Daja shook her head. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him. She simply didn’t want to admit that he might be right.

The door opened; the members of the Council filed in. One, a woman, carried the bulky logbook in which the names of all Trader families, vessels, and companies were recorded. Placing it on the judges’ table, she opened it, leafing through the pages until she reached the one she sought.

Over his—or her—arms (Daja couldn’t tell the sex of the person in those bulky robes and veils), the mimander carried a staff. Like any Trader’s staff, it was five feet long and made of ebony, a symbol of pride and of a Trader’s right to protect himself. Brass caps on both ends guarded them from wear and tear. The cap on every other staff in the room bore designs of engravings, bumps, and inlaid wire. On this staff, the cap was unmarked.

Seeing it, Daja began to shiver. An unmarked staff meant only one thing.

“As in the days when our people first carried fire, weaving, and metal-work to the non-Traders, the kaqs,” said the chief judge, a man, “so it is now. Daja Kisubo, lone survivor of disaster, we declare you to be outcast, the worst kind of bad luck, trangshi. As trangshi you must bear this staff always—”

The mimander held the staff out to Daja. The girl stared at it. What was the design on her staff that had sunk with her ship? Dancing monkeys, each grasping the tail of the one before it, with a wire spiral on her cap, to mark her as a brand-new member of the crew. This cap had no mark; it was polished mirror-bright. As trangshi, she would never be permitted to add the signs of her own deeds to it.

Numb, she gripped the wood and took it from the mimander.

“Your name is marked in the books of our people,” the chief judge continued. “You are forbidden to speak, touch, or write to Traders. This is to protect them from you. If you do not wish others to catch your bad luck, do the right thing. Stay away from them.”

The woman with the logbook inked the tip of her brush and began to write, putting down Daja’s new status for all Traders to know.

“You don’t have to do this,” Niko protested to the judges. “You have rites to cleanse her luck, rites to make an orphan new-born to a new family, blameless of everything that has gone before.”

The mimander tucked yellow-gloved hands into wide yellow sleeves. Daja could just barely see eyes behind the thin saffron veil. “We made this choice after taking the omens. I placed sacred oil and my own blood on a hot brass dish and read the signs for her future. Her fate is to be trangshi. There is nothing you can say to change that, Niklaren Goldeye.”

“It’s all right,” Daja whispered to Niko. “They just want to keep my bad luck from ruining anyone else. I understand.”

Her rescuer glared at the judges and tucked Daja’s arm in his. “I’m taking her to Winding Circle Temple,” he told the Council, his dark eyes sparkling with anger. “They’ll appreciate her, with or without Trader luck!”

In Sotat:

On their first night outside the walls of Hajra, Niko and Briar slept on the ground at a Trader camp, the welcome guests of a southbound caravan. On the second night, they stopped at a wayside inn. Briar was inspecting the room that Niko had taken for him—and considering a raid on the kitchen—when Niko called, “Would you come here? I have some shirts I think will fit you.”

Unsuspecting, the boy went into Niko’s room, to be brought up short by the sight of a large metal tub filled with hot water. Next to it was a stool with fresh clothes, a scrub-sponge, towels, and soap on top. “Hop in,” Niko said pleasantly. “The landlady says you don’t sleep in one of her beds until you’ve bathed. I have to admit, I would welcome the change myself.”

Briar started to back up. “That stuff’s unhealthy,” he informed Niko. “Maybe you wouldn’t be so bony if you stopped doing this all the time.”

Strong arms grabbed him; a hostler had been standing behind the half-open door.

“My thinness has nothing to do with bathing,” Niko retorted. “Do you undress yourself, or must we do it for you?”

In the end, it took him and three hostlers to give Briar a thorough scrubbing with hot water and soap. The boy’s curses, in five different languages, left Niko unmoved, though the hostlers were impressed.

“I never thought a person could do all them things,” one of them said to another.

“They can’t—leastways, not all at once,” replied his friend.

Briar was silent all the way downstairs. Only the sight of the loaded supper table thawed him, and that just a bit. “Soon as we’re out of Sotat, me’n you part ways,” he told Niko. “Even the Street Guard only tortures folk when they’d done something.”

“You’ll do as you wish, of course,” Niko replied, sitting. “Beef or chicken?”

“Both. And some of that yellow cheese.”

“It just seems a pity,” the man said, handing over the cheese plate. From a pocket in his over-robe, he drew out a handful of wilting plants and put them on the table. “These fell out of your clothes. This”—he tapped a leafy stem topped with a small lilac flower—”I believe is thyme. I don’t recognize the others.”

Though he pretended not to see the plants he’d stolen over the past two days, Briar reddened. “What’s a pity?”

“Magic Circle Temple has the finest gardens—and gardeners—north of the Pebbled Sea. People who know more than I about plants from all over the world.” Niko cut some fish for himself, put it in his mouth, and chewed it carefully, without looking at his companion. When he’d swallowed, he added, “It’s also one of the two great schools of magic north of the Pebbled Sea. I studied at Lightsbridge, the university for mages, but in some ways I find the mages at Winding Circle more … open-minded.”