Chapter Two: The Pursuit

I had expected the thief to run toward the river. Every sensible criminal did. The Wren went west instead, across roofs slick with rain and through alleys too narrow for a mounted man to follow.

“Your Highness,” Captain Reed called behind me, “that is not a road.”

“It is if you keep moving.”

I pulled my coat tighter and kept after the figure ahead. The thief wore a dark cloak and a plain bird mask, nothing distinctive enough to identify a face. Yet the Wren moved as if she knew the city by touch. She avoided the puddles that hid broken cobbles and ducked beneath signs before they struck her head.

I had spent three weeks tracing stolen grain to Lord Markham’s estate. The official reports called the Wren a common thief. The accounts I found suggested something else: food disappeared from corrupt landlords, then reappeared in districts where children were starving. Theft was still theft. But the pattern had begun to bother me.

The Wren reached the roof’s edge and leapt for a laundry line stretched between two houses. The line sagged under her weight. She caught the opposite sill, swung once, and disappeared through an open window.

I heard a crash. Then a woman shouted.

I reached the window and climbed inside. A small room smelt of damp cloth and cabbage. A woman in a nightdress stood beside the table, clutching a wooden spoon. The thief was gone. On the floor lay a boy, winded but unharmed, and a sack of grain split open across the boards.

I had been raised to believe that a prince’s name opened doors. That night, it opened none. The woman with the spoon watched me gather grain from her floor and did not soften when I apologised.

“Don’t apologise to me,” she said. “You didn’t put it there.”

Her boy, Kit, sat wrapped in a blanket. He was the one I’d seen at the window, and now I noticed the clean strip of linen around his forearm. The knot was neat, made by someone accustomed to dressing wounds. I had expected a bandit’s mark. Instead, I found a careful hand.

“Whoever brought the food also treated him,” I said.

“She did more for him in a minute than your watch has done in a year.”

Reed shifted behind me. “Madam, the Wren is a criminal.”

The woman gave him a tired smile. “Then you ought to be grateful she’s better at her work than the men you pay.”

Reed had served me since my boyhood. He had pulled me from a river when I was fourteen and once taken a knife meant for my shoulder. I trusted his instincts. I did not always trust what the palace had taught him to call order.

I inspected the strip of linen. A faint blue stain marked one edge—lavender tincture, commonly used at St Agnes. I had been scheduled to visit the infirmary that morning. The coincidence sat uneasily with me.

Outside, the rain began to thin. I looked across the street, where the roofs shone like black glass. The Wren could be anywhere now. I imagined her stepping through a back door, removing the mask, and becoming someone the city would never suspect. The thought was more unsettling than the chase. How many people did I pass each day without seeing what they carried?

Reed held up the token I had found. “This is from the old royal stores.”

I rubbed the scratch on its back with my thumb. Beneath it, a tiny letter had been carved into the brass: M.

“Markham?” Reed asked.

“Or someone who wants us to think so.” I closed my fist around the token. “We’ll begin at St Agnes.”

Reed kept pace as I led him from the house. “You’re choosing the infirmary over the estate?”

“I’m choosing the place where the missing supplies were supposed to go.”

“Markham’s steward may have sent the Wren there.”

“Then we’ll learn that too.”

The token pressed into my palm. I thought of the palace reserve, a locked storehouse no one had used in years—or so the steward had claimed. When I was a boy, my father had taken me there after a winter storm. He showed me the ledgers, the sacks of flour, and the barrels of lamp oil and told me a crown was only worth wearing if it could keep people alive. I had not thought of that lesson in years. I wondered when it had become easier to trust a seal than the people standing in front of me.

At the carriage, Reed held open the door. “If this leads back to the royal stores, we’ll need proof before we name anyone.”

“I know.”

“And if the Wren is there?”

“I’ll ask why.”

He studied me as if that answer worried him more than an arrest would have. Perhaps it worried me too. I climbed into the carriage and tucked the token inside my coat. The woman with the spoon had not asked for a reward or a pardon. She had asked nothing at all. By the time the palace carriage turned toward St Agnes, I had begun to suspect that was exactly why I wanted to find the thief.

Reed glanced toward the house. “And the thief?”

“When I find her, I want to know why she was in a granary full of stolen food.”

He studied me, perhaps waiting for the familiar order to arrest first and ask later. I did not give it. For the first time in years, I wondered whether the law I represented had become a convenient name for the people who broke it most profitably.

“You’re the prince,” she said. “Try not to bleed on the patients.”