Corvo cried the whole way. From the dock on the far western shores of Verarszag to the bay of Bugt, his screams never stopped. Eris could do nothing but hold him and close her eyes. For hours and days and a whole week across the Crater Sea. She waited for the trip to end. She may have even prayed for it, once, late at night, while delirious and sleep-starved.

The sailors gave her contemptful looks, but she and Aletheia mercifully had the passenger compartments to themselves. Eris did not want to imagine what degree of homicide might have been required were the ship not so empty.

The moment they came into port, he finally silenced, and he fell asleep in her arms.

They stepped onto the quay at midday and beheld the island of Skane. It was early summer, but the breeze chilled bare skin. Gloomy moorlands ran for miles up and down the coast, where far inland the still-snowcapped tops of some great mountain range loomed. Bugt was a fishing village, sleepy and poor, exactly as they needed. The few people they saw were fair and light-haired, and they muttered to each other in the harsh tones of an unfamiliar language.

Eris adjusted Corvo in her arms, heaving him upward. He was hardly four months old, yet he seemed big and heavy as a toddler. Her biceps burned endlessly.

“News of our misadventures shall have reached this place by now,” she said. “We must take care with our identities, at least until we have reached—our destination. Under no circumstances are we to reveal our abilities. Magic is rare in Skane.”

Aletheia nodded. “Are we still Cleopatra and Atalanta?”

They stepped onto an unpaved street, walking side-by-side. Eris felt the thrumming of the arcane focus within her pack. She could smell the sweet scent of mana burning behind her, like the oil in a lantern. Its enchantment activated on a whim, glamors concealed their true natures. The spell had been adjusted to reduce their tans and render them both blonde and blue-eyed, to fit in more easily among these northern islanders.

Her magister’s staff had been left behind in Verarszag. It was simply too conspicuous, and she could not carry it while she had Corvo in her arms. But she would have another, someday. When Corvo could walk.

“Do Cleopatra and Atalanta sound like Skanish names to you?” Eris said.

“I don’t know. I don’t speak Skanish.”

A man with a large fish over his shoulder pushed past them. Eris shielded her infant jealously. She turned and watched the man go with a glare.

“Nor need you,” she said through clenched teeth. “Wisdom of the Sages will conceal our accents to natives. We must use it at all times. Until we reach safety, we are Skanish siblings. I have chosen names for us already. I will be Sigyn. You shall be Sannhet. Corvo will be Hrafn.”

“Sannhet?” Aletheia stopped. “That’s a name?”

“I am not certain,” Eris said gravely. “But it will have to do.”

“I would rather be Atalanta.”

“Atalanta is a known alias for a fugitive wanted for the murder of a duke. But you knew that already, Sannhet. Did you not?”

Aletheia sighed. “Of course I did, sister Sigyn.”

“Good. Now there must be an inn somewhere in this—horrific place. How much silver is left?”

“None.”

Now Eris stopped. Her overtired mind struggled to keep up with their conversation. But she looked at the girl.

“None?”

“We spent it all. But you knew that already, Sigyn. Did you not?”

Eris closed her eyes. She had forgotten. Everything since Corvo’s birth blurred together in her memory. Time no longer passed as it had before motherhood. She had not slept since winter. Yes, they had discussed their funds, many times.

They were broke.

Eris felt her nostrils twitch.

“Of course I did, sister Sannhet. It appears I am not myself.”

Aletheia smiled. “Thankfully. I thought—I could find a party, while you stayed here with Co—Hrafn. There must be adventurers in Skane. Then we could earn enough to make it to Hovestad.”

“No.” Eris wasted no time replying. “We cannot do anything of the kind. We must appear normal in the eyes of these people. The risk is too extreme otherwise. We…will have to find more mundane labor.”

“Like what?”

“I do not know. Picking berries, or whatever else women do in this place. Only until we have enough to begin our journey inland.”

“You want to pick berries?”

“I do not want to do anything but sleep. But I will do what I must to survive.”

The girl was still smiling. She had a light in her eyes.

Eris cringed away, frowning. “What?”

“You wouldn’t have said that when we met,” Aletheia said.

Eris wanted to object, but knew she had no credibility to do so. Instead she let her head fall against Corvo’s.

“Much has changed,” she said. “That was many years ago.”

The prospect of menial labor was nearly as painful as her tiredness. But she would do what was necessary. For Corvo’s sake.

In the woods, far away from scrying eyes, their weapons were buried. Aletheia’s bow and sword, and Rook’s as well. Maintaining illusions over such obviously weapon-shaped objects for days or weeks on end was challenging and dangerous, and if emergency came, they would not need blades to defend themselves anyway.

Beneath a large tree, three feet deep, wrapped in cloth. Eris locked an illusion into the arcane focus to better conceal the location, with dirt that appeared undisturbed, while Aletheia used Beacon to ensure that its location would not be lost to them.

That night was spent in the women’s ward of Bugt’s flophouse. It was crowded with refugees from the north, with twenty women and forty young children sharing a space with ten beds.

Eris did not care. She threw out a blanket, brought Corvo tightly against her breast, and slept the night through.

She awoke to a cacophony of voices. Like the atrium at the Tower of Pyrthos or the markets at Katharos. Corvo pawed at her to be fed, but she kept her eyes shut. Another twenty minutes was all she needed. And the cacophony receded, growing quieter and quieter, fading from her ears, until…

A shadow descended over her.

“Are you all right, dear?” said a woman closely.

Eris’ tiredness evaporated. She heard the flophouse again, and it was much quieter. She rolled onto her back.

“What?” she groaned.

“You’ve slept in. Everyone else is up. I was about to leave myself, but—your baby started crying, and you were still asleep. Are you all right?”

She righted herself, scooping Corvo into her arms. He gave her a contemptuous, hungry glare. Without further thought she pulled apart the frontward laces of her gown and let him feast.

For a time yet her mind remained vacant. She had slept beside a bed and used its frame as a backrest. But finally she looked at the woman before her.

Small and slender. Yellow hair, brown eyes. Thirty. Wearing poor clothes. Normal.

“You shouldn’t sleep beside your baby, you know,” she said. “It’s dangerous. That’s what the nurses all say. What if you turned on your side? You could crush him. If you don’t mind my saying.”

Eris wore no expression. “I do not turn,” she said.

The woman paid this hostility no mind. “You’re very beautiful, dear. We surely haven’t met. Is your husband near?”

Their eyes never broke contact.

“My husband is dead,” Eris said.

“I’m sorry. So young to be a widow, and with a baby, too. Me and my boys came in from Starhaldt. I should imagine more will be arriving behind us. My husband is fighting in the siege, so it’s just us. What’s your name?”

She adjusted Corvo in her lap. “Sigyn,” she said. “He is Hrafn.”

“Hrafn? What a pretty name for a boy. Unique, though. I’m Linnea. My boys are Oto, Bjorn, Erik, and Anders, but they’re all outside right now. We slaughtered a sheep this morning so all the women and children could have enough to eat, but I’m afraid it won’t much last past today. And with any more coming in—times is hard. You should have some mutton before it’s all gone, dear. I know how nursing a babe can make you hungry.”

Eris looked around the flophouse. It was a long, floorless, wooden room, and now mostly vacant. Aletheia was nowhere to be seen.

“And what of you, young Hrafn?” the woman continued, “I think there was some berries. Would you like to try some?”

Eris straightened herself. “He does not eat food.”

“No? Surely he’s a year old. That’s well past time to start weaning.”

“He is four months old,” Eris said.

“Four months old? But he must be twenty pounds.”

“You do not need to remind me,” Eris groaned. She did not want this woman’s charity, and she loathed mutton. It was a gristly and revolting meat. But she was starving, so she followed Linnea outside.

She could have been a duchess. Her son would have been fed by wetnurses, while she paraded up and down carpeted hallways in beautiful gowns, fattened to her heart’s content, waited on by a dozen servants. She should have been a duchess. By right she was a duchess, and her son was a duke.

Instead she sat on cold, wet grass, an infant on her lap, propped up by one hand while she fed herself scraps of mutton with her fingers.

She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the flurry of motion around her. The children running and playing. The girls coming and going. The crones blathering and bemoaning.

She tried, but she did not have much success.

“Sigyn,” said Linnea’s voice. “Sigyn. There’s no more meat left, but I asked the baker if he had anything to spare for a young mother, and he gave me this.”

When Eris looked, she saw a small confectionary that reeked of honey. It looked soft and bready and sticky, and Corvo looked up at it with rare silence.

She took it, unthinking, and ate it in two bites. The taste was overwhelmingly sweet and stung her teeth, and she immediately realized she wanted more.

Of course she had no way to understand why this strange woman had offered her such a thing, but instead of asking—as she might have a year prior—she instead said, reluctantly, painfully, “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, dearie. You need all the energy and encouragement you could get. Have you any money?”

Eris shook her head. She was suspicious of generosity at the best of times and remained determined to never become reliant upon it. Unconsciously, not realizing she did it at all until her fingers grew too tight, she pulled Corvo closer against her chest.

“Is there work to be done in this place?” she said.

Linnea laughed and nodded. “Aye, plenty of work now, what with all the people come down. Do you have any training? Know anything of your husband’s trade, or your pa’s? You must have picked up some skill or another in all your time before you became a mother.”

The only response that fit seemed a smug smile. “None at all,” she said quietly. “I never needed a skill, beyond to make men swoon.”

“There’s always work to be found in that line,” Linnea said, and she was serious and dismissive, “but none should stoop to it. Especially not one so young and pretty like you.”

Eris wondered why not, for prostitution would surely be lucrative, and could be made safe and riskless through magic. Degrading, yes, but she was prepared for degradation in order to feed her son. But she would never hear the end of it from Aletheia.

“Why don’t you join me at the laundry by the creek at noon?” Linnea said. “That’s where I’ve been at. I can see to it you get paid, although it won’t be much at first. It’ll be hard, with young Hrafn there clinging to you, but it’s honest work.”

Equal degradation. But still that was preferable to relying upon charity, so Eris nodded, and she agreed. She would be a laundrywoman henceforth.

“Hard” proved an understatement. Eris joined five small, thin women, among them Linnea, at the creek, and she learned what it meant to live without magic. They gathered the clothes of their husbands, their sons, their daughters, and all the busiest people of the village, and keeping them all separate (with no writing or spell), prepared stale urine in small tubs. Buckets brought water from the creek to the tubs, and then they would stand within, trampling on freezing and watered down piss until—who knew.

Eris did as little as she could get away with.

The especially long and heavy garments, such as her own gown or the other women’s dresses, had to be put upon poles hanging by the water and beaten with sticks until “clean,” which was not clean by any magician’s standard. That proved so horrific and exhausting that Eris quit five times before sunset. But always she returned, when she remembered why she was working.

For the whole day’s effort, she received one silver coin.

That night she retuned to bed with so much ache in her arms and legs and feet that she couldn’t stand to stand and find dinner. She fed Corvo and went back to sleep, the whole day blurring into a nothingness that may have never happened to begin with.

This was what normal life was like as a woman—no, a widow. She had grown accustomed to—even fond of—motherhood, but this lifestyle could never be adapted to. Only endured.

Aletheia joined her shortly before she fell asleep. She had a giddy look to behold Eris so miserable. They spoke in whispers:

“Is it true you became a laundrywoman? All day?”

“Who told you that?” Eris groaned.

“Linnea. She thinks you’re best friends now. She said you talked all day.”

“Talked? I did not talk to her at all.”

“She talked to you. Apparently.” Aletheia sat upright.

“And what did you do? Are our coffers refilled?” Eris said.

Now the girl looked as tired as Eris did. “The stablemaster paid me to help him clean.” She hung her head. “I don’t want to stay here for long.”

“Nor do I,” Eris whispered. “But we must grow our funds. I will continue with my work, and—so must you.”

Aletheia sighed and nodded. And like that, Eris fell asleep.

Work the next day was exactly the same and twice as tiring. Thrice Eris set Corvo down and leaned over her tub, ready to scream in exhaustion and frustration. Compared to the others, she was dreadful at this work. Clumsy and inexperienced and slow. She smelled of urine and was sticky everywhere. Her hair was ugly and out of order.

And there was Linnea. Linnea, who she somehow had ignored the first day, was now upon her like a fly. At all hours it was:

“So you twist it around the noose like this, see, dear? And you wring it partway once—just partway, mind you, and hang it up…”

Or,

“My husband’s a brave man. He’ll be all right. Then we’ll all be working...”

And,

“When I had my first, I was low all term, and tired as a kitten from day to night, but with my second I felt as right as I do now—hardly noticed…”

Plus,

“We’re farmers at home. I always worked with the cows as a girl, as a milkmaid, and I was teaching my boys to know how to take care of a cow good and proper-like…”

The amount of laundry was set per day. They could not do less than they had promised they would. And at sunset, while Linnea was still talking and Corvo was crying and Eris was slumped back over the tub, inhaling urine fumes, losing her mind, she took a look at her poorly organized piles of laundry, and realized she was hardly halfway done.

She could take it no longer. She took all the remaining clothes, tossed them together into the tub, and cast a spell. It was one of the simplest, earliest spells a young magician learned—to remove stains and smells from clothes. She had used it for years, on herself and Rook and whoever else was beginning to stink especially badly on her journeys.

A single breath of mana was all it took. A brief gesture. A flash of her eyes. Then it was done.

She purified the water, doing away with any stale urine, before sublimating it all with a single flash of heat. Steam poured into the sky from her tub, and she turned it over on its side.

No water came out. Just a collection of soft, beautifully cleaned clothes.

She had just set about reorganizing them for retrieval when Linnea shrieked.

Eris picked up Corvo and regarded the woman—and only then realized what she, in her fume-riddled and languid state, had done.

“You’re a witch!” Linnea said.

Eris sighed. Corvo cried. She opened her mouth to deflect the accusation, but she was too slow; Linnea turned and ran toward the other women along the creek, screaming again and again, “The tall woman! Her! She’s a witch! She’s casting hexes, she is! She’s a bloody witch! She cleaned the clothes with magic! She made water boil with a gesture of her hands!”

This aroused the attention of all in the proximity, including the mistress who was to pay Eris for her time; but rather than pay her, or ignore Linnea’s ravings, they looked at Eris—and ran away.

All of them. Back to town.

“You cannot leave! You owe me money!” Eris shrieked.

The words were not heeded.

Several years ago this event would have precipitated slaughter and looting. Unless struck by a rogue arrow, Eris knew she had more than power enough to raze this little village. She did not want to, but if that was how they saw things…

But that was no longer an option. Corvo was too fragile. Too vulnerable. And he needed her to survive. She could not be so reckless.

So she waited until she was out of sight of the fleeing women, and she cast Polymorph.

First she turned Corvo into a mouse. He was small and it took little effort, and then there he was—a newborn rodent.

She hated using magic on her son. But she did what she had to.

Next she transformed herself.

She focused. And she concentrated. And she molded her form.

Her gown fell down around her feet. Her shoes went empty.

A cat emerged. Black and big for its size. Female.

She picked up the infant mouse in her mouth, grabbed a small onyx egg from her backpack, and darted into town.

The people of Skane truly hated “witches,” for the alarum bell was raised by the time the cat slinked into town. She passed by Linnea and a horde of women, their sons and daughters now gathered up, and overheard her speak,

“The tall woman, with the shapely figure and the black-haired babe. I knew they wasn’t right. I spoke to her and didn’t see it, but I knew it somehow. It was horrible! The way she made that water disappear—like it was nothing! Damn magic!”

She spit.

The cat kept onward. The mouse in her mouth did not move.

A small squadron of men marched past with iron swords and linen armor. Witch hunters, no doubt. The cat waited for them to pass, then made it to her destination across the street: the stables.

The door was closed. The cat jumped in through a high-up opening at the side, and she scaled down to the place where a donkey sat, and she saw a young blonde girl glancing about herself as if trying to determine from where the bells were ringing.

The girl jumped back when she saw the cat, but her surprise waned when she saw the arcane focus roll from its mouth. Next a mouse was set on the ground, and then, with a blink, both mouse and cat became human.

Eris was naked. She scooped Corvo into her arms, feeling him everywhere to make sure no mistake had been made in the transformation. Luckily they were alone in this place.

“Eris!” Aletheia hissed. “What did you do?”

“I did not do anything!” Eris said. “I—forgot where I was. I used a simple spell to hasten my work. ‘Twas nothing more than that. But I—it seems even I underestimated the taboo for such things in this place. The washer women were not amused.”

Aletheia sighed. But she nodded.

“We have to go?” she said.

“Yes. At once.” Quickly she changed her appearance, to seem clothed and like a different woman from the one she truly was. “First we fetch our things. Are you ready?”

“No!” Aletheia said. “I haven’t been paid yet!” She had a trowel in her hand and reeked of manure.

“Too bad. You will have your wish; we will steal what we need in the next village.”

“I didn’t wish for that.”

“Adventuring is theft, even if we steal from the dead or undesirable.”

With that Eris pushed through the doors of the stable, and the two marched quickly back to find their things.

The streets were amassed with curious and concerned townspeople. Eris was careful not to bump into them, lest they notice that the texture of her clothes was not that of clothes at all. And it was strange as she held Corvo to her chest, that as she feared for her life and her son’s—and even Aletheia’s, to an extent—she really was far calmer and more composed than she ever would have been as a laundrywoman.

Truly, if not a duchess, Eris was an adventurer. She was almost relieved to know that she would never be able to do anything else.