Idrin walked the Fair in his travel-worn coat, which had once been a Lessaran dress uniform and which still had the ghost of its braid across one shoulder, and he was recognised within the first hundred paces. The recognition came in two kinds, and he had come to know both. The children curtsied. They did it at the speed of children, with a flurry of skirts and a glance over the shoulder to see whether their mothers had noticed, and then they ran away giggling. The grown people did not curtsy. They looked at him with the flat assessment that Lowgate kept for the Hold’s officers, and then they looked past him at the stalls, as if they had weighed him and found him a fair price for a broken bench.
He had decided, on the morning of the Fair, that he would not be a prince in the outer ward. He would be a clerk who had been asked to buy something. It was a foolish decision, and he had known it was foolish when he made it, and he kept it anyway for the first hour.
The first stall he stopped at belonged to a Coldharbour pot-seller with a barrow of brown lodger’s ware, the thick glazed clay that the Coldharbour potters sold to the lodgers because it was cheap and did not break in the wind. The pot-seller did not curtsy. He did not glance at Idrin’s coat. He looked at Idrin’s hands, which were holding a…
