The carriage continued to pass along the New Road every month. Hisana settled back into a routine of sorts. The house where she now lived was set back from the road in a busy district where the bustle continued day and night and new people arrived in a seemingly endless stream. She had less cause to see the black carriage now and even less inclination to think of the man who rode in it. Their meeting, she told herself, was nothing more than an anomaly in the vast expanses of time that skined out in these streets.
Seven years on, the nobleman's son, if not forgotten, was little more than a memory. As his presence had faded from her mind, so too had any lonesomeness. Survival was, once again, her greatest priority. Finding ways to go unnoticed on the streets consumed her time and attention. She traded for clothes, and food and water when she needed them, and for new furnishings for the house, which had been falling into ruin when she moved in, but she drifted always between different markets, different merchants: never revisiting the same area twice.
With every trade, she found another excuse to slip into Seventy-eighth again. She was searching. At first, she did so without even realising she did it, her eyes roving over anonymous streets, checking the passing faces.
She would know her if she saw her; she had never doubted that. To know that she was alive; that had become a compulsion. Because somewhere in these nameless, faceless crowds was the only proof that she had ever been alive: a link to who she really was, or had once been.