The market swallowed her like it swallows everything—noise first, then faces, then the shape of a life no one intends to miss. But the moment her eyes met mine, the street fell quiet inside my head.
White hair. Not pale. White—like frost under a noon sun. Eyes that couldn't decide on a single color. And the pressure in the air when we looked at each other—like the breath a storm holds before it chooses where to strike.
Most people I forget on purpose. She is someone I will always remember.
I stand where she landed after vaulting me, a black seam in a crowd dyed every color by heat. A baker complains about coins. A child drags a toy with one wheel. Someone laughs too loud. It all moves around me the way river water moves around a rock, stubborn and resigned.
"Prince." Vale's voice is low at my shoulder. He's learned not to announce me. "Do you require an escort?"
"No." My gaze follows the direction she ran, not with my eyes but with the city map I carry in my bones—lanes that kink left because a kiln failed a century ago, a gap between two roofs the length of my outstretched arm, a beam that bows in heat at midday. "Pull the west-ward cordon to the copper quarter and leave the south lane open."
Vale's brow tics. "Open, my prince?"
"People flee where they think guards are lazy," I say. "And my guards are lazy to the south. Today they will remain so."
Vale doesn't ask questions he doesn't want the answers to. He dips his head once and vanishes into the press, already issuing orders without raising his voice.
I start walking.
The market's smell is layered—sugar burned to gloss, meat left too long at the edge of shade, metal sweating in its sleep. It sticks to the tongue, acidic and sweet. Under it, something sharper threads the air. The city calls it forge-breath. I know better. It's the taste of something burning.
I take the passage that cuts between fish and clay. Dye-water leaks into the street, a purple river that goes nowhere. On the third stone after the bend, the mortar is loose. I nudge it with my boot as I pass. Habit.
Where would I go if I were small and hungry and good at vanishing?
Left, then right, then the alley with the pipe that drips every fifth breath. Not because it's safest—because it is familiar. The city protects those who learn its bad habits. She knows them. The way she moved told me that.
The alley offers me its ordinary: flaking plaster, a door that sticks, a smear of soot at shoulder height where someone has leaned too often. No thief. A scrap of crust on the ground. I crouch and touch it. The bread has grit ground into one side where a hand grabbed and a street punished the impulse.
"Lost your mouse?" Revik's voice comes from the alley mouth, amused, unbothered. He leans on the wall like it was built for his shoulder. His grin shows a tooth he chipped at sixteen and refused to have mended.
"She is quick," I say.
"She is a trouble magnet," he counters. "Apparently three of Vales men on her heels and she bounced them off two different walls. I have never seen a man apologize to a wall before. Twice."
A corner of my mouth moves without permission. "Shame you weren't one of them."
He clutches his chest. "You wound me."
I stand. "I want her found."
Revik's grin eases into something more attentive. "Because she stole a stale loaf of bread from the market?"
"Because she looked at me," I say.
He lifts a brow. "Careful, Highness. That sentence can get a man married in poorer kingdoms."
"Not like that." I search for the word and discard all the wrong ones. "Like—recognition. Not of me. Of… something."
He tilts his head, reading the space around my words the way he reads wind on a battlefield. "You think she's one of the marks from Zaius's dusty nightmares."
"Zaius reads more than nightmares." The scholar collects truths like knives: quietly, and for a purpose. Last month, he laid a faded page on the war table with hands that did not quite tremble. White hair that is not old. Eyes that do not keep their promise to one color. An air-pressure that changes rooms. The rest he left for me to say aloud and did not make me say.
"You really tasted it?" Revik asks softly. "The storm-breath?"
I look back down the alley. The air here still sits wrong—thinner, like something exhaled and forgot to inhale again. "Yes."
He whistles under his breath. "All right. Then you're not chasing a thief. You're hunting an omen. That's worse. People stab thieves. They build churches for omens."
"I don't want a church." The word tastes like dust. "I want answers."
"And if the answers belong to a girl who prefers roofs to rooms?"
"Then we go to the roofs."
He brightens. "Finally, a reasonable order."
We move. Revik keeps pace two steps behind, not because he must but because he knows it lets me listen. The city's sounds contain its secrets. A shout that's mostly performance. A cart that squeaks because the wheel was never oiled. A child's laugh that is too brittle. The slap of sandals on stone that belong to men who think they are hunters and do not know they are decoys.
I cut left down a catwalk thin as a promise and climb an iron ladder that weathers like old blood. The roof accepts my weight, then his. Up here the heat changes; it's the heat of sky and reflected stone, easier to breathe than the lower city's stew. Wind plays with my cloak. The world opens—the black spines of the palace far off, the veins of molten rock stitching neighborhoods together like a careless tailor, laundry strung like flags of truces no one intends to honor.
"She'll aim for height," I say. "Height buys time. Bridges to the dye-yard are scaffolded this week. That gives her options and removes others." I point across the rooftops, mapping the week's construction that only someone who walks the city every day would bother to learn. "She'll avoid guard patterns even if she doesn't know she knows them. Habit. They move loud. We do not."
Revik's grin tucks itself away. He lives for this—for the part where the world becomes a puzzle and we become two men who like puzzles too much. "South lane stays open," he repeats. "So she'll believe it's the path of least attention and stitch toward it."
"She will, unless fear makes her sloppy." Fear makes most people sloppy. It makes a few people sharp. The look in her eyes suggested steel.
We run the roofs. The city becomes a rhythm in the legs—dip, leap, land—until thought is unnecessary and intention is enough. I angle us toward a ridge I know flexes under weight in the heat, already calculating a dozen lines she might take and three I can break with a body and a pause. When I was a boy, the master-at-arms scolded me for spending hours over the city map instead of the sword rack. The map has saved my life more times than a blade has.
Below, two guards misjudge a wall, in sequence, as if learning were a superstition. Revik laughs once, short and delighted. "There they go."
"Let them drive noise where we want it," I say.
The roofs give us elevation and sight. They also give me quiet. In the quiet, the sense of pressure returns—faint, like a ripple after something drops into deep water far away. I turn my head toward it before I know I'm turning.
"Feel it?" Revik says.
"Yes."
We angle, leap, cut a corner where a beam slants, and there: the glimmer of a cloak edge vanishing past a chimney, the specific way a body lowers before a long jump, hands placed precisely, not the way a trained acrobat places them but the way someone who had to learn fast and dirty places them.
"On your left," I murmur.
"I see her." Revik is already smiling again. "Small, stubborn—your type."
I ignore that. The jump she takes is bold enough to earn respect; she rolls on landing and bleeds momentum without bleeding skin. Good. I dislike clumsy prey. Clumsy prey dies before it can answer interesting questions.
We do not shout. We do not announce. We shift, we intercept, we let the city funnel her from the edges of our map into its middle. When she nearly runs into me on the beam, her eyes go wide, and for a breath the air overlays with that same pressure. The wind smells like the moment after lightning leaves a scar on stone. Up close, the white of her hair is not complete; threads of silver live in it like veins in marble. The hood shadows the edges of a face built for defiance and starvation in equal measure.
"You run well," I tell her truthfully.
"I practice," she says, and it's a fine answer.
If I reach for her now, she will bite. If I let her go, she will show me where she believes safety lives. I step aside. Not mercy. Cartography.
She bolts. Of course she does. We move. Of course we do.
By the time she hits the stair to ground, the decoy cordons have thickened the crowd in places that look thin and thinned it in places that look fat. She takes the kind lane—heat-shimmered, unguarded, unworried. It dead-ends today because the dye-yard decided to stack barrels like a barricade. She pivots for the gap the way I would have. I am already there.
"Enough," I say, mostly to the part of me that would like to see what happens if I push her harder. I prefer answers.
She throws grit. It is well done. I blink sand out of one eye and let her think it worked long enough to keep her moving where I want her. She takes three turns a corner too fast and bursts into a lane where the heat warps the air into breathless waves.
I step into that heat and let my shadow give her the idea of shade.
Up close again, she does not try to lie with her eyes. She asks me who I am, and without thinking
Someone who sees you.
It lands. I can feel it. It also frightens her more than my name would have. Interesting.
She runs again. Even more interesting.
By the time we lose her in the black-and-blue maze that slumps toward the slums, dusk has started to lay a hand on the city. Lanterns blink awake like cautious eyes. The smell shifts toward cooking fat and cheap spirits. The guards relax into the kind of tired that makes mistakes. I do not let mine relax.
We regroup on a roof that overlooks three lanes and a courtyard where laundry pretends to be pennants. Revik stretches his shoulders until something pops. "She'll vanish for a few hours. She's good at it."
"She will try."
He leans his elbows on his knees. "Say it."
"Lock the inner gates at the second bell," I say. "Quietly. No panic. No spectacle. Post two watchers on each roof from the copper quarter to the dye-yard—people who can run without clanking. No arrests unless I give the order. Anyone who moves like she moves, you mark. Anyone with white hair you do not touch. You follow."
Revik's grin is back, not because he enjoys hunting children, but because he enjoys hunting puzzles. "Commands received. And you?"
"I will walk."
"Of course you will."
He drops to street level with the grace of a falling idea and vanishes into the crowd.
Then I drop as well, landing in the light between two lanterns so the glow cuts me in half.
I start toward it, hands loose at my sides, as the second bell begins to toll.
"I will find you, little thief."