Movement caught his attention and he saw a man in red robes with a brown cloak on the edge of the crowd, his eyes so green Parno could see them even across the square. The fire cast the man’s shadow over the wall of the house behind him. But it couldn’t be his shadow, it didn’t flicker in the fire glow like everyone else’s. Rather it was as still as a pool of ink, looming over the man in red and brown like a smudge, far too large to have been cast by such a small man.

Too large and too dark.

Parno shivered again, trying to shake off the feeling that somehow it was the shadow that watched him, dissolving his thoughts. He wanted to look away, needed to look away.

“Sir?” the boy had hold of his sword harness and was pulling on it. “Sir, the fire.”

Parno jerked and lowered his eyes to the child’s tear-marked face, dragging in a ragged breath of smoke-tainted air. Though the boy was no great weight, his arms trembled, and the sweat on his face was not from the heat of the fire. Dhulyn still waited below, her face a pale oval in the darkening square. Parno shook himself, held the boy out, and dropped him into her waiting arms.

It was harder for him to use the shape than to be it. Harder to merely look through the eyes than to inhabit. Especially at such a distance. Distance was shape, too. He shook, and pushed that thought away. To keep the human he now used whole, to keep its shape, he had to spread himself thin. Spread the undoing. Spread the NOT. The humans closest to him were fidgeting already, their eyes rolling and flicking from side to side, their heads beginning to twitch, their hands to clutch, to wring, to scratch.

A flicker of gold, high up on the wall, and with great effort he had the human whose eyes he used lift its head and look. Gathered his powers and felt. Sending his own essence like fingers tenuous as smoke, pushing into the human’s eyes, probing into the flame he thought he had seen. He smelled it all over, tasted it, felt it begin to give way, then harden again, regain its shape. Yet it was not Marked. He withdrew. It was only a blue flame after all, not the gold one he sought.

But now the humans around him were crying out, some were striking their fellows, others falling to the ground weeping, tearing at their own skin and faces. He retreated again to the man whose eyes he used, resting a heartbeat or so before gathering his strength for the leap back to his host, the shape in which his essence now dwelt.

As he leaped, he saw again the gold flame, and he took one heartbeat more to look closer, to fix the flame’s human shape and human coloring.

There.

She was the one he sought.

By the time Parno stepped off the windowsill, landing neatly at her side, others in the crowd had begun to help douse the flames. The Finder’s house couldn’t be saved, Dhulyn thought, nor could the smaller structure to the south of it-attempts to put out the fire had started too late for that-and even now, less than two thirds of the people still in the small square were helping to douse the flames. Automatically, she shifted the angle of her sword and settled her feet firmly in a new position.

“Parno,” she said, and felt him move to her left side.

What’s wrong with them?” he whispered.

She shook her head, voice freezing in her throat. The people not helping to put out the fire seemed confused, many as if they did not know where they were. Some were rolling on the ground slapping at themselves as if attacked by bees, others fought each other, clawing at each other’s faces with stiffened fingers, seemingly unaware of the knives at their belts. Others were crying, rocking and holding themselves. One poor woman wandered as if blind, blood dripping from her nose and ears.

Some few of the unaffected were leaving the water brigade and going to the aid of one or another of the afflicted, and some of those were calming down, a few looking around them, as if trying to remember where, and perhaps who, they were.

“Should we do anything?” Dhulyn said, her sword still raised.

“Leave,” Parno said. “There’s a Jaldean here. He’ll see to them.”

Dhulyn nodded, even as she pressed her lips together. Which was stranger, she wondered, the behavior that was even now dissipating like smoke blown away by a breeze, or that the Jaldean priest-bewildered looking but otherwise sane-was only now coming to help?

Parno was putting the older girl up on his horse, and passing the smallest child up to her when what could only be the Finder and his wife in identical dark green headgear came pushing through the line of people passing buckets. A few people muttered and pointed, and one man made as if to approach them, but Dhulyn discouraged him with a hard look.

“Why haven’t you gone to the shrine, then?” the man called out, but he turned away, jaw and fists clenched, when Dhulyn jerked her head at him to be gone.

The wife went immediately to her children, but the Finder himself, after staring openmouthed, began to question those of his neighbors he found among the people passing the water. Dhulyn pulled him to one side and spoke, pitching her voice so only he could hear.

“Have you someplace else to go, Finder?”

The man focused his shocked gaze on her, responding to the touch of Dhulyn’s hand on his arm much like a nervous horse responds to the trusted touch of its handler, calming automatically and without thought.

“I don’t understand,” he said to her, a countryman’s accent under the polish of the Guild. “Why would they do this to me? I’ve always done my best to Find.”

“You didn’t Find my Jolda!” came a voice from a woman nearby.

Even in the uncertain light of the dying fire, Dhulyn could see that the Finder had gone pale. His lips moved, but in the suddenly increased noise she missed what he said. A stone came flying out of the crowd, and Dhulyn deflected it without a glance, stepping in front of the Finder, sword still raised. His wife took him by his arm and pulled him into the shelter of the horses, where Parno stood with the children.

“We can go to the shop,” the woman whispered to Dhulyn. Dhulyn nodded and backed away, her sword still held out in front of her.

“Let the Brothers take them,” someone else called out. “They’ll know how to deal with them.”

Dhulyn silently blessed the quick thinking of that particular person. So the Finder and his family had at least one friend in the mob. The slower wits in the crowd were happy enough to believe that she and Parno were taking the Finders under duress, and to let them leave with only jeers and sharp glances to send them on their way.

The Finder’s shop was a small but comfortable space within easy walking distance of the house. Dhulyn settled Grenwen Finder into what was obviously his own chair behind a neat worktable while his wife, Mirandeth, took the children into a small kitchen room and set the older girl to making hot drinks for everyone before rejoining her husband. She made the Mercenaries take the clients’ chairs and perched one hip on the edge of her husband’s table.

Parno leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Are you sure there’s nothing…?”

“Nothing, good Mercenary, I swear. I’ve always given full value, never charged more than the Guild recommends. And I’ve done all I can to follow the new restrictions,” he said, rubbing his face with trembling hands. “The curfew was one thing,” he said. “And the dress code.” His gesture took in their headresses. “That was bad enough, but this…”

“What was that the woman said about Jolda?” Dhulyn asked.

Mirandeth shook her head. “That was a sad thing, but a thing no one could have helped. And it’s more than a year ago now. Mistress Fisher’s child. Everyone thought the willful little thing was just hiding herself as usual after an argument with her sister. She’d done it before, and this time the parents-the Fishers, as I said, they own three boats and the salting sheds down by the point-thought they’d let the stubborn little mite sulk and come home on her own when she got hungry instead of chasing after her as they usually did.”