Free Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay Page B

cutting diagonally through the square in front of the Sanctuary of the Victims. He thought about dashing in, hoping a cleric was awake, begging protection, but, for good or ill, he kept running, trying to put distance between himself and those behind.
    There were lights now, spilling from cheap wine shops he knew. He recognized two women on a corner. Had his pursuers been the sort of men he’d thought they were he’d have joined these two, taken them into a drinking place, been safe among a crowd.
    Men in armour wouldn’t care, he thought. It wouldn’t stop them.
    He knew these streets and alleys; the smell told him he was home. He could lose pursuers. He cut to his right up a leather-workers’ laneway, the shops shuttered and dark, then left along a smaller, fetid alley as fast as he could, then out again at the far end into a little, untidy square where ramshackle buildings on all sides housed many of the indigent artists of Seressa, including the son of Viero Villani, currently being pursued.
    And awaited.
    There were many lights here, far more than there should have been. Torches in hand, half a dozen men in a livery he knew stood before Pero’s own building. They looked at him as he burst into the square.
    He stopped, breathing hard.
    â€œWhat did I do?” he shouted. “
What did I do?
”
    No answer. Of course, no answer.
    In silence they came and surrounded him and took him away with them. A neat formation, well-trained guards, an artist in the middle. They took his sword. He didn’t resist. What was the point of resisting? He was finding it difficult to breathe and not just because he’d been running. He hoped some of his friends were watching, at windows or in doorways. There had been none in the square. There wouldn’t be, not with armed guards of the Council of Twelve here among them in the night.

CHAPTER IV
    S ome days—or nights—seemed to point themselves towards vexation, difficulty, obstacles, the Duke of Seressa found himself musing. He thought of images that applied: headwinds, lawsuits, dried ink clogging, burnt food, flooding, ambitious councillors, constipation.
    Ambitious councillors causing constipation.
    This windy night in spring was becoming such a time. Braced as he was for the unexpected after years in office, it was not especially startling to learn that the woman before them was quicker, and much more alert to what they were doing, than the man beside her.
    The doctor, it appeared, was a step-by-step fellow. Perhaps useful in a physician but awkward just now. His grasp of matters appeared to be stuck like a gun-wagon on a road after heavy rain. (The duke was briefly pleased, he was arriving at excellent phrases tonight, if nothing else.)
    The woman was otherwise. She had been investigated, interviewed twice, only then recruited to the service of the republic from one of the sequestered retreats of the Daughters of Jad. She was ofan aristocratic family (from Mylasia down the coast), was obviously intelligent (too much so?), and sufficiently high-spirited as to have
required
being placed with one of the religious houses, for the usual reason. She’d delivered herself of an inconvenience there. It had been relocated to one of the foundling hospitals and then to some family somewhere.
    She was now, it appeared, willing to accept an opportunity to leave the contemplative life for something more adventurous. Such women were rare, and could be important. Seressa had made use of them before, to variable effect. They could cause difficulties. Intelligence and spirit came with their own challenges.
    â€œWhy,” Leonora Valeri was saying just then, “are we not doing more to simulate being married?”
    The duke lifted his head, removed his spectacles, and gazed at her. The light, as always, was on those before the council. She was attractive, undeniably. Small, golden-haired under a dark-green cap, a good smile. He wished, briefly, that