narrow lane to narrower alley, his movements sharp, turns brusque, as if daring her to keep up, as if angrily urging her to go her own way, to let him be. It soon became obvious to them both that he would not break into a run and try to get away, nor would she fall back or fail to match his every turn; and so he slowed enough to let her catch up. Yet even when she drew beside him, he continued to walk along as if unaware of her presence until, peripherally, he saw her reach toward him—he thought—to stop him. Instead, she held between her thumb and forefinger a copper coin identical to the one he had . . . or was it his? Now he turned to face her.
“You dropped this,” she said.
He stared at her, anger beneath the gaze. “You stole it while I slept?”
“No,” she replied firmly, “it fell from your trousers as Glaise and Bois carried you to your room last night. I wasn’t about to return it to your pants myself while you were asleep.”
As he reached for it, she closed her other hand over his. He gave an instinctive twitch in response to her touch, but took hold of the coin, and she opened her fingers beneath his and thereby pressed his hand between her two. He didn’t try to pull away. In truth, he didn’t want to. He came to a stop with her.
“Where did you get it?” she asked.
“The fair. The street fair I started to tell you about, where I thought you’d find more stories. Leodora, I—”
“Shh,” she hushed him. “Don’t speak it. I know what’s there between us, the same as you do, but if we say it, either of us, then it becomes something we have to confront and act upon, and I don’t know, Diverus, I don’t know if I’m ready to compound the journey I’m already on with that one as well. I don’t want to risk it.”
He swallowed.
“It isn’t because it’s you, it isn’t that you’re unworthy or anything else that Soter might intimate. It’s because I’m not certain of me.”
“And if you were certain?”
“Then . . . we would have to see,” she answered.
They stood a long while, gazing into each other’s eyes, joined by their hands wrapped around the coin, in an alley lined with empty urns, debris, and rotting vegetables. She could not tell him that her fear arose more than anything from the Brazen Head’s warning, The thing that unites also divides; that to speak aloud what was between them would set in motion some unpredictable destructive force that might sever them forever, an idea she could not bear. So in superstitious fashion she protected herself and him by not voicing anything.
Finally, she slid her hands away, and he lowered his. He said, softly, “I’ll show you where I got it.” They struck out then side by side.
The fair was assembling when they arrived, but they smelled it before they’d even reached Towerside Thoroughfare. Once again someone was cooking the sweet buns that Diverus had purchased, and because it was impossible to pass by the booth and not want one, they bought their breakfast before moving on.
As Diverus had described, the bridge tower was itself an inhabited structure with rows of windows, ledges, and small balconies across the breadth of the span. At the enormous gateway in its middle he drew up. “This is where he came from, the stilt walker who gave me the coin. Out of there.” He pointed into the dark tunnel between the two statues.
“Then I suppose it’s where we’re going,” she replied.
They walked beneath the gate, Diverus keeping his eye on the huge relief figure of the water creature that seemed to be undulating up the side of the tower. As they crossed into shadow, the spiked bottom of the barbican was just visible in its niche overhead. The tunnel floor was wet as well as dark. The grooves between the paving stones glistened with puddled water, the surface sloping on either side of the middle to a wide channel at the edges that appeared half filled with brackish standing water. The smell clogging the air beneath the arched ceiling suggested that sewage from the tower must drain somewhere close by—perhaps behind the various square grilles set in the wall at street level.
Past a pile of what appeared to be panels, poles, and uprights from dismantled stalls, two small fires clouded the air with a