Glasswash cheered for a cloak full of rocks.
The sound began near the outer arch and broke apart as it traveled. Someone shouted Aylin's name. A woman wept into both hands. A glassworker threw furnace salt at the empty collar, while a pair of monster-cutters shut their red-stained shop door and dropped the bar.
Wrapped in the living Aylin's coat, Jiang rode behind all of it on Whitewake's narrow frame. His imagined returns had included anger, relief, and perhaps an attempted execution. Being ignored in favor of laundry was new.
The cloak walked down the center wash channel. River stones pushed its hem through gray water, following pale mortar between buildings. Its torn sleeve dragged behind like a hand that had forgotten what hands were for.
People cleared the route and crowded back after it passed.
A voice rose behind the cloak. "Princess Aylin!"
The garment answered in King Edric's voice. "You took a long road home."
The cheer grew louder.
Aylin's hand tightened beneath Jiang's coat. "He said that through the river image."
"Then half this street heard it when the city horns repeated the mourning," Ossin said. "Keep walking."
"I am walking. Your hunters are the ones dragging a penguin furniture cart through my city."
Korrin looked at the one-runner frame. "It was a prisoner cage this morning."
"Thank you. That restores its dignity."
Jiang knocked once against the rail in support.
Glasswash crowded around water and fire. Narrow ovens opened directly onto the street, each with black loaves cooling above its door. Glasswrights carried glowing saltglass on forked rods between low furnaces and waist-deep quench basins. Across a side channel, pale carcasses hung from a monster-cutter's hooks, their antlers bound in prayer cloth meant to keep dreams out of the meat.
Jiang smelled hot bread, smoke, blood, and fish oil.
His stomach chose fish oil. He respected its focus.
The woman who had dropped an oven paddle recovered it before the crowd kicked it into the channel. She was broad through the shoulders, with flour in the creases of her dark sleeves and one gray braid tucked down the back of her apron.
She stepped in front of Aylin.
Ossin's hook blocked her. "Back, Ista."
"That is my street, Grell. You stand back."
Ista Kelm looked past him at Aylin's face. Her gaze moved over the wet hair, split lip, bandaged palm, and torn coat wrapped around a bird.
"You hated seed cake," she said.
Aylin answered too quickly. "My father hated dropping it into machinery."
"Every drunk in Glasswash knows that story. We baked the memorial version for three winters."
"Was it any better?"
Ista's mouth twisted. "You might be her. Nobody else insulted my work before breakfast."
The warmth in Aylin's answer faded. "Do you believe me?"
"I believe one of you is wearing a worse coat."
Ista pointed her paddle at the funeral garment already crossing the next bridge. "Catch it before it reaches Last Gate. Then I will decide which impossible thing annoys me more."
A man staggered out from behind the central wash basin.
Rian Solk had lost his hat and most of the skin over one knuckle. Road salt crusted his boots to the knee. The sealed order remained inside his coat, its lead edge visible where he held the cloth closed.
Dagna dropped the frame rope and met him with her broken spear.
"You cut the road," she said.
"And you found another road."
"Where did that cloak come from?"
Rian glanced at the empty garment. "Last Gate. It walked out before I reached Glasswash, turned at the funeral arch, and began going home."
Aylin stared at him. "It left Eres to return to Eres."
"Perhaps the city needed witnesses for the second arrival. Perhaps it wanted you chasing it. I do not know, which is why my hands are still attached to my body."
The cloak stepped off the bridge onto a bright saltglass seam.
The central wash wheel stopped.
Every quench basin along the street jumped in its stone bed.
Glasswrights shouted over one another. A chain above the nearest furnace snapped taut. Hot gray water climbed the basin wall while a rack of cooling rods tilted over three apprentices trapped between the wheel housing and Ista's oven.
The funeral cloak kept walking.
"Last Gate is downhill," Ossin said. He started after it.
One apprentice screamed when a hot rod rolled across the rack above his shoulder.
Aylin turned away from the cloak.
"Of course you did," Jiang thought, with equal parts relief and irritation.
She stripped her coat from his back, folded it beneath his injured side, and lifted him off the frame. "The low drain. Can you see it?"
From the street, the wheel housing looked solid. From Jiang's height, a dark opening showed beneath the fallen rack. Steam rolled out across his beak. A flat iron tongue lay inside, buried under broken saltglass and a coil of black-green cord.
One tap answered her.
Aylin set him down.
"He goes nowhere alone," Ossin said.
"Then find a shorter hunter."
Dagna shoved the broken spear through the wheel spokes. "Grell, hold this or the next turn takes the apprentices with it."
The huntmaster looked once toward the disappearing cloak, then put his shoulder against the shaft.
Rian seized the opposite spoke. "The upper basin empties through that drain. If it opens while the return blade is high, the water crosses the ovens."
"Then lower the blade," Aylin said.
"The chain is behind the rack."
Ista handed her oven paddle to Aylin. "Reach with this. Break it and I will charge the palace."
"I have no palace at the moment."
"Then keep it intact."
Tovin pulled Torren's doubled knot from his coat. The wash alarm line ran over his head, one rope dark with soot and another bleached by steam.
"Which one clears the apprentices?" he asked.
Ista pointed to the dark rope. "One pull stops the furnaces."
"Your workers heard one pull when River-Open failed. Torren tied two."
With his useful hand, Tovin looped the doubled knot through the rope's lower eye. He leaned his body away and made the alarm cup strike twice.
The first note sent people toward the main street.
The second turned the glasswrights back for their apprentices.
The funeral cloak, already beyond the basin, answered with one perfect note. The single sound drew no followers.
Jiang pushed under the fallen rack and met warm water at his breast. After Cliffhook, heat should have felt merciful. Trapped beneath saltglass and iron, it felt like another animal trying to choose his body for him.
The gap narrowed around his shoulders. His failed flipper remained inside the cradle, scraping the underside of the rack whenever he kicked. He angled onto his good side and used the working wing to keep glass from sliding under his chest.
An apprentice's hand appeared through the rods. "Is that the marked beast?"
"Today he is the drain tool," Ista said. "Move your fingers."
Jiang reached the iron tongue.
Black-green cord had wound around it through a saltglass chip. Every step of the distant cloak pulled the cord tighter and held the drain shut while the basin filled.
His beak could reach the chip. An adult hand would have entered at the wrist and met the rack.
He caught its rough edge and pulled.
The chip sliced the cracked tip of his beak. Pain drove his head back against iron, but the glass moved far enough for the cord to slip beneath it.
"Again," Aylin said from outside. She had the oven paddle through the chain loop and both feet against the wheel housing.
Jiang hated being ordered by somebody who was right.
He bit lower and twisted.
The chip came free. Black-green cord whipped into the drain as the iron tongue rose, following the funeral route downhill.
Water hit Jiang in the chest and rolled him backward under the rack. His good wing struck one side. Webbed feet found the smooth floor and turned him before his injured shoulder met stone.
Above him, the upper basin emptied into the low channel instead of across Ista's ovens.
Dagna, Ossin, and Rian forced the wheel through its stalled turn. Aylin dropped the return blade with the paddle. Glasswrights lifted the rack high enough for Ista to drag the first apprentice free, then the next.
Jiang came out last, soaked and tasting blood.
Aylin's reaching hand halted clear of the mark. "Up?"
One tap gave permission.
She gathered him into the coat. Ista shoved a smoked herring between the folds before Jiang could pretend he had higher priorities.
"Eat while being carried," she said. "It is a skill our princess never learned."
Jiang swallowed the fish headfirst. Hunger softened without leaving. Nothing else improved.
Ista looked at Aylin over his back. "I still cannot prove who you are."
"You could have waited until after the fish."
"I can prove which one stopped."
Downhill, stone jaws began grinding.
Last Gate stood at the end of Glasswash where the streets narrowed between two black towers. The funeral cloak had reached its threshold. Pale salt lines climbed from the road and traced Aylin's name around the arch.
The gate opened, and the empty cloak walked into Eres beneath a cheer from people who had followed the chase.
Aylin ran after it with Jiang against her chest. Dagna, Tovin, Ossin, Ista, and Rian reached the arch behind her.
The stone jaws closed before Aylin crossed.
Her own name burned above the gate while it shut her out.