Moving into the only available bit of shade, she sat and watched their target do his accounting. Except he wasn’t exactly their target. Pity, she thought, fingers curled around the pommel of her dagger. We could have killed him last night and been on our way home by now.

Maybe he’s working out the numbers of Astoblite soldiers he needs for the invasion. If he is, I can kill him now.

Before she could move, the woman who’d tried so hard to sell them a carpet the night before emerged from the back of the shop and told him she’d sold the small red-and-gold rug. “Good. Good!” Hy Sa’lacvi added a note to one of the finished sheets and flashed a brilliant smile up at the woman. “Maybe this month we make enough to import more, yes?”

Maybe import more was a euphemism for more soldiers.

“Maybe you should import something that doesn’t unravel when you move it,” the woman snorted.

Or not, Vree sighed. She’d never spent this much time on a target she could have taken out within moments of first marking him. Boring, boring, bor…

Mirrin clambered into her lap and shoved her head under Vree’s hand.

Over the years, she’d had every type of insect imaginable climb over her while waiting to take out a target. There’d been half a dozen snakes, a few lizards, and on one memorable occasion a rat that’d had to be fatally discouraged from snacking on Bannon’s foot. Dogs were avoided and, as a rule, cats avoided them.

Mirrin demanded attention more insistently.

When Bannon returned, Mirrin was napping with her head on Vree’s dagger, and Hy Sa’lacvi was just filling his last piece of parchment. The breeches he brought her were dark green silk that hung low on her hips and flowed over her legs like water. The sleeveless tunic had been block printed with large pale green fish.

“You never said no fish,” he protested, blocking her blow.

He wore a similar style in dark red and gold-the vest lightly laced across his chest with gold cord, the whole thing fish free.

They ate in the ale house across the road from the carpet shop, Bannon having taking their letter of credit to a moneylender for some coin. As they ate, they watched Hy Sa’lacvi try to sell a carpet to a middle-aged couple dressed in matching sleeveless tunics and short breeches.

“Do they know how ridiculous they look?” Bannon wondered, eating a small onion off the point of his knife.

Vree shrugged and peeled another shrimp.

By the time they finished their meal-having switched their full tankards for the convenient empties of their neighbors, Hy Sa’lacvi had turned the shop over to his employee, pushed his way out into the milling crowds, and began walking toward the harbor.

Vree and Bannon followed, careful not to be seen by either their quarry or Orin’s people. Given both crowds and darkness, it wasn’t hard. Eventually, after a short stop at a bakery and a slightly longer one at a wine merchant’s, they found themselves at the harbor watching Hy Sa’lacvi go into a warehouse near the North Pier.

“That’s it. The Astoblite ships are tied up at the North Pier. We can kill him.”

Vree stopped her brother’s forward movement with a well placed elbow. “He could be seeing another trader about a carpet. We need to be sure.”

“Fine.” He rolled his eyes. “We’ll sneak into the warehouse, get close enough to find out exactly what Hy Sa’lacvi is up to, and when we find out he’s helping the Astoblites invade, then we kill him.”

“That works.”

There were four men and two women sprawled on cushions around a low table in an empty corner of the warehouse. One of the men and one of the women were definitely Astoblites. Three of the other four were South Reaches locals, and the last was wearing the distinctive orange-on-blue parrot tunic of a visitor. When Hy Sa’lacvi joined them, money changed hands and tiles were slapped down on the table.

Catching Bannon’s eye, Vree signed, No kill.

He nodded and signed, Stay?

She signed back, Maybe kill later, mostly just to cheer him up, and they settled in to watch and wait for the tile game to become strategy and tactics. It never did.

“So tomorrow we tell the governor she was imagining things and head home,” Bannon sighed as they headed back toward their inn. “Hy Sa’lacvi is no more planning a slaughtering invasion than I am. And he sucks at tiles.”

Impossible to argue the latter point as the Ilagian had, indeed, lost steadily all night. They’d followed him home, watched him climb into bed, discouraged Mirrin from following them, in turn, away across the roof, and were now calling it a night.

“I suspect the governor will want us to observe him for a little longer,” Vree pointed out. “He can’t spend all his time planning an invasion. Maybe this was his night off.”

“So we’re staying?”

“For a while.” She grabbed his arm as he started to turn away. “Where are you going?”

“Big Eylla’s place is still open. I can see the torches from here.”

Since she couldn’t think of a good reason to hang on to him, she let him go.

“You should come with me.”

“No, thank you.”

“Your loss.” Walking backward, gracefully avoiding the other people still wandering the streets looking for entertainment, he winked. “You need to get laid more, sister-mine.”

“Sod off. You, too,” she added before the elderly man leering cheerfully at her could make the obvious suggestion.

Just before dawn, someone heavy heaved himself up onto her balcony. It sounded very much like he took out two or three other people on the way down.

Their second day in the South Reaches was very much like their first-except Bannon smelled faintly of cinnamon instead of limes. That night Hy Sa’lacvi had dinner with friends, ate sixteen crabs, drank half a barrel of pale beer, and threw up three times on the way home.

On day three, Orin attempted to shove Bannon into a cup-seller’s cart, inexplicably missed, and somehow ended up crashing through it himself. The resulting shouting match was made funnier by the minor wounds Orin had taken. That night, they watched from the roof as Hy Sa’lacvi mixed powders and potions in his back room. After the first small explosion, Mirrin joined them.

When Vree returned alone to the Cyprus Gardens, heavy breathing and the creak of leather told her she had company in her room. She thought about taking care of it herself but figured Bannon would never forgive her for blowing their cover without him. Noting where each man stood, she backed away from the door, returned to the atrium, gave the information to the large young woman on duty, and let the inn’s security handle it.

The intruders had swords out, but they weren’t expecting crossbows.

“Who says assassins have no sense of humor,” she murmured to herself as Orin and his crew were tossed down the front stairs loudly protesting that they were the governor’s guard. Orin seemed to be bleeding slightly again.

“We need to deal with them,” Vree muttered the next morning as she watched Orin shove that same poor water seller out of his way with a bandaged arm. Keln and the still nameless fourth kicked the man on the way by. “They’re starting to annoy me.”

Bannon glanced behind him. The four guards were barely three or four body lengths behind, shadowing them obviously, scowling, hands on their weapons, the noon crowds scrambling clear. “They look a little bruised.”

“They’ve had a rough couple of nights. Come on.” She led the way into a narrow alley between a candler’s and yet another ale house.

Rubbing at a bit of sandalwood-scented oil in the crease of his elbow, Bannon shrugged and followed.

From the look on his face when he joined them, Orin had not been expecting an ultimatum.