He left the reception within the half hour, slow and smiling, a young lord pleasantly overwhelmed by an evening above his station. He did not go back to the inn.
Instead, he walked the long way through the cooling streets, through the lamplit quarters where Verissan kept its evening to itself. He did not let himself think while he walked.
A man thinking too hard on a public street walks differently from other men.
His weight goes wrong, his eyes stop seeing, and somewhere out in the dark, a courier still carried a description with his face on it.
So Alistair kept his pace easy and his head empty, all the way to the chapel.
It was small and old, built into the foot of one of the council towers, and it stood empty. Alistair was not religious enough to use a chapel, but he went in anyway.
He sat on a back bench in the dark, where the only light was a single lamp burning at the far end for no one.
There, finally, he let himself stop being Tobian Marrow for one hour.
