Angel was just getting into her song, feeling the music moving from inside her out into the room, binding them all together as they stared at her and listened and let the notes chase away the darkness, when she saw the girl. She was about Angel’s age, but Angel did not know her, which was odd. She knew every young person in this quarter at least by sight. Sure, living in an inn she saw strangers often but always adults, traders and sea captains and pilgrims. Sometimes she saw refugee families in the street, but they never came into the Underking, and her father would have run them out if they did. This girl looked a little like a refugee, but she did not have the hungry eyes and nervous air that usually marked them. She was wearing pants, but that was not so strange; lots of women did, especially the ones who had fled from the west when the horse lords came. Her clothes were good, her blouse green, the kerchief on her head dark blue. Some of her long black hair showed around it. She was thin, lithe, slipping through the crowd like a cat through the reeds. Her face was pretty but a little hard. Not very trusting, Angel thought.

  Then she realized what it was that made the girl so extraordinary – nobody else seemed to notice her. She walked among the crowd, but no one looked at her. If she passed between someone and Angel, that person just shifted a little to one side or the other to keep Angel in sight. Nobody spoke to her. It was like she was invisible, except that Angel could see her plain as day. Angel kept singing but once she saw the girl her heart wasn’t in it. She could only watch this girl move and wonder who she was.

  Then, from a table in the back, the girl snatched a loaf of bread. There were three men at the table and Angel waited for the explosion, but nothing came. No shouting, no blows, not even an “excuse me.” They just shifted around to keep looking at Angel as she sang. Angel desperately wanted the girl to get away, so she threw herself back into the song, pouring her voice out to draw their attention to her and away from this girl. Either it worked, or the girl needed no help, for she slipped away from the table, back through to crowd and out the back door of the inn.

  Angel hurried to the end of the song and as soon as it was over she walked to the back door as quickly as she dared. People were calling for another song but she ignored them. She slipped through the back door and into the alley. It ran in either direction, but Angel had a feeling she knew where the girl had gone: to the dead end, where sometimes sailors diced after dark but nobody went in the daytime.

  She was sitting on the cobblestones, her back to a wall eating hungrily.

  Angel walked up to her and stood just a few feet away. She said, “You could get put in the pillory for that. The sailors love to mock girls who end up there. I’ve seen it and it’s ugly.”

  The girl looked startled. “You – you saw me?”

  “Of course I saw you. You were right in front of me, walking through my father’s inn, stealing bread off his tables.”

  “Just one table.”

  “One is enough to get you pilloried.”

  “How did you see me?”

  “What, did you think you were invisible?”

  “Nobody else saw me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because nobody ever sees me. Unless I want them to, and sometimes not even then.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “I see you.”

  The girl stared at Angel with something like wonder, and then something like fear.

  Angel said, “I won’t betray you.”

  “Why not?”

  Angel shrugged. “I won’t.” There was a long pause. “And if you come back, I can get you food without you having to steal it.”

  The girl said nothing. She seemed to be thinking this over as if it were one of those holy riddles the priests like to ask, the kind with no answer that makes any sense.

  Angel waited a while and then spoke again. “I’m Angel. Where did you come from?”

  “West. The hills.”

  “That explains the pants.”

  “Lots of girls here wear pants.”

  “Lots of people here came from the west.”

  More silence. “What’s your name?”

  A long pause, and then a decision. “Andy.”

  “I need to get back. The inn is crazy busy.”

  “I saw.”

  “See you later, Andy.”

  Andy didn’t answer, so she went back to work.

  Later, in her little bed in the attic room so small she had to climb over the chest to get to the bed, she thought about her day. She had not seen the attack on the harbor. She had gone down for a peak at the crowd and seen the garlands of flowers, but then she had come back to the inn to get ready for the crowds they knew were coming. She used to beg her father to let her spend all day at a festival, any festival, but now she knew better. Those were their busiest days and they needed that coin to get through the lean months when the inn was empty. Her father always talked about how bad trade was, with so many cities ruined and so few ships on the sea. It seemed to Angel like there were a lot of ships, but she didn’t argue. She made do with little glimpses and the stories she made customers tell her. At least when the rite was at the harbor she could hear the hymns well enough to sing along.

  She had not seen the bottles or the smoke, and even the sound of the bombs hardly made it to her. The first she knew of the disaster was the screaming. Lifting her head from her work she heard a thousand terrified voices let loose at once, echoing down every street, bouncing off every wall. It was sound she would never forget. People were dead, but nobody seemed to know how many. Ten? Fifty? A hundred?

  She hardly understood what people told her about the attackers. Why would they come here from some other city of the old empire to kill us? These weren’t riders from the great plains whose people the mage lords slaughtered, or tribesmen from the swamps sailors used to hunt for sport. These were people like Calyxians, the same hair and skin and eyes, the same language, the same kind of houses and inns. People said it had something to do with gods, but didn’t they have the same gods? Maybe the mages had mocked the gods, but regular folks never did. People were praying when they threw their poison bombs! How did that honor the gods?

  She thought about the anger she saw in the inn, and the worry. People were mad and wanted to fight, but people were also scared. This was not a war anybody expected, like the fighting out west in the hills. Would there be a war or not? Would the Viscount decide, or did he have to summon the guilds and the temples or something? The only wars Angel had ever known were the ones out in the hills, and that was just people attacking us and us defending. Nobody had to decide about those.

  That brought her mind back to Andy. She must be a refugee from the west after all, chased from her home by the horse lords. Or by bandits or renegade soldiers or somebody – there seemed to be a lot of people fighting out there. Was she alone? Lost all her family? She didn’t look like one of those lost orphan children, but then she was a little older and maybe tougher. And what was that trick that kept people from seeing her? Not seeing her, Angel realized, but noticing her. People had to move their heads to look around her. She was there, blocking their view, they just didn’t seem to care. She was just like a pillar or maybe a servant girl hurrying by, not anything they needed to think about so long as they could still see what they wanted to look at. Even when she stole their bread.

  For a second Angel remembered the last thieving refugee girl she had seen in the stocks, stripped naked, covered with filth, crying while they threw saltwater on her welts and jeered at her. She had to help Andy stay away from that. And if she was used to getting away with brazen thievery using some trick that Angel could see through, then one day somebody else would see through it and it would be the pillory for her. She decided to store up what food she could during the day and see if Andy would come back for it.