A deal is a deal

He does not take your arm. He walks, and the ribbons that are left on the floor do not follow, and you go after him before you have a chance to think. The cape is heavy. The bra and the panties are still on under it, damp, and every step tugs the wet cloth against you while the hood sits useless an inch above your brows.

The green curtain parts.

Hemm is at the counter with the slate, and three of the nobles are still there, coats half on, arguing about sealed bolts. The ringed one is counting coin onto the wood. None of them look up. Hemm’s chalk hand moves through the space where your shoulder is and does not stop, and the ringed man’s eyes pass over your face — the mess, the blonde hair stuck to it, the hood — and land on the coin again.

You are close enough to smell the wine on him.

“Hemm,” you say, and it comes out small in Sera’s mouth.

He does not hear it. Or he hears a draft. The man beside you does not slow, and you pass the counter and the dummy and the door, and the bell does not ring for you. Out on the cobbles the night has come down properly, oil lamps lit along Needle Row, and you look back once at the lit glass where they are still buying. Your face is tight where it has started to dry. You put a hand up and the spend smears instead of coming off.

The street is not empty.

A woman with a basket crosses ahead of you and does not glance. A warden at the corner is watching a cart, not you. Then you pass under a lamp and the light hits the wet on your cheek and your mouth, and a man leaning in a doorway straightens. He sees it. You drop your chin so fast the hood slips back another finger, and the blonde hair falls forward and does not hide enough.

“Keep walking,” Hallin’s man says, quietly. “He wants the face as it is.”

You keep walking. The cape hides the lingerie and not the shame, and every lamp is a problem you can see coming. You angle your head. You use the hair. It helps until it doesn’t, because the stuff on your skin catches light the way water does, and people are not blind.

At the turn toward the yards a drunk is sitting on a step with a bottle between his boots, red in the face, and he looks up as you come into the pool of the next lamp. His eyes go to your mouth. He grins with bad teeth.

“Straight from the whorehouse, I see.” He lifts the bottle as if it is a toast, and then he finds the rest of his thoughts it as the first line slurred out of him. “How’s I put an extra load on that, sweetheart? You look like you’ve got room.”

Heat hits your ears and your throat. You turn your face into the cape’s edge and keep moving, and the drunk laughs at your back and does not get up, held back in drunken stupor. Hallin’s man does not answer him. You continue, hood low as it will go, forehead still bare, the mess still there for the next lamp and the next pair of eyes. This happens a few more times, sparingly as you approach the warehouse district

The warehouse yards are at the back of the cloth district, past the last decent shop and the smell of sizing. Timber sheds. A gate with a lamp that has been turned down. Stacks of bolted linen under oilcloth. He stops you short of the door and looks at your face the way a man checks a parcel.

“Don’t wipe it,” he says. “Hallin will know if you did.”

The yard is quiet. Your knees still hurt from the boards. Somewhere behind you Needle Row is still selling, and nobody in that shop can say they saw you leave.