the first time,” Rediana promised. “And not so hard as that. The money is easy, and you’ve got that young swordsman to look out for you, if you come across a rough customer. He works for me already, you know.”
    “Cazio?”
    “Yes. He looks after some of the girls.”
    “And he put you up to this?”
    She shook her head. “No. He said you would turn your noses up at me. But men often don’t know what they’re talking about.”
    “He does this time,” Anne said, her voice frosty. “Thank you very much for your help with the fish, but I’m afraid we must decline your offer.”
    Rediana’s eyes sharpened. “You think you’re too good for it?”
    “Of course,” Anne said, before she could think better of it.
    “I
see
.”
    “No,” Anne said. “No, you don’t. I think you’re too good for it, too. No woman should have to do that.”
    That put a queer little smile on Rediana’s face. But she shrugged. “Still you don’t know what’s best for you. You could earn more in a day than you do now in a month, and not ruin your looks with scrubwork. Think about it. If you change your mind, I’m easy enough to find.” With that, she sauntered off.
    The two girls walked in silence for a few moments after Rediana left them. Then Austra cleared her throat. “Anne,
I
could—”
    “No,” Anne said angrily. “Thrice no. I would rather we never made it home, than on those terms.”
             
    Anne was still fuming when they reached the carenso at the corner of Pari Street and the Vio Furo, but the smell of baking bread put everything from her mind but her hunger. The baker—a tall, gaunt man always covered in flour—gave them a friendly smile as they entered. He was slashing the tops of uncooked country loaves with a razor while behind him his assistant slid others into the oven on a long-handled peel. A large black dog lying on the floor looked up sleepily at the girls and put his head back down, thoroughly uninterested.
    Bread was piled high in baskets and bins, in all shapes and sizes—golden brown round loaves the size of wagon wheels and decorated with the semblance of olive leaves, rough logs as long as an arm, smaller perechi you could wrap one hand around, crusty egg-shaped rolls dappled with oats—and that was just at first glance.
    They spent two minsers on a warm loaf and turned their feet toward the Perto Veto, where their lodgings were located.
    There they walked streets bounded by once-grand houses with marble-columned pastatos and balconied upper windows, picking their way through a shatter of unreplaced roof tiles and wine carafes, breathing air gravid with the scents of brine and sewage.
    It was four bells, and women with low-cut blouses and coral-red lips—ladies of Rediana’s profession—were already gathered on the upper-story balconies, calling to men who seemed as if they might have money and taunting those who did not. A knot of men on a cracked marble stoop passed around a jug of wine and whistled at Anne and Austra as they went by.
    “It’s the Duchess of Herilanz,” one of the men shouted. “Hey, Duchess, give us a kiss.”
    Anne ignored him. In her month quartered in the Perto Veto, she had determined that most such men were harmless, though annoying.
    At the next cross-street they turned up an avenue, entered a building through an open door, and climbed the stairs to their second-floor apartment. As they approached, Anne heard voices above—z’Acatto and someone else.
    The door was open, and z’Acatto glanced up as they entered. He was an older man, perhaps fifty, a bit paunchy, his hair more gray than black. He sat on a stool talking to their landlord, Ospero. The men were of about the same age, but