They were still behind him when he sprinted the length of the parapet, but they had slowed to a walk. There was a sheer drop of fatal length into the courtyard on one side and down to the perimeter road on the other. Another group of the queen’s guardsmen was ahead of the thief, around the corner of the wall. Both groups were confident they would catch the thief between them. The thief could imagine too well what might happen to him if he were captured, and when he reached the corner, he didn’t slow as the guards expected, and he didn’t turn. He stepped onto the edge of the parapet and threw himself off it, into the black night air beyond.

Too late, the guardsmen raced to the edge of the parapet. They lay on their bellies on the wide stones to look down the sheer walls to the pavement of the road. Remembering their specific orders to capture the thief alive, they looked for the broken body in the interlocking shadows cast by the lanterns hung on the palace walls. The shadows made it difficult to see, and it took time to realize that there was no body below.

Finally one guardsman pointed to the rooftops on the far side of the boulevard that surrounded the palace. Stumbling, the thief had gotten to his feet and was crossing a rooftop as quickly as he was able. He dropped to a lower rooftop and was out of sight until they caught a glimpse of him as he dropped from that roof into the alley beyond. Someone in the group of guards swore, partly in frustration, partly in admiration.

“Did you see where he went?” a cold voice asked behind them, and the soldiers pulled themselves to attention as their lieutenant answered, “Into an alley, Your Majesty.”

“Fire your crossbows into it. The guards on the ground should hear where the quarrels fall.”

The queen turned and strode down the wall to a doorway leading back inside. She’d wanted to capture the thief in the palace. Four times in the last year she knew he had moved through one of her strongholds, once leaving a room only moments before she entered and once, she suspected, passing through her own bedchamber while she slept. He’d escaped only by a narrow margin on his last visit, and she knew he wouldn’t escape again. Still, it galled her that he hadn’t been captured within the walls of the palace.

In the alley the thief heard the quarrels clattering down behind him and heard a corresponding shout not far away. He gave up moving quietly and ran as fast as he could through the twisting streets. The drop from the palace wall had been a sickening one, and though he’d rolled, he’d been shaken by the force of the landing. His hands stung, and his shoulders ached. Before the hollow feeling in his chest faded, it was replaced by a stitch in his side as he ran on, sweating in the warm night.

There were so many turns and intersections to the narrow streets that no pursuers could have kept him in sight, or heard his footsteps over the noise they themselves were making, but there seemed to be more soldiers at every corner, and no sooner had the thief dropped out of sight than he was found again. He was breathing heavily when he came to a straight street at last. He turned onto it and sprinted. He could hear dogs barking and thought they were not the city dogs that had been barking since the shouting started but the palace dogs brought out to hunt for him.

The road he ran on came to an abrupt dead end at the town wall. Like the palace, the town’s walls were new, built shortly before the end of the invader’s occupation. They were sheer, rising straight to the walks above, unlike the banked walls of older cities. He had no hope of scrambling up them, but at their base, where the narrow road canted into a ditch that drained heavy winter rains, there was a sewer that ran under the city walls. Halfway through the wall there should have been an iron grate, as there was in the other drainage sewers, but the grate in this one was broken loose. It had been repaired once, several years before, and the thief had spent three long nights filing through the new bars to reopen this private entrance to the city.

The drain was not large. Coming into the city, the evening before, the thief had moved slowly on his hands and the tips of his toes, taking great care not to get his clothes dirty. He’d washed his mucky hands at a public fountain, wiped the tops of his boots, and gone to buy his dinner.

With the palace dogs somewhere behind him, he raced at the walls without slowing and threw himself facedown at the entrance to the tunnel, sliding the first few feet into the sewer on the mud and slime inside. Behind him he could hear people running and dogs barking. When he reached the iron grate lying in the mud halfway along the tunnel, he crawled over it, then turned back to lift it upright. When he heard it scraping the walls, he yanked it harder, hoping that if the dogs pressed against it, their weight would force the grate further into place, not over into the mud again.

After crawling the rest of the way through the sewer, he dragged himself out from under the city wall at the edge of an olive orchard. Dawn was hours away, and with no moon to light the sky, he could barely make out his hand in front of his face, but he didn’t need to see to know where he was. There were olive trees in front of him, planted in orderly rows. If he headed downhill between the rows, he’d reach the river at the bottom of the olive grove. Once in the river, he could pull himself out of the water into one of the trees along its bank. He’d lose the dogs and then could get farther from the city before the dawn revealed him.

The nearest gate through the wall was well away to his right. Pinpricks of light issuing from it were the lanterns of more pursuers. Trusting in his knowledge of the olive grove and the orderliness of the trees, the thief got to his feet and ran. The trees were shifting shadows against the black night as he headed downhill, moving faster and faster, placing his feet carefully in case he landed on a root. Thinking of the river, he had no warning when a shadow appeared directly in front of him and he ran face first into a wall. As he fell heavily to the ground, he was dimly aware that his feet hadn’t hit anything, only his head.

The pain was overwhelming, and he lay on his back while he struggled to see past the lights flashing behind his eyes. He clutched at the sparse grass of the orchard, then rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself to his knees, trying not to be sick. He crawled to a nearby olive tree, following its roots through the hard dirt, and holding it, he got to his feet. The night, which had been dark before, had become impenetrably black. With one arm still around the tree, he waved a hand hesitantly through the darkness until he felt it strike something solid. It was a board, he realized slowly, stretching between the trees. He pushed on it. It was nailed in place. It was just at the height of his head, and a stone wall couldn’t have been more effective.

He was wondering why it was there when he heard someone uphill shout. He managed only a few uneven steps away from the tree, not even certain of his direction, before the first of the dogs reached him. It jumped onto his back, and another dog hit him behind the knees. He was driven back down into the grass, feeling the dry, hard dirt underneath it. He curled into a ball and hoped the dogs’ handlers arrived before the animals chewed him to pieces.

The queen of Attolia waited by the city wall, listening to the triumphant shouts of her men and the barking of the dogs. She was on horseback, and when they brought the thief to her, two guards half carrying him, he had to tilt his head back to look at her. The skin between his eyebrows was split, and a few drops of blood leaked from the tear. The blood from his nose flowed over his lips and down his chin to drop in heavy splashes that mixed with the mud on his house tunic.