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“If we’re far enough out of the city by then, maybe it won’t matter.”
He nodded. “Something else worries me.”
She responded with a laugh that was more frustration than mirth. “I can’t decide if I should be vexed or grateful that you are looking ahead to perceive so many obstacles,” she said. “What concerns you now?”
“Your bracelet.”
She freed her left hand from the folds of the blanket and held her arm so that the filigree glinted in the surly moonlight. “Ah. It identifies me.”
“Even the guards who won’t recognizeyouwill be told what your bracelet looks like. I don’t have the tools to saw through it.”
“This time,Iam the one who has been thinking ahead,” she murmured, lifting her other hand. She touched the bracelet—and snapped it open.
Brandon gasped. “I thought they were always welded on,” he said. “Mine are.”
“They’re supposed to be,” she said. “A year or two before I was imprisoned, I had a friend who was a jeweler. Even then it had occurred to me that I might—sometime—want to leave this identity behind. He cut it from my body and remade it with a hidden clasp. No one else has ever known about it.”
“That’s exceptionally useful,” Brandon said. “Of course, if we’re stopped, and you’re not wearing any bracelet on your left hand—”
She fastened the band around her wrist again, and he heard the small click as it locked in place. “Oh, but I was still thinking ahead,” she said gaily. “He made me a second bracelet, just a plain band, the kind that would be worn by any ordinary laborer.”
Brandon drew back to study her face. As if he didn’t already know it by heart. It hardly even mattered that there wasn’t enough moonlight to make it out clearly. “Though you look nothing like any laborer I’ve ever seen. And your clothes—I don’t suppose you laid in some plain gowns or trousers while you were plotting?”
“I did! I bought two new dresses for my maid and told her I’d dispose of her old ones, but I kept them in the bottom of a drawer.”
“That was clever.”
“So that’s another problem taken care of. Anything else?”
“Your face and your hair mark you as Cordelano,” he said. “You’re dark enough that I don’t think there’s much you can do to alter your appearance. But maybe if you don’t have the bracelet, they won’t realize it’s you.”
She sighed and leaned her cheek against his jacket, tucking her hands back under the blanket.
“And if they catch up with us, and recognize me, and take us into custody?” she whispered. “What happens then?”
He was pretty sure she could hear the sudden acceleration of his heart. “I suppose they bring you back here and your incarceration begins again.”
“I know what happens tome,”she said. “I was inquiring afteryou.”
He was silent a moment. “I don’t know what happens to temple guards who try to help prisoners escape,” he lied. “I think it’s likely I might be incarcerated myself, at least for a time.”
She lifted her head again, and her dark eyes were liquid with apprehension. “They wouldn’t—they wouldn’thurtyou, would they?”
He imagined hangingdidhurt, but only for a short time. “I don’t think so. I’ve never heard stories like that.”
She kept her eyes on his face, as if she wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. “I wouldn’t want any harm to come to you,” she said, “not because of me.”
He kissed her, then drew her head back against his chest. “Neither of us will come to harm,” he said. “Because we won’t get caught.”
During his afternoons off, Brandon went exploring. The closest bridge was the northern span, but it also had the most drawbacks, in his estimation. First, it was the logical place the temple guards would look for them. Second, it was the narrowest of the three main bridges, so on days when traffic was heavy, travelers might line up for more than an hour before they were able to cross.
Third, it had one foot in the elite neighborhood of the city, where there were no affordable housing options nearby. It would take Brandon and Villette longer to get to the next nearest bridge, but that one was so close to the warehouse district that cheap lodgings were plentiful—and it was so wide that it permitted hundreds of travelers to cross every hour.
So Brandon spent a few days prowling through the working-class neighborhood, looking for just the right kind of accommodations. He wanted a building that was large enough to suggest the neighbors didn’t all know each other, shabby enough to indicate that no one was keeping close track of the property, but decent enough that Villette wouldn’t be alarmed.
Fortunately, that description applied to a lot of the buildings in this part of town, so Brandon added a fourth qualification: close enough to the bridge to allow them to cover the distance quickly. Finally, one afternoon, he came across the perfect spot, a long, three-story complex bare of any ornamentation, with all its windows intact but all of its doors in need of paint. When he sought out the landlady, she led him to a cramped and dingy set of rooms while he grumbled about the trouble he was having getting out of his current lease.
“I keep arguing with my brother, because he doesn’t want me to leave, so I think it will be a week or two before I have all my things transferred,” he said. “But I want to have my new place ready so I can just pick up andgo,you know? I’m tired of the quarreling.”
