That was why she came late home. And this time-gods, she trembled so with terror in the streets that her legs had practically no strength left for the stairs this time she brought a lump of metal the size of her fist; and to Stilcho’s anxious, angry demand where she had been, why she was besooted (she had always washed before, in the rainbarrel, and wiped it all to general grime on her dark clothes) and why she had let wisps of her yellow hair from beneath her scarf-
“Stilcho,” she said, and held out that heavy thing which was, for all the fire and its changing, too heavy to be other than what it was. Tears ran down her face. It was wealth she had, as Sanctuary’s lower levels measured it. Where she had rubbed it, it gleamed gold in the dim light from the lamp he had burned waiting for her.
Finally, to one of her desperate men, she had given something great enough to get that tenderness she had longed for. “Oh, Moria,” he said; and spoiled it with: “Oh gods, from there! Dammit, Moria! Fool!” But he hugged her and held her till it hurt.
The river house waited, throwing out light from one unshuttered window, across the weed-grown garden, the trees and the brush and the rosebushes which embedded the iron fence and the warded gate.
Inside, in the light of candles which were never consumed, in a clutter of silks and fine garments that lay forgotten once acquired, Ischade sat in her absolute black, black of hair, of eye, of garments; but there was color in her hands, a little lump of blue stone that had also known that fire. She had gathered it out of the ash in a moment’s distraction-she was also a thief, by her true profession; and if her hand had suffered bums from the ash, the stone had sucked all the heat into itself, and rested cool in unscarred, dusky fingers.