Ossane had taken a room above a laundry in the lower town of Sallowmere because it was the only room in the city that the Chancery had not thought to count.
It was a narrow room with a sloping ceiling and a window no bigger than a loaf, and it smelled of soap and hot linen from morning to night. The laundry occupied the floor beneath her. It was run by a widow with three sons and a daughter and a temper like a stove-lid, and the girl who did the carrying was a Sallowfen cousin of the widow’s, a thin quick child with marsh-brown hands and a habit of looking at Chancery men as if they were goats that had got into the garden. Ossane had been polite to the girl from the first morning. She had asked her questions about the reed-houses and listened to the answers, and the girl had been so astonished to be asked anything at all by a Lessaran advocate that she had decided, quite fiercely, that Ossane was the only decent Lessaran in the city.
That was useful. Ossane did not mind being thought decent. It was an excellent disguise, and it had the great advantage of making people talk.
