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from him if she were moving instead of digging in her heels. That might have been a more appealing proposition if she’d been able to recognize her surroundings, but she couldn’t. Perhaps the man knew something she didn’t about trouble in places she hadn’t considered.
    Or perhaps he was merely hurrying to meet someone else who might want to hurry her back to the Guild.
    She considered her escape until she found herself suddenly handed off to none other than the finely dressed gentleman who had blocked her view of her parents. The guard melted into what she realized with alarm had become deep shadows. Her hour had come and gone—and she was so far out of any part of town she recognized, it would likely take her hours to find her way back to the Guild.
    “Come along now, lass,” the man said pleasantly. “No making a fuss. Wouldn’t want to draw any attention to ourselves, now, would we?”
    Aisling felt as if she were dreaming. She would have pinched herself, but her arm was already throbbing from where the guard had been holding on to her. She trotted along with the fop, because whilst he was speaking kindly, he was as insistent in his own way as both Euan and the guardsman had been in theirs.
    She hurried with him along streets, past pubs and music halls, until she realized that her escort had come to a gentle but inexorable halt.
    And she was looking at none other than the weaving mistress herself.
    Aisling blinked. “Mistress Muinear, what are you—”
    The old woman looked behind Aisling’s shoulder, then swore. “She’s cannier than I gave her credit for being, damn her.” She looked at Aisling. “You’ll have to run.”
    Aisling looked over her shoulder as well to see what she would have to be running from. To her horror—as if things weren’t bad enough as they were—there strode the Guildmistress herself, bearing down on her, her expression hard and her stride full of fury.
    Aisling almost went down to her knees then because she knew she was doomed. Another seven years of her life spent in a grey, soulless, freezing hall listening to the endless clack of looms—
    “I’ll see to them,” the weaving mistress said. She shoved something into Aisling’s hand. “You go through the border.”
    Aisling looked at her and blinked. “What?”
    Mistress Muinear took her by the arms with surprising strength and shook her. “I do not matter,” she said, her normally watery blue eyes bright and fierce. “Get yourself across the border, gel, then go do what must be done.”
    “But—”
    The old woman embraced her briefly, then turned her around and pushed her. “Go, whilst there is still time.”
    Aisling stumbled forward, then found herself swept up ina press of men who seemed to be in a great deal of haste. She looked over her shoulder and could see through the crowd that Guild guards had surrounded the weaving mistress—
    “You’re Quinn?” asked a voice in front of her flatly.
    Aisling looked at the border guard who had taken her license. His expression of absolute boredom was visible thanks to the excessive and unpleasant amount of torchlight. She supposed that light allowed the guards to identify miscreants more easily, but to her it seemed garish and harsh.
    “Quinn’s wife,” Aisling lied, her mouth very dry. “On his business.”
    “Do you have anything to prove that?” He shoved the license back at her and waited.
    Aisling looked down at her hands and realized that what she was clutching in one of them were coins Mistress Muinear had given her. She slipped a pair of gold sovereigns into the crease of the trader’s license, and handed it back to the guard. Her hands were trembling so badly he had to snatch it before she dropped it. He slid the gold—she could see it glinting warmly in the torchlight—into his sleeve, then back down into his glove with the practiced ease of a man who had done the like a time or two before. He handed her the license.
    “Go on.”
    She went,