---
"Or was taught," Fizz answered, voice going level in the way it did when jokes put on boots and became plans. "Someone shepherds you from the real gate."
"Then let us be sheep awhile," John said. "Dogs sleep somewhere."
A few more days later…
The dyehouses lived in a twilight of their own making. Cloth hung like flags between buildings, dripping blues, reds, madder browns into gutters that forgot how to be water. People worked with mouths closed; dye makes men careful because it loves to bleed. Three Vale households lived close to the vats; none had a cousin named Rettan, all had cousins who claimed not to remember cousins.
"Rellan once," said a woman with purple wrists and eyes that liked to measure men. "Face like a question. Laugh like an apology. Not a captain, not a nose. Married out to a tanner on Pave Street when the river froze strong that winter."
"Rellan," Fizz murmured, wrinkling his muzzle. "Relatives of Rettan for poets, not for evidence."
