Morning settled over Runewick the way ash settles after a forge fire: slow, warm, a little suffocating.

  The heat from Temple Hill drifted down the narrow lanes in shimmering veils, bringing with it the smell of its inhabitants. Salt from the river barges, the sharp bite of tannin from the hides drying in Tanners' Row, and underneath it all the faint sweetness of fruit that had ripened one day too long.

  Yara kept her hood low and her hands hidden as she walked through the noisy market. To go unnoticed, she blended into the tired crowd, moving like someone following a daily routine. Crowds were safest when everyone had something to lose.

  Vendors shouted over one another, their voices rising and falling like hammer blows. Fishmongers lied about the tide, claiming morning catches when the nets hadn't seen water since yesterday. A glassblower's apprentice dumped cooling shards into the gutter; they hissed when they hit the runoff from the tanners and filled the air with the scent of wet sand. Someone was laughing. Someone else was already haggling over the price of onions. It was all wonderfully, stubbornly ordinary.

  She paused at a baker's stall where the boy behind the counter had dozed off, cheek pressed to his arm. The bread in front of him was yesterday's batch, hard enough to use as a weapon, but still food. When a wagon rattled past, shaking the awning, her sleeve brushed the tray, and the loaf vanished into it.

  She didn't hurry. No one hurried without a reason. She kept her hood low. The small horns curving from her temples drew attention, and attention meant questions.

  Her path bent toward Cooper's Row, a lane that smelled faintly of soap and boiled linen. She slowed there out of habit. The laundry shop on the corner still stood the same blue-tiled door, the same cracked sign, but its shutters were drawn tight against the morning heat. A faint plume of steam curled from the roof vent; someone was working inside, just not open yet.

  Yara paused, recalling the clatter of buckets and the comfort of routine—the straightforward trade of sweat for soup. "Do the work, get paid," she murmured. These weren't nostalgic words but instructions, as necessary as breath. Shops would open again tomorrow or the next day; somewhere always did. She just had to find a spot before someone else did.

  The thought steadied her. She adjusted her hood and moved on.

  The stones of Coal Quay glistened with tar where river barges leaked their loads. Gulls squabbled overhead, wings flashing as they caught what light pierced the haze. Men bellowed orders from the docks; the clang of chains rang off warehouse walls. The air was thick enough to chew, and she could taste iron from the forges above.

  Yara bit into the stolen loaf. It was coarse and dry, but the salt on her tongue reminded her she was still earning, still working the rules she understood. She passed a group of guards near the weighhouse, their armor dulled by heat and indifference. They didn't glance her way. Why would they? She was another nobody with callused hands and no trouble worth starting.

  The road bent upward at Market Stair, the long climb that stitched the lower wards to the hill. Each terrace was its own world: smiths on the first, tinkers and chandlers on the next, the cloth merchants above them. She knew the rhythm of the climb, the shift of smell from brine to copper, the way the air thinned but never cooled. She counted the steps without meaning to, measuring the distance between hunger and sleep.

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  At the landing, she stopped beside a dry fountain. The marble basin was streaked with moss; a handful of copper coins lay in the dust at the bottom. She tore off another bite of bread and chewed slowly, watching the market below wake fully. Bells from the docks rang in the wrong key, but no one noticed. The sound folded into the day's heartbeat.

  A small shape appeared at the edge of her vision—a girl, maybe six or seven, with tangled hair and a dress that had been patched more than once. She clutched something brown and wriggling against her chest. A puppy, Yara realized. Scrawny thing, all paws and ribs.

  The girl stopped a few feet away, eyes flicking between Yara and the bread. She didn't say anything. Didn't need to.

  Yara looked at the loaf in her hands. Half of it left. Her stomach was still tight with hunger, the kind that would come back before nightfall. She could eat it all now, make it last longer in her belly, or—

  She broke the bread roughly in half and held out the larger piece.

  The girl's eyes went wide. She darted forward, snatched the bread, and clutched it against the puppy. "Thank you," she whispered, the words tumbling out fast and uncertain, like she wasn't sure if speaking would break the spell.

  "The puppy too?" Yara asked, nodding at the wriggling creature.

  The girl nodded seriously. "He's hungry."

  "Then make sure he gets some."

  The girl crouched right there on the stones, tore off a corner of bread, and held it out. The puppy attacked it with tiny, savage enthusiasm, tail whipping back and forth. The girl giggled—a sound like bells, bright and unguarded.

  Yara felt something in her chest tighten and release. She turned back to the market below, chewing the remainder of her breakfast.

  The morning heat made her hood stifling. She pushed it back for a moment, let the air touch her face. Her small, curved horns, barely longer than her thumbs, caught the light. Her skin held the dusky orange-red of old clay.

  "Pretty," the girl said quietly.

  Yara glanced down. The girl was looking at her horns without fear, without the usual flicker of unease that came before people looked away. Just a child's curiosity, simple and honest.

  "They're just horns," Yara said.

  "They catch the light." The girl smiled around a mouthful of bread. "Like the coins in the fountain."

  Yara almost smiled back. Almost. Instead, she pulled her hood up again and stood. The girl was already distracted, breaking off another piece for the puppy, both of them absorbed in their small feast.

  She pushed away from the fountain. The bread felt heavy in her stomach, the good kind of heavy, even if there was less of it than she'd planned. Roof, water, sleep—that was enough. Tomorrow she'd find new work, or at least someone willing to pay for quiet hands.

  The air thickened suddenly, heat pressing down harder. She thought at first another forge had opened its vents, but the sound that followed wasn't the roar of bellows. It was lower, an undercurrent running through the stone. A hum, faint at first, then rising.

  The jars on a potter's cart rattled in time with it. People stopped talking. Heads turned toward the hill.

  The hum climbed until it became vibration, until every rib in her body felt tuned to it. The guard at the corner shouted something—she couldn't hear what. Someone dropped a basket; apples rolled across the stones. The sky seemed to tighten, a breath held too long.

  Then the world ruptured.

  Light struck from the direction of the upper wards, pure and white, so bright it swallowed color. The blast came a heartbeat later—a shove that lifted her off her feet and threw her into the wall behind the fountain. Heat and dust slammed through the square. The sound was everything at once: thunder, screaming metal, the ocean inside a shell.

  She curled instinctively, arms over her head. The air burned in her lungs. For a moment, she saw coins spinning above her, catching the light as they fell, and thought stupidly that they looked like birds.

  Then everything went black.

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