Wracked with guilt over what happened to her sister, Mare runs away to a local inn where she…obsessively picks the pockets of every drunk she can find. Do we have any hobbies for Mare so far besides hating the easy-to-hate people and being freakishly, supernaturally good at stealing?

It’s getting irritating. It wouldn’t be so bad if the thievery were more well thought out to begin with, but as it stands, difficulty-free, way-too-easy pickpocketing is all she does, and since I already have problems with that, it’s not making me like Mare. Sure, she’s got a bit of personality beyond that, what with her loyalty to Killorn and Gisa and her shouldering of too much responsibility, but why can’t that take center stage? Besides which, that would have impact if stealing from the other poor people presented literally any difficulty at all for her.

On top of that, Mare mentions that the inn is full of people who follow the court around, servants and the like, and all of them are heavy with coin from getting paid, and it brings up another problem. If Stilts is so close to this bustling hub of court life, why are they (supposedly) so poor and backwater? Even here we have acknowledgement that such things tend to bring money into town. And are they even poor and backwater? We got that impression from Mare, but we haven’t had a good view of the town proper, and they’re well off enough to support a large inn and a busy market day, so… We could just call Mare a biased narrator, because it’s not like the setting itself is contradicting itself, technically. Just that it’s not holding up to what Mare says.

One mark catches Mare in the act, but instead of turning her in he gives her a large coin. He’s got really pale skin, but also he’s built, so Mare can’t figure out his occupation. I don’t know how she could have missed his totally obvious role of Love Interest.

Mare doesn’t want to take the coin out of pride and petulance, but she does and even grinds out am appropriately reluctant thank you. Obvious Future Love Interest With A Good Job that Pays Well is named Cal. (Whew, much shorter to type.) Cal decides to walk her home so she doesn’t steal from anyone else, and along the way they talk about her lack of prospects, looming conscription, and why she’s thieving. Once Mare gets to talking, she just can’t stop and tells the story of Gisa’s injured hand. (Although if she leaves out the part about the Scarlet Guard and Kilorn, what’s her excuse for why she so badly needed the richer thieving pool?)

After Cal leaves her, she heads home and finds her dad in his wheelchair outside. Why is her dad in a wheelchair? We know he has a fake lung, okay. But as far as we know, the rest of his body still works, and yet he can’t get out of that thing long enough to climb down a ladder and go out to the front mailbox? He has to use a pulley system to bring the chair down? And it can’t be about exerting too much effort, because he’s a non-motorized chair using pulleys, that takes a lot of cardiorespiratory power. I can see him using the chair to spare his breathing for just getting around the house, sort of, but if he’s coming this far out it seems like walking would actually be less trouble, so long as he doesn’t have any other injuries we don’t know about. And we do not have enough examples of intermittent wheel-chair users in our media/culture. It feeds into the belief that wheelchair use is some sort of on-off switch, and erases the far more common situation of “I just need it for most stuff/a lot of stuff, not every stuff.” And here we have a prime candidate for someone who needs a chair for a lot of stuff but can still walk a little bit.

They fiddle with the electricity box that regulates their power (the reason her dad came outside) and she starts it working with her as-yet-known-sparky powers. Mare and her dad have, honestly, a really nice little quiet scene which is also super depressing. Her dad doesn’t want her mom to know he left the house, because she’ll see it as a hopeful step and he just doesn’t have any energy for hope because he knows he’s never going to get better.

Then at the end of the chapter, she reads her brother’s letter again and realizes he uses the same phrase as one from the Scarlet Guard speech, so it must mean he’s part of their group. (Although why would he put that in a letter? Unless he just got really used to flowery turns of phrase while hanging out with revolutionary buddies.)