The baker was burning her shelves.
Selka saw her through the shop door as they dragged the boat into a slack-water alley. The woman had taken the shelves down herself and stacked them beside the bread oven. Without hearth warmth, the dough would not rise. Without bread, the neighbors would not leave.
“They said you'd died,” she told Selka.
“They've said it twice.”
“I gave your girl the money.”
“Good.”
The baker looked past her at Ruun. The god stood in the alley with its folded irons and stone feet, leaking water onto the cobbles. She had seen it in procession, perhaps imagined its strength safely beyond anything she might need to worry about.
“Is that what's heating us?”
“Yes.”
The woman leaned against the door. “Oh.”
Selka asked for the back passage through the yard. The baker moved aside. No declaration of allegiance. She lifted a shelf into the oven and showed them the latch.
Beyond the yard people were carrying bundles toward the upper streets. Others leaned from windows asking where they meant to go. A man shouted that the peace envoy was back, that the trouble at Reedgate was only sabotage, and the hearth would recover by morning.
Darr lowered his head. Voss had reached home.
Selka pulled her prison coat inside out. It hid the military stitching but not her face. Anet walked beside Sorell, taking stops at corners. The pendant no longer glowed.
They reached the ward bridge, where the pipe branches entered rows of houses. A few still ran warm. Outside the washhouse above the bridge, Selka touched a wall pipe hot enough to dry the clothes pressed against it. Selka recognized a woman she used to meet on the stairs of their room. The woman stared at her, then at Ruun, and shut her door.
“She likes you,” Anet said.
“She likes you better.”
“Not enough for a door.”
Sorell found a covered stair for the freed prisoners. Kerr sat with the man he had helped out of Reedgate. Darr set two escorts to watch the road. The rest of the boat's people began looking for family. Some returned; some did not. Selka could not keep them by invoking the favor of their rescue.
She went toward the lock gate with Ruun. It had once risen from water here in a shape larger than the tower. Now it paused every few paces, waiting for its stone feet to catch up with the rest of it.
At the gate a boy in an oversized guard coat lifted his spear.
“No entry.”
Selka recognized him from the stair under the lock. “Where's Pel?”
“No entry.”
“You can say it a third time. It won't tell me where he is.”
The boy's eyes moved toward the service door.
She followed the look. He lowered the spear across her path, but his hands shook. Ruun stopped beside him. The boy stared at the seam in its throat.
“They hurt it?”
“Yes.”
He swallowed. “They told us to wait for it. The envoy says it has to go back.”
“We all had orders,” Selka said. She stepped over the spear while he was still deciding how to hold it.
Pel opened the service door before she knocked. He wore his boots now and a coat over the chest pipe. His face had gone gray around the mouth.
“You brought it back,” he said. “The flow kept failing. Voss has shut the north branches to feed the lifting frame. Says the wards get warmth when the god is back under it.”
“To the anchor,” Selka said.
He looked at Ruun. Then he stepped aside, very slowly, and let them in.