Still, she envied the airy wraps and shaved heads of the Cheparok women around them. They were dressed for the muggy heat.
“I don’t know what the sign says, cousin,” she said. “And I don’t care. That mark there? That means Crows aren’t allowed. We need to take the stairs. And the stairs are this way.”
Tavin blinked at her. “You can’t read?”
Something in her shrank at his surprise. “I … I know Crow signs,” she mumbled. “Swain does the reading for us.”
“And the Crow signs say we won’t be allowed on the water-lifts,” Hangdog chipped in. Perhaps two and a half days of Fie’s silence had taught him to keep a cooler head, for no resentment smoldered in his voice, only stiff resignation.
“Well, those signs look old. Let’s make sure.” The prince set off down the muddy road.
Fie gritted her teeth and followed. She couldn’t blame him, not truly. The idea of slogging up stair after limestone stair, all the way up to Second Market, made her want to vomit. The water-lifts used the force of the reservoir’s water channels to move cargo and citizens between Cheparok’s tiers with considerable less effort.
The lift attendant looked up from a cotton-heaped cart only long enough to snap, “No.”
For a moment Fie wanted to stand there anyway and relish the faint relief of mist and water splashing down from Fourth Market. Then she remembered that same water had traveled from the Fan, into the city reservoir, and down four tiers of canals and bathing steps, carrying whatever those tiers’ citizens felt like throwing in it. Likely it was as clean as the grime on her arms.
“Come on,” she said, wincing, and headed back toward the stairs. This time Jasimir kept his mouth shut.
Hangdog split off once they’d climbed the three-score steps to Fourth Market. “Luck, cousin,” he muttered to Fie, and gave her a half grin. She briefly debated pushing him back down those three-score steps, but it seemed like an awful lot of work in this dreadful sun.
Instead she looked for a Crow mark for the stairs. One was carved into a signpost nearby, pointing to the opposite end of Fourth Market.
“Do they even know how hot it is?” gasped Tavin, staring at the crowds packing the market. Fie could scarce hear him over the lowing of disgruntled cattle, shouts of vendors, wailing children, and high-pitched warbling from some unholy horn busker.
Holy texts said the Covenant disposed of irredeemable souls in one of twelve hells. Fie wasn’t sure what she’d done to deserve this one.
A mother shoved past, dragging a child on each arm. It gave Fie a notion equal parts distasteful and effective. She snatched one hand from each of the lordlings. “Hold fast.”
Then she plunged into the crowd. It was chaos and cacophony, a crush of sweat and flesh and salt-stiff cotton. She lost count of how many people trod on her feet, but she was dead sure that the nails in her sandals repaid that in triple.
At last they reached the end of Fourth Market. Fie staggered to a quiet place between stalls, and the prince yanked free of her, shaking his hand out. She let go of Tavin and swayed in place, catching her breath.
“Let’s never do that again,” Tavin said, tone dark.
Fie shook her head, wheezing. “The way … back.”
“I’d rather throw myself down the water-lift.” Jasimir started to pull his hood back, then thought better of it. “What now?”
Fie looked at the next hundred stairs and winced. “Third Market.”
This stairway led past a set of bathing steps, where one of the green-tiled reservoir channels spilled out over limestone blocks larger than those Fie climbed. People of the fourth tier splashed in the milky water, rinsing laundry or stripping down and bathing as they pleased. Fie and the boys stopped a moment to scrub down their arms; it took more will than she’d admit to not wash up head to toe.
Third Market was mercifully less crowded than Fourth, giving them a moment to catch their breath in the shade of a cool stone wall. An uneven brick street wound between stalls and tents, where merchants dubiously promised the coolest palm screens, the fattest lambs, the brightest lamp oil in Cheparok. Crews of Gulls poled their cargo barges down the canal at market’s edge, shouting for buyers in the spice-laden air as they wiped sweat from deep brown faces. A distant smear of orange roof tiles marked a Magistrate’s Row, where Crane witches called truths out of witnesses and