Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
The sky was blue, with clouds fluffy and pale as catalaya blossoms. The air was warm with the scent of green and growing things.
Springmarket was here at last. Servants had the day off, and there’d be no curfew so we could all enjoy the double moons. It was the closest thing to freedom we were offered; our time wasn’t owed to anyone.
Wren and I had taken freezing baths and washed and combed our hair.
Mine was braided in Springmarket tradition.
Wren had arranged her hair in her usual twists.
Nheve had made small posies of flowers to tuck behind our ears, and we wore the best of our tunics.
Wren in somber green, and me in the deep blue of a late winter sky.
The northern market was already a party, full of revelers who lifted cups to the rising moons beneath garlands of paper moons that hung across the road.
Sellers pushed carts of festival snacks—skewers of grilled meat and vegetables, chewy sweets shaped like flowers—and sold spherical white peonies that sweethearts could exchange.
I eased two coins from the pocket of a fur seller who’d overcharged for a fox pelt, mostly on principle, and was relieved to have coins with no connection to the prince or his entourage.
It had been days since I’d last seen him, but he still occupied entirely too many of my thoughts.
The anger had burned away, leaving disappointment and a dull kind of understanding.
We both lived under constraint. But we pretended we had choices.
That we were in control. That we could have a different future than the one that likely awaited us.
In my case, hard work and scraping by. We pretended it didn’t matter that we’d met interesting people, people we could come to care about, only to lose them again.
Even this place—this holiday—wasn’t free of him.
The prince’s soldiers were in the market; they wore no armor, but their dark uniforms were unmistakable.
They stood at the edges of the market, hands clasped behind them, their gazes on the revelers.
To ensure they behaved, or to keep an eye out for the Aetheric practitioner?
“I’ll be right back,” I told Wren. I heard her footsteps behind me, but she stopped when I reached Galen first, giving us some space.
“What?” he asked, disdain singing through the word, not bothering to look down at me.
“His arm. It’s healing?”
A beat of surprise, and then his expression softened. Maybe he’d expected I’d go back on my word and try to see the prince again.
“No fever,” he said. “No swelling.”
“Good. That’s good.” He was alive and healthy, at least as I’d left him. That was enough.
It would have to be enough.
“Tell him I talked to a monk in the Aetheric shrine. The words on the paper we found in the smith are a blessing for success. The monks don’t make weapons.”
I turned to leave.
“You did good,” Galen said quietly behind me.
I didn’t turn around, as the earnestness in his voice hurt more than his usual sarcasm. I kept walking, Wren falling into step beside me.
“I need sweetwine,” I told her. “A lot of sweetwine. I want to be exquisitely drunk.”
We found a shadowed table in an inn on the edge of the market. Wren sat with her back to the wall, her gaze shifting suspiciously across everyone else in the room, which was loud with partygoers already very deep in their cups.
The coins I’d pinched from the fur seller bought the first jar of wine.
It was cheap and cold and not a little bitter, but paired with strips of crunchy flatbread and spiced nuts hot enough to sear the tongue, it was perfect.
The large shutters were open to the breeze, and we watched jugglers and bards parade through while the crowd clapped and tossed them coins.
Performers dressed as Terran gods, with their squat bodies and enormous grins, reenacted the birth of the realms from the emptiness of Oblivion.
Courtesans strolled down the road in their gorgeous gowns and delicate ways, hoping to find clients among the horde.
“Do you think you could be a courtesan?” I asked.
“No,” Wren said flatly. “I prefer to choose who I talk to.”
“And usually as little as possible.”
“I am who I am.”
“They’re impressive,” I said as one of the courtesans smiled with eager interest at a man working very hard to impress her with his flexed biceps. It was not working.
“They’ve trained their entire lives to be impressive.” She took a drink. “He’s looking at you again.”
“Who?”
“Jonas. The farrier’s son.”
I glanced subtly behind me and found him with a knot of other men from the district. He was tall and lanky, with blue eyes and auburn hair that had girls tittering around him like birds.
“He likes women. I happen to be one.”
“He’s pretty. I bet he’d be a good bounce.”
“He’s too young.”
“He’s our age.”
“Too green, then. I kissed him at Springmarket last year. He was a bad kisser. Very sloppy. Wouldn’t trust him with a bounce.” The prince, on the other hand, wasn’t a sloppy kisser.
“The prince is a Lys’Careth,” Wren said quietly, apparently able to read my mind now.
“I know what he is. I told him goodbye, and we got our coin, and it’s done.
” So why did I feel a wave of sadness every time I remembered the truth of it?
Why, when I’d told him to leave us alone, was I disappointed that he hadn’t ignored that directive and sent us a message from the palace?
I appreciated that he respected the line I’d drawn.
But a little part of me would have enjoyed a storybook ending—the prince on his destrier, begging for my hand because he’d never met anyone braver or more beautiful.
She slid the jar toward me. “Keep drinking. You’re still too sober.”
The women at the table behind us, who’d been on their bench before we arrived and had made it through several jars, were much less sober than we were.
“It’s been a week now since he’s come,” said one woman. “No one’s so much as seen the prince.”
“Maybe he’s dead.”
“Could be,” said another. “Could be Anima running the palace, keeping up pretenses. It’s all very suspicious.”
There were murmurs of agreement.
“Maybe he’s ugly.”
“That’s even worse than dead!” They all howled at that.
“Too much coin to be ugly. Probably holed up in his great palace and swimming in gold.”
“Maybe he’s with the girl who saved him. She’s probably rich as the emperor himself now.”
“I heard she was a servant.”
“No, she’s a courtesan.”
“No, she can see ghosts. Ran right into the crowd, pointing out ghosts everywhere. Ought to write a song about her.”
I sat up a little straighter.
“Or she made it all up. Didn’t see shite and just wanted the attention.”
Wren, who’d listened to it all with a flat expression, slammed down her cup and turned back to them. “Hey.” Her voice was like a bolt of thunder. “Lay off talk about the prince.”
The girls looked at each other. “Why should we? Mind your own gods-damned business.”
“There are guards and soldiers everywhere,” Wren said, pointing them out. “Looking and listening for treason. You want to spend Springmarket in the garrison dungeon with the rats?”
That had them looking at each other, then muttering into their drinks.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said when Wren turned back.
“I don’t want to hear about him, either.”
“I thought you said you didn’t care?”
“I don’t care about him. I care about you. And people talk too damned much.”
But she’d piqued their curiosity. I looked back and one of them, apparently the most sober of the group, had narrowed her gaze at me.
“Was it you?” she asked. “The girl who saved him?”
I could accept there were times when it was handy to be noticed. This—in a crowded inn in a market full of people—wasn’t one of them. “Saved who?”
“The prince, for the gods’ sake.”
I snorted. “How would I know a prince?”
“You’re pretty enough,” another girl said. “You should bounce him.” She wiggled her chest. “That could be your reward for saving his life.”
“You got the wrong person,” I muttered, and drank deeply.
Another woman shook her head. “Royals are trouble anyway. Best to stay as far away from them as possible.”
“Cheers to that,” Wren murmured, and lifted her cup.
“Everyone’s trouble. It’s the way of the world. Best get some joy out of it while you can.”
I wondered if they’d believe me if I told them what I’d done, what I’d seen.
That I’d fought bandits, chased an assassin in the woods, snogged the prince in a Vhranian caravanserai.
I didn’t think they’d believe any of it.
But it didn’t matter. I’d gotten my joy out of the prince, and that story was done.
On to the next one.
The parade led to a party, with musicians and a farandole dance beneath the glow of paper lanterns.
Jonas showed up and offered me his hand, and we joined the line of strongholders snaking down the road, most already out of breath from joy and laughter.
Dancing was still dancing, after all, and moving felt like freedom.
But when he tried to kiss me, I ducked my head and joined a different line.
There were more partners—young and old, skilled dancers and not—as we celebrated beneath the twin moons that shone luminously over the stronghold.
The scent of something delicious flowed through the market; a woman pushed a wooden cart bearing trays of fried dough knots.
I glanced back at the inn, found Wren in the window watching the world, waved my arms until she saw me, then pointed at the cart.
She didn’t smile—she’d warned me not to go wandering—but I got a thumbs-up for the food.
The crowd was thick and hungry, and I wasn’t the first to reach the seller. I pulled my purse from my tunic, then stared down at the drawstring coin pouch the prince had given me when we’d returned from Vhrania.