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People create patterns, too, and by becoming Destrin’s journeyman, my presence was changing the patterns in Fenard. How much the order I had added changed things…who could tell?

Before I rode Gairloch out to the mill to check the available black oak for the sub-prefect’s chairs, I made sure to cross the market square, stopping to buy a biscuit, nodding to the few people I recognized or thought I recognized, and listening, always listening.

The high clouds were hazy and gray, yet the day was humid, almost steamy, and sweat dripped from my forehead. The late and short spring was turning to summer.

The market looked the same as always, a scattering of small stalls, carts, and merchandise strewn across the open expanse of granite, all of it able to be moved at day’s end when the sweepers pushed through their brooms and refuse carts and the open space returned to a cavernous granite-walled emptiness.

The prefect was bright, or his advisers were. Half a silver a day was what it cost to use the market if you had a stall, a penny if you could carry your wares on your back. For that you got guards posted at each street departing the plaza and guards who patrolled in leather vests with clubs. You also got some guards who looked like merchants and hangers-on. If you couldn’t fit your goods in a single stall, you had to find a permanent store or sell to someone who had one.

A fair trade, all in all. Sellers got a place relatively free from theft and graft. The prefect got revenue and information, particularly since his open market was one of the few in Eastern Candar exempt from major corruption. Reputedly the autarch’s markets were better, but the prefect’s border posts supposedly confiscated anything coming from the south without the prefect’s authorization.

I hesitated as I neared the fountain.

“…did you see the golden coach?”

“…came through the west gate, as if it had come from below the Westhorns…”

The second speaker was Mathilde, the plump blond flower lady whose flowers seldom lasted more than two days. People with chaos in their blood should never handle living things, yet they seem to enjoy plants and pets and delight in gossip. She bulged out of a long tunic and stretched the seams of her faded purple trousers. Unwashed and gnarled toes protruded from her battered sandals.

“Probably some retainer of the prefect’s,” I offered gratuitously.

“It couldn’t have been. There were two armed guards and a blood-red banner on the coach staff. The prefect doesn’t allow mounted armed guards inside the city gates, saving his own.”

“Maybe they forgot…”

“Young fellow, are you trying to provoke me?”

I grinned at the flower seller. “Just trying to be charitable to the poor guards that had to chase their boss across the countryside.”

“Poor guards, my trousers! That coach was worth a fortune, and the geldings that carried those guards were a matched pair. And I saw a veiled woman in that coach, the kind they sell in Hamor only to the wealthiest of landowners. Not only that, but the coach was of wood and leather, without a scrap of iron…”

I shrugged. “Some chaos-wizard, then, on his way to help the new Duke of Freetown. That’s where everyone is headed to make their fortune. He just stopped to pay his respects to the prefect.”

“Wrong again!” cackled Mathilde. “The coach is stabled at the prefect’s palace.”

“Why does the prefect need a chaos-wizard?” asked the peddler, as she unpacked and placed her crooked pots on the ledge by the dry fountain that had not worked since before I came to Fenard.

“The rumor is Kyphrien…” hissed Mathilde.

Kyphrien? I almost stopped then and there. Instead I looked at a particularly crooked pot, so ugly I could never have been tempted to buy it. “Kyphrien? The autarch?”

“Why not?” asked Mathilde. “The prefect and the autarch aren’t friends.”

I nodded and put down the pot, well-aware that the ragged man edging up to look at the other pots on the lower step of the fountain was some sort of spy for the prefect, and a chaos-tainted