Free Glasswrights' Apprentice by Mindy L Klasky

night.
    Soon, though, Rani was forced to stop her headlong flight, brought up short as she gasped for exhausted breath, sobbing like a baby. Gulping from a fountain at the heart of the Guildsmen’s Quarter, she remonstrated with herself. Her behavior was ridiculous. She had not cried when she arrived at the Guildhall, when she was all alone in the world. She certainly wasn’t going to disgrace herself and her guild now, bawling like an infant in the night. Cook would expect more of her. The old woman would never forgive Rani if she dishonored the glasswrights with tears that only proved she was too weak to belong in her current caste.
    In fact, Rani should be husbanding the new strength that she had found, the new power that sharpened her wits and lent strength to her body. It was as if Cook’s cries to Lan had been answered, as if the kitchen god had truly adopted Rani as his own. How else could one lonely apprentice escape an entire platoon of soldiers bent on her capture?
    Rani vowed to light a candle to Lan when she next had the chance. The kitchen god … he was an odd patron for a merchant girl turned glasswright. But if Lan had seen fit to respond to Cook’s prayers, who was Rani to protest? Who was Rani to gainsay her elders and her betters?
    Rani’s silent tongue-lashing worked its magic, and she retreated to a deep doorway, gathering her thoughts close with her ragged tunic. Search out Morada, that’s what Cook had said. How was she supposed to do that - one disenfranchised apprentice wandering the City’s streets without even a penny to her name?
    Rani’s head began to ache, and she remembered the soothing herb tea her mother made whenever she was ill. The thought brought fresh tears to her eyes. She imagined her mother’s cool hand laid across her brow, smoothing back her hair, forcing away fear and exhaustion and childish nightmares.
    Her family may have bought her way into the guild, and they might fear the wrath of Shanoranvilli’s soldiers, but they would certainly take her in. That’s what family meant.
    Rani picked her way through the streets. Except for the Pilgrims’ Bell, tolling steadily in the foggy night, the City was quiet now. The constant clang was comforting; Rani had heard it every night of her life. She carefully schooled her thoughts away from the memory of Prince Tuvashanoran and his daring feat of manning the abandoned Pilgrims’ Bell. Those stories were past, as dead as the man who inspired them.
    Rani picked up speed as she made her way to the Merchants Quarter. Now, she knew the streets. She had played in them as a young child, roamed them to bring customers to her family’s stall. She knew the way the cobblestones buckled in this patch, and she automatically ducked through a stone gateway to cut through the potter’s tiny yard on the corner near her family’s home.
    Despite her shivering exhaustion, Rani let a smile cross her lips. She would come home, and her mother would gather her up in fat arms, pressing Rani’s head against her breasts in the way that usually drove Rani to squirm away with a wrinkled nose of disgust. Rani’s father would listen to her gravely, shaking his head in disappointment that his daughter had gotten herself meshed in such misdeeds. Bardo, her brother, would be the one to help her. He would let their mother shed a tear or two, and he would let their father rant and rave, but it would be Bardo who would lead Rani through the streets in the dawn. He would walk her to the Palace, her hand neatly folded in his, and they would explain what a terrible mistake had been made.
    Bardo would make everything right.
    Rani rounded the last corner, reassuring herself that her brother had the power to set the world straight. She was so intent on thinking about Bardo that she forgot to look where she was going. She came up short on a sooty flagstone, her hand raised to knock on a non-existent door.
    Her