He walked at random for a while, let the flow of humanity through the Palace Quarter carry and soothe him. Women in brightly colored wrapping, like toffees too numerous to choose from, and the heady slap of perfume across the eyes as they passed. Slaves and retainers in the livery of this or that courtier s service, bent beneath upholstered saddles piled five feet high with burden, or the lucky ones bearing some lettered and sealed communication from one lordly house to another. A noble trailing an entourage in his wake like noisy gulls at the stern of a fishing skiff. Here and there the odd brace of City Guard, sun smashed too bright to look at across their cuirasses. Beggars and street poets not dirty, deformed, or disruptive enough to be worth the effort of moving on.

Faint, twining scents of fruit and flowers from a market somewhere close. The broken rhythms of the sellers, crying their wares.

Heat like a blanket. Street dust stirring beneath the tramp of feet.

Egar drifted on it all like a swimmer with the current nursing for a while the still-sharp, piercing pleasure of just being here, of having come back to this place he never thought he d see again. But in the end, it was no good. His eyes tracked inevitably up and west, to the stately, tree-shaded white mansions along Harbor Hill Rise. To one particular mansion, in fact, with the mosaic dome cupola at its southern end, where right now probably

Come on, Dragonbane. Really. Leave it alone.

Too late. His gaze stuck on the cupola s polished wink and gleam like a blade in a frost-chilled scabbard. He felt his mood sour. Felt the unreasoning anger flare, the way it always did. right now probably, sucking him off in that big bed

Grow up, Eg. You knew you d have to live with this. Besides a sly, steppe nomad wit intruding, relic of a man he sometimes wondered if he still was it s way too close to prayer time for that sort of thing. He s a pious little fucker, remember. She told you as much.