of every square, every major thoroughfare; on the lesser streets, Nate noticed more than one person wearing a white sash like Nora’s. The colors of the embroidery varied. Different factory committees, Nate guessed. They held themselves with an air of grim importance, and Nate found himself walking quickly, too. He found that he didn’t want these people to look at him for long.
The Grand Bazaar was closed, the stalls inside shuttered tight. Some of the locks had been broken. Ruined goods were scattered over the wooden floor. The air in the empty aisles smelled the same as it always had, like nutmeg and wine. A poster had been tacked up next to the entrance: a map of the city, divided into uneven slices like a badly cut cake. Nate stopped: the old neighborhood names were gone. Each wedge was labeled with the name of a factory. Paper. Textiles. Steel.
The managers are going to run everything.
The slices were uneven because sometimes there were two factories close together, and of course none of them were anywhere near the better parts of the city. It was clear that a lot of deal-making had taken place as the map was drawn. Limley Square was probably closer, as the crow flew, to Textiles, but for some reason it was included in a lump growing off the eastern edge of Paper. The map had been made on a press, quickly and not very neatly. The letters across the bottom—Know your factory district! Please cooperate with resource inventories! Your New Life in New Highfall!—were blurred.
Your New Life in New Highfall. As revolutionary slogans went, Nate found it a bit vague. It didn’t even have a verb. He didn’t know what the resource inventory was, but assumed he would find out.
He skirted the Lord’s Square, not knowing if Elban’s body was still on display there and not caring to see it if it was. Not far away, a crowd gathered in what had once been a lovely garden. A decorative statue—something graceful and lithe—had toppled off its plinth; it lay in pieces in the mud, and a man with wild eyes stood in its place. “They cut out their tongues!” he cried. “They cut off their fingers! When a courtier was barren and needed an heir, they chose one of your daughters or sons, anyone they liked the looks of—and why not, since it was what they did anyway, aye? But woe betide the girl who came down with a child unwanted. Did your daughters not come home? Like as not, they lie in the great trash heap, holding the tiny bones of a courtier’s lust!”
Nate kept walking.
The Beggar’s Market had fared better than the Bazaar. It still seemed mostly the same, although the piles of food were a bit smaller, the carrots a bit spindlier. But there was still milk, and butter and lamb; Nate bought some of each, and a bit of cheese. He wanted coffee, too, but the prices were ridiculous. Everything was more expensive than it had been. The vendors all told him that his House account was no longer good. They were polite about it; he knew them all, and they seemed happy to see him. But something was missing, something was off. It took him a moment to realize what it was. The traders, the ones from outside Highfall or across the Barriers: they were gone. All the people he saw were pale and golden-haired, with round blue eyes.
“Where are all the traders?” Nate asked the dried fruit man.
“Gone.” The man threw a few more apricots on Nate’s pile.
“With the courtiers?”
He shook his head. “On their own. By sundown the day Elban died, wasn’t a single foreign trader left in the city. I had friends among them. Folk I’ve known for years.”
Nate wasn’t surprised. No matter how big the city or small the village, when trouble came and people were scared, their eyes fell on the outsiders. No better way to learn that lesson than to grow up in a caravan. Nate, Caterina and the others had been run out of more places than he could even count. The makeshift market by Harteswell Gate might never have existed; the plague shrine was still there, but the offerings—like everything else in the city—seemed a bit paltry. Nate waited there for an hour, long enough for the guard keeping watch over the shrine to begin eyeing him curiously, but Derie didn’t show up.
When he came back to the manor, Charles—wiping the still-uncontrollable tears from