Alistair entered Verissan in the late afternoon, when the gates were at their busiest.

He had timed it that way on purpose.

The third hour after midday was when the market carts, the residency arrivals, and the courier traffic all overlapped, and a single traveler drew the least attention of any hour. That was the only reason he had picked it.

The wall came into view through a long line of carts, higher than he had expected.

Caelmar’s old wall had been added to over the last hundred years, and the additions never matched the original stone, so the whole thing carried a layered look that sat somewhere between honest and embarrassing.

The guards at the top held crossbows, the same way the Therasian guards once had, except these were ceremonial, and the men holding them looked like men who had not pulled a trigger in years.

Alistair joined the residency queue, since it moved faster than the merchant one.

Clerks worked it instead of soldiers, and clerks had paperwork to finish and no patience for conversation, which suited him.

The clerk at the desk read his papers slowly, with the attention of a man who read papers for a living. He went down the residency line, then the seal, then the Halversen line, and after that he held Alistair’s face for a small but specific length of time.

Then he asked something Alistair had not been prepared for.

"Marrow," the clerk said, not looking up yet. "Which line, then. The Verissan Marrows, or the Halversen ones?"

Alistair looked at him.

The question was nowhere in the script Due had spent three weeks drilling into him. The two houses had split four generations ago over a property dispute that ended badly, and both sides had kept it quietly bitter ever since. Outside Verissan, almost nobody knows the difference. Outside the council of Caelmar, almost nobody bothers to track it at all.

And yet this clerk, at this gate, had asked.

’He was told to ask,’ Alistair thought. ’No one drags up a dead family quarrel unless someone handed him a reason to.’

Even so, he did not pause any longer than a man would after a dull, polite question.

"Halversen," he replied.

The clerk looked up at that, held his eyes for a breath, then made a small mark on a paper Alistair could not see. He stamped the residency papers and slid them back across the desk.

"Welcome to Verissan, young Marrow."

"Thank you," said Alistair, and he walked through without looking back and without slowing his step.

The street inside the wall opened onto the long market avenue, lined with stone fronts, painted shutters, and small bronze plaques telling you what each building was. He moved through it with the slightly tired step of a third son of a minor house who had spent two days on the road, the exact walk Due had drilled into him.

’Someone in this city wants to know whether Tobian Marrow can tell two forgotten houses apart,’ he thought. ’That is not curiosity. That is a man checking whether I am the name on my papers.’

He turned south at the third intersection.

The Sealed Step sat in the second district, where Silas had told him to stay, and the second district was reached fastest down the southern fork of the avenue. He took it. He passed three salons with their lamps already burning despite the daylight, then a council building scrubbed clean enough that it had to be done every morning, and a wanted board he did not slow to read.

The Sealed Step came into view at the end of a quiet street.

Four stories of pale stone, a black sign hanging from iron hooks, and a small lamp burning beside the door even now in the afternoon. The lamp had been lit since morning, Alistair guessed. Someone inside wanted whoever watched the street to see an inn that was open and unremarkable.

He went up the three steps and through the door.

The keeper behind the desk looked up. She was a woman in her fifties, plainly dressed, her grey hair pulled back hard, and she carried the calm of someone who had run an inn for thirty years and never once raised her voice to do it. She looked at his face, then at his papers.

She did not ask which Marrows.

"Halversen," she said pleasantly, before he had got a single word out.

Alistair was caught off guard, though he kept it off his face.

"You knew before I told you," he said.

"It is a small district, young Marrow, and word of an arrival runs through it faster than the arrival ever could." She slid a key across the desk. "Third floor, the corner room. The window faces east, so you will get the morning before the rest of the street does. Breakfast is at seven, if you are awake for it. If you are not, the kitchen stays shut until midmorning, and I will not be opening it again for one guest."

"That suits me," said Alistair.

"Anything else you find you need, you have only to say so." Having said that, she went back to the ledger she had been filling in, not looking at him a moment longer than was polite.

He climbed the stairs slowly, like a tired man and not a man in any hurry.

The corner room waited at the end of the third-floor hall. The window faced east, the bedding was clean, and the lamp on the table sat unlit.

He set his pack on the chair, crossed to the window, and checked the sill. It was empty, which he had expected.

Silas had only reached Verissan the night before, and Silas’s process was slow because Silas’s process was correct. He would leave nothing on that sill until he had something on it worth the risk.

Alistair turned back into the room.

The lamp on the table was lit.

It had not been burning when he walked in. It had been lit while he stood at the window with his back to the door, inside a room he had locked behind him.

Beneath the small ring of light it threw onto the wood, a folded piece of paper sat waiting, set down as neatly as if a servant had left it there.

Alistair did not turn for the door, and he did not summon his Rune Sword either. He stood at the window for a slow count of ten, breathing exactly the way Tobian Marrow would breathe, and only then did he cross the room and pick the paper up.

The hand was Caelmari, formal, the writing of a man whose first tongue had been the old script and who had bent it into Caelmari letters for forty years after.

He read it.

Welcome to Verissan, young Marrow. Your father’s old colleague has heard of your arrival and would be glad to see you at the Auber salon, the day after tomorrow, at the fourth bell. The afternoon promises rain.

It was signed with two letters.

R.C.

Alistair’s grip tightened on the page.

Whoever had written it already knew his false name, his false father, and the room he had been handed inside a locked inn, and they had wanted him to understand all three before he had so much as unpacked.