Tea-Master Louen spun away from the stall of unfathomably tiny undergarments as a shadow fell across his vision, and he looked up, his hand on his knife-hilt.

'Gael,' he smiled in relief, and dropped his hand, holding it out in greeting.

The young man clasped it in in both his own and smiled. Louen glanced this way and that, then led Gael into an area of the market slightly less crowded.

A first-class thief, and an excellent eavesdropper, Gael moved like a shadow in the crowd. He nodded at the satchel under Louen’s arm. 'What's in that?'

'Gold and silver for you. Make sure you fetch the best price.’

Louen passed it over, and Gael looped the strap over one shoulder. ‘I always do. Here's some news for you: the Queen's Guard are crawling all over the Capital like perverts in a whorehouse.'

Louen’s blood ran cold. 'Oh?'

'Yes. There are rumours, I've heard, regarding the late King's first daughter. Apparently, she's missing.' Gael swiped the end of his kerchief across his face and grimaced. 'Cursed heat! One day I swear I'll go back home. Have you heard anything about this?’

'The Limean ice doesn’t agree with you,' said Louen as they turned onto a wide promenade lined with merchant booths. ‘I haven’t heard anything except rumours, all of which contradict each other.’

‘Because rumours is all there is,’ said Gael grimly. ‘But the crux of the matter is that the princess is missing.’

Silk and silver gleamed in the sun, and the scents of spiced pasties wafted to them on the gentle sea breeze. Louen’s stomach rumbled, but he knew he could not afford to stop and eat just yet. He had to be careful who he was seen with. In a moment he’d send Gael down one street and he’d go down another and no-one would remember they’d walked together. 'I thought she was sick with the pox. Why has she disappeared? How?'

Gael grinned cheekily. 'Not sure, but I have heard that she and the Queen had a disagreement. Must have been serious for the girl to disappear like that. I did go to Raoul's place but he hadn't seen her.'

Louen paused, puzzlement creasing his brow. He remembered the little princess Meliane as a small child, still in tail clouts, when once he'd been a servant’s boy in the palace. Tiny yet sturdy, with glossy black hair and almond-pale skin, and a rosebud for a mouth. But that was sixteen years ago. If she'd carried that beauty into womanhood, she'd be a knockout.

It was common knowledge among the citizens of the Capital that she spent a great deal of time in a certain quayside tavern owned by an ex-pirate called Raoul, and that the King had not been able to put an end to that. Meliane was willful, stubborn, and had a temper to rival the current Queen's.

She’d been but two years old when the order to detain all sorcerers in the city had gone out. That was fourteen years ago.

He shifted the sack to the other shoulder and wiped the sweat from his forehead. 'Have you been up to the Capital? Any idea where she’s gone?'

Gael shrugged. 'Not really, no. But I do know that if the Queen's turned out the Guard to find her, then…I don't know. But it doesn't sound good. I think the Mirror she’s commissioned is the work of a Limean sorcerer too, though I can’t be sure.’

‘Then he’s a traitor, and will die if I find him. But try and find out more, and be sure. What about this Mirror?’

‘She has only to ask it: Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? And it tells her. If it answers that she is the fairest, she’s satisfied. If it answers otherwise…well then, the Hunt is on.’

‘For anyone fairer than she?’ Louen snorted. That didn’t sound at all like a reliable way of finding one particular person. The definition of fair would probably depend on the sorcerer making the thing, and anyway it would be apt to change. Even if Meliane were fairer than Verana, it wasn’t likely she’d always top the charts as the most beautiful in all the land. One of them, maybe. But not the most beautiful of all. Although he supposed it was possible. Just not likely.

He huffed in exasperation. ‘Try and find me something more tangible than that fairytale nonsense, will you?’

Gael pushed a lock of stray hair back under his cap and scratched at his neck, shiny with sweat. ‘I’ll do my best. I don’t know how you can stand to live here.’

‘I spend half my day half-naked,’ Louen said drily. ‘The less said about it the better. Any other news? How are you doing at the Eyrie?’

Gael shrugged. ‘We’re fine. Do you want me to take back any message?’

‘Only this: stay out of trouble – and let me know the moment the Hunters leave the Capital. Or any other developments!’

There was the sound of a sudden scuffle from the next street. A few people came running. Some went running the other way, towards the shouts, and the whinnying of an enraged horse.

‘Sounds dangerous,’ said Gael. ‘Time to disappear.’

Louen drifted away from Gael and wished he could go with him, and not back to the brothel. It was early, at least in House Willow’s eyes, and he had a full shift of work ahead of him and no stomach for it. Not today. The whisperings he’d almost dismissed as rubbish until Gael had confirmed it bothered him.

He entered House Willow through the side gate, for a small gathering of frippery-swathed nobles crowded the main gate, chattering low among them. Several liveried horses waited there too, with uniformed squires at their heads, ramrod straight and official-looking.

Tea-Master Louen didn’t like officials. Not even when they were rolling around his pavilion with their cocks out, a whore or two straddling them and silver in their sticky fingers for the tea he made.

He found the place crawling with Queen’s men, and Madam practically hopping with anxiety and annoyance. She spotted him come in through the side gate and snatched him up the steps and across the courtyard. ‘Where have you been? It’s halfway ‘til lunch and you should be here, serving tea to His Excellency!’

His Excellency? The man’s a General, nothing more!

He shook her arm off. ‘I’ve been to the market. I don’t serve any tea until midmorning and that is now, so I’m not late, and would you mind telling me why there are five-and-twenty blue-coated bastards here?’

‘Keep your voice down!’ She shoved him in through the kitchen door and whirled around to face the General, seated on a pile of Royal cushions that weren’t part of the brothel’s inventory. Louen heard her calming the man, who was the thinnest sliver of the nastiest evil Louen had ever seen.

His hands shook as he made tea. He knew the General by reputation, though they’d never met or come face to face. But the man had been at the forefront of the sudden and short-lived resurgence in witch-hunts, five years ago – the hunts that had driven Tea-Master Louen from his home and to a city half-a-country away to live in hiding in a brothel, of all places. The General did not let up. He didn’t accept failure easily, and proof of his cruelty was currently hanging from his saddle. Two heads, pinned to his saddle by their hair. It was impossible to tell if one had been male or female, but the other was the minstrel he’d seen at the market. His heart ached for her.

He resented, hated, and feared this General. How had the man come to be here, so far from the Queen’s castle? Had the witch-hunts started again? He couldn’t understand why. He’d thought the King had grown tired of the expense of sending riders out over the land, and he wasn’t aware of any reason the young Queen had to go after sorcerers.

And then he remembered yesterday’s blood. Twice that had happened. And while it was cleaned up and they could be fairly sure no-one outside the brothel had seen it…well, things like that got out. Tea-Master Louen was well aware he wasn’t the only one who made a good living from secrets.

What he didn’t make was a killing.

Someone had used dark magic. He had tasted its residue, knew its scent.

All the whores in the place were lined up where the General could see them; all the female servants too. Louen looked for Menys but didn’t see her. He wondered where the little wretch had gone off to.

The General beckoned him over. ‘Are these all the women that are in the house?’

He has to have asked that of everyone else. ‘Yes, sir,’ he lied. ‘I believe so, though I cannot remember every single one.’

That should exonerate him from lying, if they were setting him up. He kept his face carefully neutral and pretended to examine the line-up.

‘Hm. Perhaps we should summon the boys,’ said the General, and beckoned Tea-Master Louen closer. ‘Perhaps this is not all that have been under this roof until today, hm? Do you remember anyone not here now, who was here, say, last week? Or yesterday? Perhaps only this morning?’

Louen screwed his face up in a caricature of deep and intense thought. Then he shook his head in a mockery of regret. ‘We have a few dogsbodies who come in and out again, sir. Nobody stays that long. There have been three or four such in the last six weeks. I couldn’t tell you where they are now.’

‘Can you tell me anything about them? Where they were from, what they looked like? Their names, even?’

Normally, Louen would have expected his memory to be richly expanded with bright silver, but the General’s hands remained in his lap. ‘I…no, not much – these peasant brats look much the same to me, sir. Scruffy, too thin, too poor. They were all from the town. I noted no foreigners.’

The General turned to Madam, apparently satisfied with that. ‘Then summon the boys,’ he ordered.

‘The boys?’ She’d been scrunching her skirts in white-knuckled fists, her face pale and grey under her rouge. She looked like someone had painted a corpse for a macabre circus.

‘The woman we are looking for may have disguised herself as a boy,’ the General snapped. ‘Fetch them all here, you incompetent clod of a bitch!’

He took another long, fierce look at Tea-Master Louen, and then nodded. ‘You may serve me tea.’

Louen got through the tea-serving without a hitch, though every time he was out of the General’s sight his teeth rattled so hard in his head he thought they’d clatter onto the floor.  It was with intense relief that he watched them finally stamp out of the brothel and away again. He sank onto his bench with an explosive sigh. The line-up of young men and boys hadn’t produced what the General had sought, either. And there was still no sign of Menys. Louen had a sneaking suspicion that she was what the General had come for and was glad he had gone away again empty handed, but whilst her escape was a relief to him, the implications weren’t.

They’re after whatever killed three men yesterday with such violence that the courtyard ran red. There’re still entrails on my apple tree! And if the almond blossom isn’t scarlet next year with all the blood soaked in at the roots, I’ll eat my hat.

Damn the little chit! If she comes back, I’ll…

She wouldn’t come back.

And Louen knew, with his heart plummeting into the pit of his stomach, that the time for him to leave was long overdue too. He knew the General’s reputation. He and his soldiers would be back, because if they couldn’t find who they really wanted in the rest of the town, they’d take someone else instead. They’d done that in two other towns by the looks of it. Louen had almost thrown up at the sight of those heads. And they’d come back here because the General hated Madam; that had been obvious from the look in his eyes, the way his fingers had caressed the hilt of his sword every time he had to look at her. She was filth in his eyes. He wanted her to suffer.

Yes, the General would come back and murder Madam’s greatest asset in cold blood.

Louen swallowed hard.

Time, indeed, to pack up and leave.