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After emptying out its pockets, you bundle up your apron with your dress and your chemise. In a lull, it finally occurs to you that you have yet to change out of your foot-wraps. However, when you so much as look down at your feet, your head starts to spin and your dress squeezes tight against the bruises and scrapes on your back and shoulders. Concerned, you straighten right up, recalling the stories you have heard about how well-bred women faint - you had chalked it up to them being brought up delicately, but you are beginning to think that their clothes have a lot to do with it. Regardless, you cannot faint right now, under any circumstance. The foot-wraps will just have to do; the hem should be long enough anyway, and even if it wasn't, who will be looking at your feet?
Before setting out, you run everything through your head one last time. You are going to the Coaching house, to collect your stage. Once you have it in hand, you are ... well, you are going to have to go to another Coaching house ... or Maker's Mercy, another Public house - somewhere, anywhere, it just has to have a public stable and grooms, so you may board your stage. To do that, you will have to pass yourself off as just having arrived on the Mount - and in doing so, you will have to answer, wave away or otherwise preclude a heap of questions. But if you manage it, you will be one step closer to leaving the Mount. In spite of everything, you have to smile at that thought; you weren't ever entirely sure that you would get this far - after all, your father just intended for you to drop everything and leave the Mount, he never suggested that you 'move house' by taking his equipment and his notes with him. Alright then; you have the money for the boarding the stage, for paying the toll to get back through the walls and for tips - or bribes, if things sour up.
You turn back to your cart, and dig out another fistful of coins.
Now then, for a surety, you must be ready. You have enough money, and Pattern's Perdition, things better not sour up enough that you need the knife, but you have it if they do. You have the domestic dress to change into if you need to, but right now, the plan is as soon as you have boarded your stage and team, you are coming right back to the Closet. You aren't going to be able to get into your sleeves without either ripping the dress open or taking it off, so the Wand of Head-Knocking isn't viable so long as you are wearing your 'worn piece' ... though you suppose you might as well take it and the nodules besides, in case you do end up changing into your domestic dress, or ... well, best not dwell on any more unpleasantness than you absolutely have to. So, with your Wand now bundled up with your knife and your lucre, you quit the Closet, closing the door tightly behind you. Of the few houses that showed light earlier, none of them show any now. As the Great Firmament stretches overhead, you begin your two-leg canter through the streets.
