Frasalu had expected that working under the Witch-Queen would be a more challenging job. The challenge would have been worth it, of course; not only because Shirrin had saved her life, but because the twin benefits of regur pay and a home to go back to were worth it. But in actuality, once they had finished giving Bellerophon that letter, it seemed that Shirrin hardly cared about what Frasalu and her gang were doing at all.

  That wasn’t actually true. At any given time, about a quarter of the gang was taking their shift working as Shirrin’s personal staff, doing her undry and cleaning her chambers and other such physical tasks that you’d normally get a sve to do. The rest, meanwhile, were under standing orders to seek out any rumors about goings-on in the city, reporting them back to Shirrin at a weekly meeting. But that really was the end of it. Find information, keep a finger on the pulse of the city, and report back every so often; even the most free-wheeling of spies was kept under a tighter leash. In the end, Frasalu and the rest defaulted to doing what they had been doing before Shirrin entered their lives at all, just with more attractive bodies and substantially more spending cash.

  It was a whirlwind experience. During the day Frasalu would swindle everyone she came across, pretending to be a perfume-cd streetwalker for just long enough to bash the unsuspecting client over the head and rob him for everything he had, then rushing off to another part of the city to distract shopkeepers long enough that they failed to realize she’d paid for forty silver’s worth of goods with only twenty silvers worth of gold. When the sun set, she spent coin with wild abandon, throwing herself into piles of men and women and wine and exotic luxuries until Sothvam was forced to drag her back to the hideout to recover. It was living like she had infinite money and no tomorrow to save it for. Considering that Frasalu had been feeling a growing sensation of impending doom ever since she finished making the deal with Bellerophon, it wasn’t even clear to her that she was acting incorrectly.

  Then came the day where all those premonitions finally started to come true.

  There was a neighborhood out in the western part of the city, where the air was always full of dust coming off the trade caravans, where water was hard to find and regutions stuffed together all of the tanneries and fertilizer warehouses, where all the Trabakondai lived. More Trabakondai lived in Chrysopolis than you might expect. Many of them were former sves, or the descendants of former sves; others were dispced, those whose farms had been given away to Macarian soldiers, and who had eventually found that Chrysopolis was the only pce with enough work. The people who lived there were, with the exception of those who knew a craft or could work as prostitutes, poorer than peasants. But it was a beautiful neighborhood nonetheless.

  Frasalu had gotten tired of constantly mingling with Macarians, and retired there to drink good Trabakondai beer and sing Trabakondai songs and dance with gorgeous Trabakondai girls. She didn’t look Trabakondai anymore; being attractive in Chrysopolis meant looking Macarian, so that was what Shirrin had made her. Of course, she could still speak the nguage without an accent, and she preferred the taste of beer and mead to wine, so while her appearance earned her a few nasty looks, pretty much everybody assumed she was the issue of a Macarian man and a Trabakondai prostitute and let her be.

  Another thing that had remained from the old Frasalu was her instincts, and it was those instincts that saved her. Even with a hungry stomach and a pounding hangover, the sound of violence still caused Frasalu to awaken instantly. She extricated herself from the orgiastic pile, threw on what she was fairly sure were her clothes, then rushed to the main room of the inn and, thinking quickly, broke off a chair leg to use as a baton in concert with her dagger. Then she rushed outside to see what was going on; immediately, her mind turned to panic.

  There were maybe twenty of them. Macarian, clearly, going by both phenotype and the fact that they were yelling in Macarian in the Trabakondai neighborhood. Most of them looked to be fairly typical members of the mercantile csses, with the exception of the man in the lead, whose tunic had strips of red sewn into it in a way that suggested great wealth. None of them were armed with anything worse than a dagger or cudgel, much the same as she was; unfortunately, that scarcely mattered. They were angry, ready to sh out. Half a dozen Trabakondai had arrived to present a united front, while others, the young and the old, hid in alleyways and prepared to throw rocks.

  “You think just because your Queen’s here, just because her honeyed words are in our Emperor’s ear, that you own us?” said Mr Red Tunic.

  “She’s not our damned Queen!” said one of the Trabakondai. “My family’s lived in Macaria since my grandfather’s time!”

  “We pay tax to the Emperor, same as you! You don’t get to come in here and throw your weight around just because—”

  “And you don’t get to throw your weight around just because the Emperor decided to show you boy-fucking barbarians an ounce of mercy! You’re lucky I don’t come back here with a— what’s she doing here?”

  Immediately, Mr. Red Tunic’s attention turned to Frasalu. He shoved past the men in front of him, the rest of the mob trailing behind him like kittens behind their mother, eyes wide with disbelief and horror.

  “Are they holding you here? What did you do, did you wander away from home, have those bastards been using you?”

  Frasalu took a fearful step back before catching herself. Being mistaken for Macarian had never hurt her more than in that moment. Her hands clenched around her two chosen weapons, and considering she had just been accused of being a sex sve she wondered if she would be justified in bashing the man’s head in. A gnce around at the street, the youths and elders and the scared revelers still emerging from theinn, reminded her of why that was a bad idea.

  Instead, Frasalu let her Trabakondai accent become as thick as she could make it before she brandished the knife at the man and said, “You ask me what I’m doing here, you shit-eater? What do you think you’re doing here?”

  The man muttered a slur under his breath. “Think they can do whatever they want.”

  “What, because I don’t like it when people come into my neighborhood”—that was a lie, but it didn’t feel like one—“and start acting like we committed a crime just by being here”

  Mr. Red Tunic gnced at the chair leg in Frasalu’s hand. “Are you threatening me?”

  Frasalu cooled immediately. A rich man coming around to beat Trabakondai in their own neighborhood was one thing; a rich man credibly telling the city guard that he’d been threatened by a foreigner was entirely different.

  “Everyone around here saw that I didn’t. And you’re throwing around accusations that we, what, corrupted your Emperor? Do any of these people here look like they’ve ever spoken to the Emperor?”

  “Maybe not most of them,” one of the other men muttered, “but she certainly looks like she’d draw the Emperor’s eye.”

  There was a round of chuckling. Frasalu redirected her rage at the comment away from these men and towards the one whose magic spell had made her this way. Not that she could punch either one.

  “I’m not throwing around accusations,” said Mr. Red Tunic, silencing his followers. “We all know the sorts of things that your Witch-Queen has been whispering into the Emperor’s ear, and we won’t stand for it any longer.”

  More and more of the inhabitants of the Trabakondai neighborhood had started coming out, some bewildered and merely seeking the source of the commotion and others seemingly ready for blood. They were roughly even in numbers with the intruders now, and the odds were only going to get worse the more time passed.

  “Come on, let’s leave,” said Mr. Red Tunic. “I thought these barbarians might be willing to apologize, but it seems we have no choice but to get a bit more forceful. We’ll be back.”

  It was an affair of a great deal of shoving and angry words as the Macarians retreated to whatever dank, stinking, xenophobic hole they had crawled out of. It was a minor miracle nobody got trampled, and that no fights started, but the Trabakondai were mostly happy to have them gone. Frasalu, experienced as she was with leadership, took it upon herself to make sure everything was alright, conscripting the most fit-looking passersby to help clean up the one shopfront that the thugs had damaged in their outburst. Nobody was injured, but Frasalu had the feeling that wasn’t going to stay true for long.

  “Is this sort of thing normal?” she asked one of the men. He was bearded and calloused, middle-aged but far from senescent.

  He shook his head. “Drunks occasionally come by and start something, or jealous wives who think their husbands have been seduced by our whores, but never like that. Something’s changed.”

  “Shit-eaters,” Frasalu muttered.

  Something was going wrong, and she needed to find out what. The first step was to find the others. It was a quick carriage ride back to the busy commercial district where most of the gang went about their business. The hideout–the new one, not the one that had gotten found out–was somewhere none of the carriage drivers would go, but that just gave Frasalu more time to work her magic on the walk over.

  Shirrin had made Frasalu look passing for a reason, after all. A beautiful woman with no accent could insert herself into all sorts of conversations without resistance. Once she did that, it became very clear indeed that the Trabakondai were a major topic of discussion in Chrysopolis that day, and the tone was not positive. Shop-stall-owners rambled about the poor, misled Emperor while they sold dried fish and gss bottles to their customers, youths made crass jokes about the Witch-Queen to one another as they rexed in the shade, rich couples debated the best solution to the Trabakondai problem as they hopped between the richest storefronts. Frasalu did her best to investigate, carefully approaching those who looked least busy and asking what all the fuss was about. She couldn’t quite bring herself to convincingly portray the abject disgust that would be more appropriate for her disguise, but a sort of innocent concern did wonders.

  And yet, Frasalu could find no source for the sudden turn in the public attitude. That it had something to do with the Emperor was of no doubt; his supposed corruption at the hands of the Witch-Queen was the greatest sin id at the feet of the Trabakondai popution, though far from the only one. It was possible that this was all just a deyed reaction to his outburst during Lone Torch, but that rang false. For the situation to escate so suddenly, she knew, it couldn’t just be a gradual buildup of anger; there had to be some inciting incident. Usually that was a rumor, some crime that could, accurately or not, be pinned on a member of the minority. But, again, none of the talks Frasalu was able to have backed that up in the slightest; the only crime that most could name was Peleus’s corruption, and even that was spoken of in vague terms.

  When she arrived at the hideout, a fugue of tension hung over Frasalu’s shoulders. She was frightened, partly for herself and partly for her people, and with no obvious foe to fight, that fear turned inwards, gnawing at her guts like some wretched scavenger. She leaned her back against a mud-brick wall, well out of the sun, and waited for whichever member of the gang was the first to show up.

  It was a solid chunk of the day, from early morning until the scant warmth of the wintery afternoon, before anybody did. Not that Frasalu spent the entire time unbothered; several passers-by decided it was their duty to harass her. Frasalu always deflected them with the same story, that her lover had told her to meet him here, and that was usually heart-warming enough to get them to go away. It was an immense relief when the test wave of botherers came by, and she realized that said botherers were in fact Sothvam and two other members of the gang, the boy Komshirn and the broad-chested street fighter Magrell. They went down the alleyway all with a purpose… and handfuls of fresh meat pies.

  “You brought food?” Frasalu said.

  Komshirn shrugged. “Just because the city’s all up in arms doesn’t mean we don’t get hungry.”

  Frasalu chuckled. “Give me one. Now. I’ve been waiting all day for you fuckers.”

  Sothvam tossed her one, and she devoured it so quickly that it burned her tongue. “I’m guessing that means you’ve heard the talk of the town today. Where did this all come from?”

  “It’s the church,” Sothvam said grimly. “The Patriarch’s morning sermon at the temple of The Golden Lord was about Peleus, and how his ‘corruption’ by the Witch-Queen is ‘destroying Macaria’s purity’.”

  Frasalu gritted her teeth. “Why am I not surprised...”

  “Not like there’s anything we can do about it,” said Magrell, rolling his shoulders. “It was always going to happen, the Macarians were going to notice that us Trabakondai aren’t afraid and starving any longer and decide it was up to them to change that.”

  “If we start moving now, we might be able to get prepared before things get serious,” Sothvam said. “Buy passage out for the people who can afford it and can’t stay, and then start putting people together. Set up night patrols, find or buy or steal weapons, be ready for violence.”

  “I like the way you think,” Magrell said, baring his teeth.

  “You’re welcome to try,” Frasalu said. “And maybe we’ll bloody their noses enough to make them think twice. But they have more people and more weapons. And that’s assuming the Emperor or the Senate don’t get involved.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely,” Sothvam said. “Too dirty for the rich, and with not enough benefit. They like having our bor around.”

  Komshirn smirked. “Well, it’s not like they’re going to throw their weight behind us. Everybody already thinks Shirrin’s corrupting them as it is.”

  And that gave Frasalu an idea. It was an idea that rankled severely, her pride bucking against it like a wild horse. But pride meant nothing if it meant leaving one’s acquaintances and countrymen to be torn apart by a mob, so although it made her feel like she’d swallowed something awful, Frasalu prepared herself for it.

  “You can go do that if you like,” she said to Sothvam. “But I have a different idea. I think Shirrin needs to know about this.”

  “How do you know she doesn’t?” said Magrell.

  “Because I would like to believe that the former Queen of Far Trabakond would not abandon her own people to the mob so easily,” Frasalu replied. “She’s a witch, besides! There has to be something she can do about this before people get killed!”

  “Right, right. I’ll go with you to the pace,” he said, stepping to Frasalu’s side, “that part of the city might be dangerous.”

  “Komshirn and I will wait here,” Sothvam said. “We need to get the word out to the others if we’re going to be able to organize faster than the Macarians can.”

  “Alright. I’ll meet you back here. And by the grace of the gods, it’ll be with safety for our people.”

  SaffronDragon