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the night. After three weeks of traveling, she had learned the importance of finding lodging early. She stepped forward, and the fabric of her loose brown skirt wrapped around her calves as she tried to take too long a stride.
    Eleret shoved her unbraided hair out of her face and grimaced. She had bought the garment the day before, in a small village some thirty miles east, and she was not yet used to the way it hampered her movements. She was not used to hair in her face, either. But Gralith had insisted that, if she must go to Ciaron alone, she should at least dress in a manner that did not instantly proclaim her Cilhar origins. The idea had sounded reasonable at the time, but she was beginning to wish she had not listened.
    After a moment, the skirt unwound. Eleret slipped her left hand into her pocket, groping for the slit she had made in the material. She found it and reached through, to the knife she wore strapped to her thigh. Touching the smooth horn handle reminded her of home and made her feel better. She couldn’t stand in the street all day holding a knife under her skirt, though. The thought made her smile slightly as she withdrew her hand. Shrugging the strap of her kit bag into a more comfortable position, she started slowly up the broad avenue inside Ciaron’s east gate.
    The avenue was at least three times the width of the widest street in Calmarten. Gralith had said there were eight such avenues in Ciaron, radiating out from Castle Hill at the center of the city. Eleret wondered whether they were all as crowded as this one. A bearded man on horseback rode by, passing a wagon filled with water jars coming in and another going out that carried crates with a few wilted vegetables in the bottoms. A dark-haired woman in a brown wool cloak argued with a merchant over the price of a small wooden box, glancing up from time to time to watch the traffic coming through the gate. An elderly porter shuffled from one shop to the next, hoping for work. And all around them, people walked, some briskly, others slowly, jostling each other with a cheerful unconcern that set Eleret’s teeth on edge.
    The buildings were as oversized as the street. Near the gate most of them were of wood or brick; farther along stood towering structures built of the same dark gray stone as the street. Painted ships and carts decorated a few of the walls, but most were plain. At the far end of the street, the steep sides of Castle Hill rose above the heads of the crowd, with the Emperor’s palace perched on top.
    A cart rattled by, piled with chairs carefully roped together and padded with coarse cloth. Its driver, a middle-aged woman in a faded green dress, glanced curiously in Eleret’s direction and gave a little sniff as she passed. Eleret looked after her, more amused than annoyed. She had done nothing that she knew of to deserve the woman’s contempt, and if she had overlooked some local custom, she would find it out soon enough and correct it.
    At the next corner, Eleret left the avenue and headed south. “See Adept Climeral at the school first, before you do anything else,” Gralith had said. “He’ll know the best place for you to stay, and who you’ll need to see.” Then, Eleret had been skeptical of the need for such guidance, but five minutes inside Ciaron’s outer wall had convinced her that it would be more useful than she had thought. Ciaron was enormous; she could waste hours or days trying to find an inn that suited her slender means.
    Gralith’s instructions were easier to follow than she had expected. Accustomed to choosing a path based on landmarks, even in villages, she had assumed that Gralith was unused to giving directions when he had said only “two streets, then right; three streets, then left.” Now she understood. Ciaron had been carefully planned, the streets ran in straight lines at fixed distances from each other. The narrow alleys at the rear of the buildings were straight, too. It made Eleret even