Pera Silver had crossed half the vale to reach the noble who wore her foremothers' leaf-blade as a trophy. Now she crouched in a merchant's stall and could not take another step toward him. A bounty hunter had found her trail. The hunter's boots had passed this row of stalls twice already. Pera's silver hair marked her from a distance, and her height made her easy to name. She could not move openly while that woman watched the road. Pera pulled a hood over her hair and knotted it tight. It hid the silver, but her build still gave her away. She needed more. On the stall's table lay a wide merchant's shawl, ruby red, woven fine. She dropped coins by the cloth and swung it over her shoulders. The drape softened her frame. She stopped looking like a warrior and started looking like a trader among traders. She stepped into the crowd. Her plan was simple. Move slow. Blend with the merchants. Slip past the hunter and reach the far road before dusk. It almost worked. A voice cut across the stalls. "Silver hair, my height, walks like she owns the ground." The bounty hunter shoved through the crowd, tall, red-haired, a leather vest over hard muscle, boots loud on the stones. "That's my mark. I never lose one." She was Tora Gomak, and she said her own name like a threat. Shoppers scattered from her path. She scanned every face and stopped on Pera's shawl. Pera kept her steps even. She did not run. She turned toward a knot of merchants unloading a cart and matched their pace, her covered head bowed. Tora's eyes swept past the shawl, past the bowed hood, and moved on. The trick held. The hunter did not see a warrior. She saw a merchant. Then a child near the cart pointed at Pera's boots. Warrior's boots, scarred and heavy, wrong under a trader's shawl. "Look at her feet," the child said. Tora spun back. Her hand went to the blade at her hip. Pera did not wait. She yanked the ruby shawl free and flung it wide. It billowed open, a curtain of red across the lane. Tora slashed through it, but the cloth tangled her arm for one breath. One breath was enough. Pera drove into the packed crowd, hood low, and let the bodies swallow her. She cut down a side lane, then another, then dropped behind a row of empty barrels. She waited. Tora's boots pounded past, then faded. Pera had lost her. But she had lost the shawl too. Her disguise lay trampled in the lane, and Tora now knew her boots, her hood, her height. The vale was no longer safe to cross. To reach the noble and the leaf-blade, Pera would have to leave the open roads and take the wild paths, where worse things than a hunter waited.