By then she had vanished utterly, and the crowd was swirling and changing like the water under the bow of a boat. Barnoch had been led forth, screaming at the sun. I took a miner by the shoulder and shouted a question to him, but he had paid no attention to the young woman beside him and had no notion of where she might have gone. I followed the throng who followed the prisoner until I was sure she was not among them, then, knowing nothing better to do, began to search the fair, peering into tents and booths, and making inquiries of the farmwives who had come to sell their fragrant cardamom-bread, and of the hot-meat vendors. All this, as I write it, slowly convoluting a thread of the vermilion ink of the House Absolute, sounds calm and even methodical. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was gasping and sweating as I did these things, shouting questions to which I hardly stayed for an answer. Like a face seen in dream, Agia’s floated before my imagination: wide, flat cheeks and softly rounded chin, freckled, sun-browned skin and long, laughing, mocking eyes. Why she had come, I could not imagine; I only knew she had, and that my glimpse of her had reawakened the anguish of my memory of her scream.

“Have you seen a woman so tall, with chestnut hair?” I repeated it again and again, like the duelist who had called out “Cadroe of Seventeen Stones,” until the phrase was as meaningless as the song of the cicada.

“Yes. Every country maid who comes here.”

“Do you know her name?”

“A woman? Certainly I can get you a woman.”

“Where did you lose her?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll soon find her again. The fair’s not big enough for anybody to stay lost long. Didn’t the two of you arrange a place to meet? Have some of my tea — you look so tired.”

I fumbled for a coin.

“You don’t have to pay, I sell enough as it is. Well, if you insist. It’s only an aes. Here.”