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She only clung tighter to the reins and laughed. She’d have made a hell of a sailor. She was a better rider than he would ever be. He was passable, but he’d spent too many years on a ship. The rolling of the waves was second nature to him, not this. And he was not particularly young anymore.

The man with red hair did not stop in the village but continued on toward Fitcher, as Bram had earlier tracked from the ruined tower. They caught sight of him once but could not quite catch up. It was galling.

The rain intensified as they passed through the medieval city gates, the ground turning to mud under the horses’ hooves. Bram questioned the night porter, who pointed down the street to the left where a man had just arrived, riding hard. The buildings jutted out over the street, affording a small respite from the rain, but not for long. The storm was only getting worse. They passed a haberdashery, a shop that sold parasols, another specializing in snuff blends. The locals were already inside, sensibly dry. He wanted Clara by a fire, drinking something to warm her up.

Bram glared through the rain. A dog ran by with a stolen boot in his mouth. A window slammed shut above them. Laughter and gold light spilled from a nearby house. He noted them all but spent no more than a moment on each. They weren’t his quarry, and they weren’t a threat to Clara, and so they were nothing.

“There,” he said with grim satisfaction. Clara followed the jut of his chin toward the courtyard at the end of the street, leading to an inn that backed the river.

“The Starchy Governess,” she said above the sound of water hitting rooftop and cobblestones and shop signs. “If Sybil came this way, she definitely went in there. That can’t be a coincidence.”

He didn’t ask how she knew—the Spinsters had strange ways of communicating. If she said it mattered, then it mattered. And beyond the creaking inn sign was the brown horse with white hocks that they had been following for half an hour. A stable boy was leading her into the stables.

They’d found the blighter.

At the inn Sybil would have chosen.

He didn’t believe in coincidences. Sailors were too superstitious for that.

“You’re waiting here.” He couldn’t help it. It was a command, ripped from years of shouting orders but also from the fear rooting in his very soul.

Clara slid out of the saddle, right into a dirty puddle. His fists clenched. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, exactly as he’d known she would. “I am going through the front door.”

“The hell you are.”

“I am going through the front door,” she repeated, drenched and pale, her teeth chattering slightly. Every shiver may as well have been a dagger right through his throat. “And what’s more, I am going to make a great big fuss about it.”

He pushed his sodden hair back. “Clara. I’m begging you.”

She was already darting away. “He barely had a lead on us. He’s still trying to rent a room, I’d bet my books on it. I’ll walk in; he will panic and run for the back door. Where you’ll be waiting.”

It wasn’t a bad plan. Except for one glaring fault.

“And if he comes at you instead? With that knife?”

She tossed him a smile over her shoulder. A smile.

“Let’s find out, shall we?”

She was clearly every bit the madwoman Bram had accused her of being. This was a terrible plan.

But it was hers. And it was too late now.

*

She pushed into the inn, the warmth and the cheerful clatter momentarily disorienting. Two men shouted over a game of dice; another played a fiddle in the corner. Women laughed over pints of ale. A cat wound around Clara’s feet before darting away behind the bar toward the kitchen. The innkeeper stood at that bar, piling glasses onto the tray of a barmaid who could only be his daughter, all while accepting coin from a man dripping a puddle on the wooden floors smoothed by decades of boots.

A red-haired man.

He turned at the opening of the front door, saw Clara, and gaped.

Properly gaped.

And not just because she was wearing a man’s frock coat several sizes too large for her over a ruined, wet ball gown. He recognized her.

He turned and ran, shoving through the patrons to get to the back door.

“Got you,” she said with more smugness than was genteel.