She took Greta’s advice and made for the Second Gate. 

The Quarters were the second tier of the city, sitting higher on her land than the arc of the Wards did as they flared out along the old waterfront, now sunken below the harbor level. The sea walls kept the ocean from the Wards, and the levy walls kept both the ocean and the filth of the wards from the fancier, cleaner, stick-up-their-ass-ier Quarters.

There were five of them in all, counter to their moniker, but the boundaries between the Quarters, once you were in one of them were more symbolic and political in nature than the actual walls that divided the Wards. Getting into any Quarter in the first place was the real challenge.

The road sloped upwards as it approached the Second Gate, the burn in her calves was compounded by the weight of the full delivery basket, still it was better than pulling the cart up this hill. 
There were four guards spread out in front of the large wooden gate, reinforced with criss-crossing bands of heavy steel. The large gate itself was rarely open, instead there were two smaller gates cut into the first, one large enough for most carts and one for foot traffic only. The middle gate was propped open. Technically this was against flood regulations but Lizzie had never seen a gate that didn’t do this and it was generally overlooked by those in authority.

These guards were relaxing under the light traffic at the moment, but each held their polearms in a tight grip. It was hot that morning and the sun beat down on the briny damp of the Wards’ muddy streets cooking the dirt and the refuse piled along it. Sweat shone on the armored guards faces, and one of the end guards kept up a nervous rhythm with the butt of his halberd. 

“Where are you off to girlie?” The nearest guard asked her as she drew up in front of the gate. He didn’t shift into a more guarded stance, she wasn’t a threat to him and he knew it. His accent betrayed him as being from the Wards himself, even if he might have tried to polish it some. He could have come from any of the Wards but hers, wardlings that made it into the city guard weren’t allowed in their old stomping grounds. The upper crust thought it might encourage corruption and that was only overlooked amongst the nobles.

“You’re not the only ones what have to work today.” The paperwork as she pulled it out of her bag was thick with wax of controlled substance permissions. She tried not to wince as she handed the sheaf of papers and seals and her order list over to the guard.

He blinked at them in his hand before flipping through several of the papers one handed.

“What’re you doing with these?”

“I’m out on delivery for the herbery I work for.” Lizzie launched into a speech she knew well and used every week on her delivery rounds. “We have all of our licenses, all up to order, and we confirm suitability of client before completing a delivery as well. We’d rather get some of these items off the street as quickly as can be, if you catch my meaning. There are some things here which should not wander off if time allows them to.

The guards were staring at her basket now in a mix of apprehension and wariness. On most days she would haave offered them freely to search it. With the goods packed in it today she would rather get the goods out of her posession as quickly as possible. 
A stillness overcame the air, the heat of the sun seemed to press intensly upon them in that moment, even as sound seemed to fade. The world narrowed down to Lizzie, and the guards, and the glimpse of the maintained Quarter through the slash of gate. And a sense of dread.

The silence was consumed by a far off roar. Lizzie thought first that it might have been a breach of the sewall and that her fate was sealed, but when sense caught back up to her she knew it was the roar of the crowd at the execution. The guards had all flinched, as trained as they (might be) were. The guard in front of her had white knuckles wrapped around the shaft of his halberd, even as he still held her papers in his other hand. His grip had never loosed (his grip) on the weapon once the whole time she had been within sight. 
One of the other guards said something in a sharp voice, that broke through the silence that still lingered around the small gate.

“Be about your business,” the guard told her, thrusting her papers back into her hands. “Mind you don’t make trouble for yourself or the others here about your duties.”

Lizzie fled through the gate before they could change their minds or call her back. There was not enmity there but the moods in the Wards were mercurial and there was no telling how the guards might have felt toward her if she’d been there a half an hour later. 

________________________________________

The Quarters were something else. Only five of them, they arced out above the Wards on a map like a crown of gleaming stone. There wasn’t refuse in the gutter here. The people going about their business were all dressed in clean clothes, unpatched and sharply cut. Fabric had a luster here that was not seen in the lower city.

Even in this part of town, the pedestrian pace was brisk as the toffs hurried about their days, hurrying to make their own livings, lest they fall to the strata of her class in the dump. It was a one way ticket. She had been reminded on more than one occasion that the stench of the Wards was not so easily washed away.

While she would have preferred to go straight to the Hill and be done with her newest and riskiest parcel, it made far more sense to start in the first quarter, where she was and work her way to the University at the end of her path of torment.

So she worked her way through the quarters.

The first few stops were to herbries in the First, if they could call themselves that. She had been to them before, and did not think highly of shops that imported all of their goods, scarcely checking the quality of their stock before displaying wildly varying goods at what she considered ridiculous sums. When they had requests for harder to come by plants, especially ones they couldn’t grow for themselves even with the mage she knew they had working in the back, they bought from Greta for what the Wards considered a steep price, and for which they tripled their own income reselling it half a mile away.

There were a series of private practitioners in the quieter residential streets in the north sides of the First and the Second. Those rarely gave her trouble except when an unexperienced hall boy couldn’t be bothered to locate his mage’s papers for explicit herbs. The private buyers tipped better than the shops, even if they looked down upon her more.

By the time she had worked her way to the central quarter, her basket was almost empty. There were three stops left and she could get home. Delivery days were usually those that she could catch up on chores, or spend time with her brothers, making sure they did their schooling for the week. If she found time to herself it was when she really had time to lose herself tending to her own plants in her little secret greenhouse, or to read into the night on, while not banned, more suspicious books of herbology. It made little sense to her why books not explicitly instructive in the magick arts were banned just as surely as those at the mage’s university. Knowing how the herbs might be used by others only meant she was more efficient at growing strains or encouraging cuttings from other plants that best embodied the qualities a mage would desire.

Speaking of mages, the Third quarter was her least favorite because it was absolutely crawling with them. She’d only been to the Fourth, where the seat of the government was, a handful of times and never to the final district at all. She couldn’t imagine them any worse than the Third.

The Hill, as most people called it, and Acquitaillas University as it was called by the posh nobs who’d attended (though they really called it things like Aquatally Uni), was the main feature of the Third Quarter. It sat on the highest hill in town, built over the wellspring of magic for this corner of the country. It’s hodgepodge of once-modern architectures sprouted from the hill like mushrooms fighting for dominance on a particularly decadent cow pie.

Once again, Lizzie put off her delivery to the heart of the Hill itself. There were two other orders in this quarter. The first went to a tall, angular man who resembled little else than skin stretched taut over a skeleton. He wore a gentleman’s clothes, clean and starched to perfection, even if they were several years out of date to her untrained eye. The cavernous dark hall of his manse seemed to stretch and distort further than his building would allow and looking past him into it made her sense of balance threaten to abandon her. He tipped very well, but the coin was not one she had seen before and it, like the man, had a strange air of forgotten antiquity surrounding it.

The next, her penultimate of deliveries went to a plump, jovial mage of a man whom she encountered purely on accident. He was exiting his townhouse, a new and immaculate brick monstrosity just as she was pondering where the servants entrance might be. He caught sight of her on his way past, did a double take at her shabby clothes, and hazarded if she were not to be the delivery girl from the herbry come with his ordered.

When Lizzie confirmed that she was he clapped his hands in delight and directed to his butler, waving away concerns about her visiting a back door. “No my gel, you’re here now and we might as well get about our business.” With that, he left her to the ministrations of the only jovial butler she had ever seen. He was nevertheless a professional when it came to signing for his delivery, proof of allowance of certain substances, and a generous tip for her discretion.

With a heavier purse and a lighter basket, Lizzie had no further excuses to putting off her last stop of the day. She turned her begrudging feet uphill and began the climb toward the University.