The view from the slow-sloping edge of the wall makes everything seem very far away. Neat and orderly, in a way things only can be once you’re removed from them entirely. From a height, it’s much easier to appreciate the careful, cramped geography of the city, roads running west to east, lanes north to south. Below—far below, beneath their feet and the wall and the roof—gendarmes prowl the territory in their black and gold coats. They’re a foreign authority, though, neither help nor hindrance for either of the men above them in the wall-seat. The boy adjusts his stiff collar, too high and close for comfort, and wishes he’d thought to bring a coat on the night everything went wrong. He’s on the youth’s side of being a man still, keeps the awkward length of his limbs folded in close, and resembles nothing so much as a stork, though he isn’t nearly beaky enough to really bring the impression home.

He hasn’t quite learned the trick of being quiet when he’s thinking a thing out, either, though that hasn’t proved as much of a trouble as an annoyance. In his position he’ll take any small advantage he can.

“If you go on talking like that, I’m going to scream,” says the man sitting watch, with little inflection in his voice to indicate someone at the end of his temper.

The boy isn’t sitting next to him, not quite, but he shuffles sideways, wrists in their chains scraping the floor. “I just like the sound of it. Supercilious,” he repeats the word like a delicious food, or the name of a long-cherished sweetheart. He’s hungry, and a little cold, only it’s about to get a whole lot colder with the sun setting the way it is, so he can’t really think about that.

He’s pretty sure prisoners don’t get blankets.

“Don’t know what kind of school your parents were sending you to,” the man sitting watch replies, after a drawn-out period of silence the boy has come to expect. “Not knowing a word like that.”

“We didn’t have time for school after I turned fourteen,” the boy explains. There isn’t a seat, exactly, just more wall and then the place where he could tumble off of it. He’d wonder whether they were meant to be there at all, quite frankly, if he hadn’t been brought by a man of the law himself.

Law or not, it’s a long way to fall. The man hasn’t taken his hand from his sword yet—and not since they met, besides—but then he hasn’t tried to throw the boy over the side of the building yet either, and that’s got to count for something. In their time together, the boy has learned to glean what comfort he can from the smaller details of his captivity. The lawman isn’t unnecessarily cruel, there is that to be grateful for.

He edges closer still, drawn by a helpless fascination to drink in the view while he might, before it’s dark, or the lawman changes his mind about that blindfold. He’s never seen the city from a height before, candybox houses stretched out in untidy rows before them, stained orange with the sinking sun. Soon the gendarmes will leave, head off to their beds or blend into the dark night, the alleys and the catacombs of the city. Not for the first time, or even the hundredth, he wonders whether he mightn’t be better off down below, a prisoner still but in a proper jail cell with a bunk and three meals a day.

Not for the first time, or even the hundredth, he remains where he is, the lawman’s dark solid presence tickling at the corner of his vision like a shadow.

“I can see where running around in the sewers would keep you busy,” the man replies, and in his voice is a grizzled contempt for the criminal’s lifestyle, but none for the criminal himself. The boy throws his legs over the lip of the wall, boots landing unsteadily against the green apple curve of the roof.

“My parents can tell you, when they come for me.”

He’s said as much in every city, as if through simple persistence he can will it to happen. Surely they are just biding their time, formulating the perfect plan to get him back. His mother, in particular, always did like things to be perfect.

The lawman doesn’t have anything to say to that, only looks at him with something so close to resembling pity that when the boy closes his eyes all he can imagine is pitching himself over the edge of the roof, sinking down with the sun again and again, his feet slipping, his arms milling wildly around.

He tried it once in the third city, or maybe it was the fourth, and the lawman snatched him by the collar, choking him almost as surely as he saved his life and yanking him backwards with no more trouble than if he’d been a wayward kitten.

The lawman is fast, and he likes high places. It seems odd and imbalanced that these two pieces of information should be all that the boy’s collected in their time together, but then he is a prisoner. Perhaps he is meant to be kept out of balance in exactly this way.

He remembers he’s cold again before the sun has set entirely, and succumbs to the shivering that threatens him from the air before he can properly get ahold of it. His layers are all stiff silks and scrolling brocade, perfect for a night festival when the crush of bodies is enough as a shield from the elements, but useless ever since, and the wind that tears past them seems always to be laughing. His hands tremble. The lawman doesn’t look at him, only shifts, loosening his posture in a way the boy has come to understand as the most eloquent of gestures. The chains at his wrists clink soft like jewellery when he moves, tucks in between the lawman’s bent legs and against his chest. The boy can move swiftly too, when he likes, though it’s a fact he likes to keep to himself most days. His limbs fold in close and he’s smaller than he seems, and the worn warm lining of the coat is as familiar as his own.

The lawman slips an arm around him, and doesn’t take his hand off his sword.