Visions of soup, fruit, maybe a roasted cook-shop chicken floated before his mind’s eye. A bath would be good, too. He wanted the scent of the lady’s house off his skin. He didn’t know why, but the place had given him the crawls. It was as if he’d been asked an important question while he wasn’t listening. I don’t want to know the answer, he told himself as he nudged his horse through the gate. I’m no Sandry, forever wanting to solve the world’s troubles, or Tris, poking about for secrets. Daja has the right of it: keep business to yourself and your clan, and get on with life. There’s no point in sticking my neb in things around here. He held to that policy of godlike detachment right up to the moment when the gates closed behind him. It was then that he saw five Vipers squatted in the small, unsheltered bay in front of the tradesman’s entrance. One of them was the dimpled girl Ayasha he had flirted with the day the Camelguts joined the Vipers. “What are you doing here?”
