Patches opened the oven and pulled out a bread pan with a huge spatula. Heat washed over my face, and I could see the play of minor flames among the coals.

"Flower girl?"

"Lady of the night." He met my blank stare. "Mistress for Hire."

No one in Euphoria would be assigned that career path by a diagram, but I was able to work out what he meant. My face got even hotter, and I stood up. "I'm not doing that."

I'd learned how to speak Gracian along with Kantonese at an early age. It was a straightforward tongue, and I'd had the opportunity to practice over the years, but there were some phrases that had simply not been a part of my curriculum. A woman who sold herself in Euphoria would be considered degenerate, and subjected to corrective education. It just wasn't done.

Patches shrugged, so I made to leave the kitchen, but my way was blocked by the massive shape of the Baker.

"There you are," his manner was relaxed, but his size lent menace to his simple presence. "Juno, right?"

"Yes," I said, he was blocking the entire door. "Thank you for seeing me, but I actually have a place to stay."

"Do you? That's effin great." He didn't move out of the way. "Where are you headed? Patches will go with you. No good being on your own in these streets."

"I don't need help," I said. "I can find my way."

"Where was it again?"

Castor's name was on my tongue, but something held me back. I couldn't explain my connection to him. He might not even return from Cloud City for a week or more, especially if he tried to avoid being connected with my disappearance from the palace. If I'd still had that letter, I could have used it, but it had gone the way of my jewelry.

"You're okay here," the Baker loomed closer, eyes dead even as he smiled. "Has Patches been spooking you with his stories? Patches?"

"Guilty." Said the other man, who was busying himself with the oven.

"He was having effin fun with you. Come on and I'll show you your room."

His hand enveloped my shoulder as he pulled me through the shop to the stairs at the back. A floor up, there was a flat with three beds and a dresser. None of them were made, so he directed me to the middle one.

"You can stay here with Marisa. She's like you. You get situated, we'll talk more later." He left me there, and I heard the lock turn after he closed the door.

There was a glass window overlooking the street, but it was jammed shut, and it was too small to climb through anyway. Marisa's things, if they were her things, were a mess. She piled them higgledy piggledy and took no care for wrinkles. There were aprons for working, and linen tunics, but along with them were at least a dozen dresses stuffed into a drawer. Some of those were quite nice, nothing a princess would wear, but certainly deserving of better care than they received. A small jewelry box was open, bits of silver and glass, nothing a fraction of the value of what Sponga had stolen from me.

There was nothing else, no books or scrolls, just a chamber pot in need of cleansing. So my position wasn't ideal.

I sat on the end of the mattress and tried to think about my next move. It came back a blank.

Marisa arrived upstairs about fifteen minutes later. My mind had drifted to daydreams of diagram dialectics, it was a habit and a way to keep calm. One had to study every day to maintain mastery, even if that studying was internal. I heard the lock click and she entered with her dimples on display.

"Hello!" She shut the door and fell back onto her own bed, then turned her head to look at me. "Well, you're exotic."

"I'm Juno." I said.

"I know who you are, I mean you look exotic." Her honey gold hair half covered her face but she acted as if she couldn't feel it.

"Thank you." I wasn't sure where to go from there.

"You're a runaway right? Where'd you runaway from?"

"From my family."

"Family stuff, got it." She winked at me. "I didn't run away, exactly. I'm from Lodoss island, its mostly temples and a brewery. I just wanted to see more of the world, you know, more than fields of hops and the temple bells anyway. All day having to go around bobbing my head to appease the Deep Ones, or whatever, I don't really believe in all that. I've never seen a daemon. I just wanted more, you know. They all looked down all the time, and when you looked up it was the same ocean looking back at you as yesterday." She put her arms straight back behind her head and intertwined her hands, stretching.

"So you came to Kouros?"

"The Big Island." Her smile was real this time, but rueful. "I thought maybe I'd be an actress. There was a troupe that came to Lodoss every summer, and I memorized all their acts. I've got a good head for lines, and I'm pretty enough. I actually have been in a few plays. But it doesn't always work out, so I ended up here, and I work enough to pay for living in the city, and that's about it."

"The Baker, is he..."

"A creep? Maybe a bit, you know. But he's never tried to take it from me. And Patches is sweet, I think he's a little touched though. He loves that oven like it's a woman." She sounded jealous.

"So I'll be alright if I stay here?"

"You got somewhere else to go?"

"No." I said.

"You'll mind the store, like I do, maybe bake a bit. It's not too bad. And I know a few places in the city where you can party." She said the last slyly, turning her face away.

"Party?"

"You know, music and dancing. Some wine. Baker knows a lot of people in the city, and Porus knows his way around too."

I kept my opinions about Porus and his father to myself. "Are there a lot of people at the parties?"

"Sometimes, yeah,. Sometimes it's just a few."

"Anyone from the senate families? Like Livius?"

Marisa sat up and spun herself toward me, planting her sandaled feet on the floor. "You know someone? Did you run away from the Livius manse?"

"No. No, it isn't like that." These parties might be a way for me to send a message to Castor, then I could get out of whatever kind of mess this was.

"Then why did you ask about them?"

"I've heard the name. That's all."

"Oh." She looked genuinely disappointed.

"When do you think you'll go out again?"

"Couple of days. Porus will come around."

Marisa showed me the building, though there wasn't much I hadn't already seen. The Baker owned the whole tenement and rented the floors above us to other tenants that used a back stairway to come and go. The shop had a steady customer base, but they didn't seem to sell that much bread. Most people came in, ordered a specialty roll, and left with it in their pockets. The specialty rolls looked the same as regular ones, but they were kept separately beneath the counter.

"They're sourdough," Marisa told me, but it still seemed odd. Also, I had to learn how to use money properly.

It isn't that I'd never seen coins before, but they had been mostly decorative. Besides, Gracia and Euphoria didn't use the same denominations. In Gracia, they use a "bird", which is the common name for a big silver coin with the mark of an eagle embossed on both sides. Only a bird is worth what most people make in a day, so smaller purchases get made with "feathers" and "beaks", which are really just debased birds. Because the bird is silver, and transactions aren't always done by weight, people shave the coins down and melt the powder to make smaller coins of their own. A beak is worth about half a bird, and a feather is anywhere from a sixth to a tenth. I actually found the whole system fascinating, if inefficient, and to avoid mucking about with exact change customers ran tabs and paid up when the amount reached a whole bird or whatever denomination had been agreed upon. All of the customers who got specialty rolls ran tabs. Occassionally, I saw someone come in to drop off money without buying anything.

We had a scale, and a bowl of feathers to make change.

"The scale is off," I said, pointing to the mechanism.

"Shut up," Marisa said, slapping my hand away.

The Baker lumbered over to us. "A sharp effin eye, Juno." He put his hand on my arm, "Why don't you go to the kitchen."

It was almost evening anyway, and the whole street was closing down. It was darker here than it had ever been in my home. There were no eternal flames dancing in streetlamps, and the stars seemed so much farther away. Clouds made the sky black instead of coming to us as mists, and the window in our room was useless.

Marisa lit a candle while she readied herself for bed, she used a mirror on the dresser for makeup.

"You can borrow anything in here you want," she said. "Clothes, perfumes. "I'd noticed she was partial to a citrus blend. It made my nose tingle. "Most of it was Aubra's anyway. Some of her clothes probably fit you better, you know, she was kind of petite."

"Who's Aubra?"

"Girl that used to be here before you." She was brushing her hair, careful not to meet my eyes in the mirror.

"What happened to her?"

"She left, you know. Maybe found a better place. I think a man might have decided to take care of her and she didn't need her old junk anymore."

"Did something happen?"

"No. She just left." She was lying, I could read it in her face.

My first few days weren't bad. I was better with numbers than Marisa or the Baker was, and after I stopped pointing out the scales were wrong they let me handle the counter. I broached the subject of pay with Marisa and she just shrugged. The Baker kept a ledger with how much we earned while we worked there tallied up beside the costs of keeping us, the room and bread and cheese and the watered wine everyone drank. It was terribly bitter, but apparently the water in the city was so contaminated you had to drink it mixed with alcohol to keep from getting sick. One glance at the figures told me that working for the Baker and living in his extra room broke about even. If I missed days, or wanted to do something else with my life, I'd be going into debt. If I wanted clothes, or different food, or to see a show, then I'd have to come up with the money some other way or get a loan from future earnings.

"Marisa," I asked, "could you leave if you wanted to?"

"Of course, yeah." She took frequent small breaks to smoke outside the store. I didn't know what the leaf must have cost but I was sure it wasn't free.

"But you owe him money, don't you?"

"I don't owe anybody anything!" The harshness in her voice took me by suprise. She was almost in tears, but she threw down her leaf and stamped it out, blinked away the emotion and returned to the same blank smile she always wore.

The street was packed, and I felt as if we were the center of attention, so I tried to smooth over the outburst. "I'm sorry," I said. "It's none of my business."

"It's not, you know." Passers by ignored us, carrying goods or strolling together. It was just my sense of being a princess that was making me paranoid, of always having been known and served, it wasn't like that anymore. I was a nobody. It was hard to decide of this realization should have been a comfort or cause to panic.

A customer arrived, and I had to go back inside. Marisa was trapped here, I was sure of it. She was deeply in debt, and couldn't work her way out. That other girl had run away from the Baker, or else something had happened to her. She wouldn't have just left all her things behind, even if she did find a husband.

Porus came by the shop as it was closing to exchang a few cloth packets with the Baker for the last of the specialty rolls before he stuffed them in his pockets. He was freshly oiled and smelled like smoke. His eyes were red and a little wild.

"There's a party on the beach tonight," he said. "Do you think the girls want to come?"

"I don't need them here," the Baker said.

"Five minutes," Marisa called as she went upstairs to change.

"What about you?" Porus smiled at me in a manner he must have assumed would be inviting.

I didn't want to go anywhere with him, but I did want to see the ocean again, I had barely left the building since I'd been brought there, and I wanted to know what Marisa got up to at these parties. I wasn't going to dress up, but I went to fetch my maid's clothes and bring them with me. Tunics made me feel exposed, and also I hadn't had a bath in ages, the ocean would have to do if there was a spot secluded enough and I could change afterward. More importantly, maybe I could meet someone with a connection to Castor.

Porus must have imagined himself quite the gentleman to have two young women flanking him in the street. He certainly swaggered enough as we took the stairs back down into the narrows and he put the copper rings back in his ears and his nose.

I stood just apart enough to avoid his hand, but Marisa allowed his arm to intertwine with hers. The stalls in the narrows were either closed or entirely packed away. A few were in the process of disassembly as we passed. There wasn't space to live here, and it wasn't safe to leave one's goods behind. It was hard to imagine such a scene in Euphoria, where theft was as unheard of as starvation. The beggars in Kouros were treated like stray animals, they were punished if they pestered citizens for charity, and dispersed if they gathered together. We passed a man who was laying on his side and shivering despite the balmy air. I stopped without thinking.

"What are you doing?" Though I was walking behind him, Porus wasn't about to lose track of me.

"He needs help," I said. Allowing someone to live like this was unthinkable.

"He's an addict," Porus said, "so unless you've got some powder to give him let him be. He'll survive on his own strength or he won't."

Powder? The man's eyes were glassy, and he was looking right through us. He reminded me of my sister. I started to step toward him and Porus was on me with an iron grip.

"Leave him be," he said, pulling me on. There were other people like him that I hadn't seen on our first trip through the narrows. They came to this area to sleep because they would have been chased out of the proper streets.

Porus led us to a secluded cove where a bonfire was already burning on the sand and shadowed forms swayed around it to an unheard rhythm. He introduced us to more sailors like him. Hardly more than children with copper in their faces, they leered at Marisa and me in a way that made me flush scarlet.

It didn't seem like much of a party, but they were passing around a leaf that smelled different than the ones Marisa smoked outside the shop. It had ugly undertones like singed fur and I refused to try it when they offered. More shapes soon appeared on the beach, men and women, a few shaking gourd rattles and stomping their feet. The fire expanded, and suddenly there was drink to be had for all, a barrel of it on a stand. From the conversations around me I gathered this was supposed to be a celebration, though for what I couldn't say. The bad leaf smell was thick in the air and I looked for a quiet place to enter the water.

Marisa was deeply involved with an older man wearing a garnet studded chain, and Porus was preoccupied enough with revelry to allow me to slip away. I found a corner of the beach distant enough from the fire and the crowd to feel secluded, and layed my extra clothes on a flat stone above the water beside my sandals. With a quick glance to be sure no one had followed, I went into the sea with my tunic on.

My entire body goosebumped from the cold, but I needed this, baths are an important part of being civilized, and everyone in Gracia seemed to just layer on perfumes over grime. I crouched neck deep in the black moving waters and scrubbed myself with sand, trying to scour my skin clean of the last few days of work. I kept it up for as long as I could stand before fleeing back to shore, shivering horrendously. I was so overcome that I hadn't thought to check the area again before I started to change out of my clothes.

"Juno, you shouldn't have." Porus was walking toward me with a mean grin splitting his face. "This party isn't for me, but if you insist on giving me a present.."

I had one leg in my trousers, and tried to pull them on so quickly I fell down, the sand rough against my bare skin. Porus grabbed me, his breath stinking of smoke.

"I'm going to break you in," he said.