There is a kind of person who seems more elegant than anyone else. They cannot help drawing the eye. It is in their gait, their posture, the movement of their hands. An aura of beauty seems to gather around them, as if the gazes of the people they walk by adhere to them, glazing them like a decorative tile. So I wasn’t surprised that Thaeto was looking at Maetahtild. I was looking at her. The people in the line in front of Thaeto’s table were looking at her. The people who were coming through the East Gate stopped to look at her. And I would not blame her if she accepted their regard as protection. She had been kept in a well. Isolation had harmed her in ways that I had seen with my own eyes.

  But Thaeto’s look was not one of admiration. He wore an expression of pure and naked love that shocked me. I handed his handkerchief back to him. He received it with a disinterested hand. Then he seemed to shake himself free, and he glanced at me, saw that the full extent of his yearning had been revealed to me, and cast his eyes down at his ledger, as if it could protect him. My poor boy! He loved Grandahlae. I was certain of that. But he had allowed some other part of himself to become enamored by the Widow of the House of Song.

  I suppose we all have these parts of ourselves, fragments of our personalities that remain unaffected by daily life. We can be content in all things, well-fed, well-loved, in fine houses and with work that interests and sometimes even amazes us, yet some part of our being is discontent and wants something more. And so we look around for something or someone to serve as an object of this discontentment. I once knew a merchant in Etraedanda who became obsessed with an old copper dagger that a wine shop owner refused to sell to him. He set himself to destroy this wine shop owner, sending bullies to break all his cups, bribing the vineyard owners so that they wouldn’t send wine to him. Finally he forgot himself completely and murdered the wine shop owner with his own hands. When the guard arrested him he was holding the dagger. It was unsheathed and lying flat in his palms, and he was staring down at it. Captain Baepohrik told me that he could see from the merchant’s expression that he was already disappointed. Now that he had it, he didn’t want it. He had never really wanted it at all. But he had wanted to want something, and that feeling didn’t go away once he possessed the dagger.

  So it was for my poor son. But Thaeto is a solid sort. He would, I told myself, find a way to handle his desire. He’d bury it in columns of numbers, or in his rather absurd interest in the game of tiles. Or he would become an obsessive collector of some ordinary object, such as leaves from the unfading pahlopahda tree or shards of pottery from Old Ibimendi.

  I moved off, to save him further embarrassment. Back into the sweaty, heaving, lice-ridden crowd. The guard tower beside the gate was like a beacon in a storm. I pushed towards it, having my feet stepped on, my face coughed into, my robes snagged on pommels and pushcarts and walking sticks as I went. When I reached the base of the tower, I found Maetahtild there. She, too, wanted to converse with Captain Jahldorani.

  I saw that she had come through the sieve of flesh in the plaza more or less unscathed. We were both immediately embarrassed to be in each other’s company. I had, after all, drawn her up from that well. When I looked at her, I couldn’t help but see her nakedness, her face tilted up at me, its beautiful features begrimed with blood and dirt. I couldn’t help but see her matted hair. She had looked feral, when I had peered down into that well in the merchant Demirill’s house, except that her expression wasn’t wild, but calm. When she tilted her head up I had seen calm resignation on her face. Then, when she saw that I wasn’t her husband, the merest flicker of expression revealed the hope and anger that had battled within her during her imprisonment. Now her face was serene, despite the jostling of the crowd. But when she looked at me I could see that she remembered how I had seen her, and that she didn’t forgive me for it.

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  This is always the way with rescuers. The people you rescue are at the worst points of their lives when you intervene. They don’t want to be reminded of that time. If they are lucky, their persecutors are dead or jailed. You are the only living memento.

  Yet she was polite. Of course she was. She knew both of my sons. She bowed her head. “Captain.”

  “Lady of Song,” I said, and then saw that I had been too jocular. Her eyes flashed. But I pushed on. “What brings you to this crowded plaza on such a fine morning?”

  A small smile. “You sound like a courtier.”

  “A captain is a courtier of sorts. Although not one who gets many favors from the king.”

  “Yes. Well, it is Uesayna’s favors I am concerned with this morning.”

  “Uesayna?”

  “She is the daughter of my housemate Pyelahra. She has run away to live with Captain Jahldorani.”

  The dusky eyed maiden! “I have come about the same thing. Or nearly the same thing. I need the Captain to be dressed and at his station by midday. We are both about to be very unpopular.”

  A little twist of her finely shaped lips. “Popularity is not a regular part of my daily lot. Is it part of yours?”

  “No. Famous outcasts, that’s what the two of us are. Who should go first up the stairs?” I regretted the question almost immediately. It would harm her, I sensed, in some silent, secretive way, to see two bodies intertwined upon a bed. Whereas I have no haunting memories of sex. I didn’t take the question back, but turned and started up the stairs, and I could hear her singing under her breath as she followed me.

  “Guide of the bewildered,” she sang, “to your emptiness all things will defer. In your fulness all things are found. Hearer of complaints. Freer of captives. You who veil my faults. Friend in desolation. Companion in my loneliness. Guide in my confusion. Stronghold in my plight. Knower of the unseen. Intimate of my heart. Giver of asylum. Holder of memory. Shield of the joyous. Model of forbearance…”

  I almost turned to ask her who she was singing to. Not to me, I was certain. And it gave me an eerie feeling, going up those stairs. As if someone else were in the shadows of the stairwell. She hadn’t sung like this when I drew her up out of the pit. But perhaps she had been singing in her head. Perhaps she had sustained herself by singing in this way during her captivity.