Chapter 2
Chapter Two
As she passed by the Mighty Leaf’s front windows, Calya Helm paused beneath the eaves to reorient herself before going inside. The sounds of merriment from the café’s grand reopening spilled out into the street, words and laughter blurring together.
Under the guise of removing her cloak’s hood, she snuck a glance at her reflection in the teashop’s window.
No sign of a pink tinge in her cheeks. Good.
Not that the ranger had made her blush. It wasn’t him but the briefly uncomfortable circumstances she’d found herself in, feeling pangs of… conscience, where he was concerned.
Lowe had seemed taken aback by her actions.
Calya’s lips tensed with the tiniest of smiles.
People underestimated her to their detriment.
At only twenty-seven years of age and having grown up in her elder sister Anadae’s seemingly perfect shadow, Calya was used to surprising people.
Rudely. She delighted in it. Usually, her victims were fellow businesspeople or merchants in the maritime logistics trade.
It wasn’t often—or ever—that she had dealings with a Sentinel of the Valley.
Not that Lowe was a victim, or even a true adversary.
More of a tool, and she’d used him accordingly, but that didn’t mean Calya took pleasure in the ranger’s own work being so negatively affected.
She wasn’t altogether heartless. Working on it, but not there yet.
So, she felt a smidgen of guilt for causing him hardship.
She’d have done it again, of course. But perhaps if she’d convinced Lowe to look into the Coalition’s storage shed quicker, things would be different.
They might’ve discovered the stolen plants with enough time for him to do whatever he’d planned to stop the Coalition while managing to keep himself on their good side.
Still, the Coalition of Trade tended to know when someone was trying to exploit them—an activity the organization enjoyed so long as it was them doing the exploiting—so Calya didn’t think much of Lowe’s chances.
It was all moot now anyway. She’d come to Renstown to ensure that the Coalition didn’t sail to the aid of their colleague, Bioon Song, as she’d tried to ruin a project at Sylveren University, and in that Calya had succeeded.
With her help, Eunny Song had foiled her mother and defended their rare plant.
In doing so, they’d secured the first remedy capable of healing someone sickened by the poison ravaging the small kingdom of Rhell.
It was a triumph for all. Of that, there was no doubt.
Peering through the window, Calya looked for any sign of Anadae, but her elder sister didn’t appear to be part of the crowd inside the Mighty Leaf. Perhaps she’d gone next door to Eunny’s repair café, Song’s Scrap.
Calya thought about going in search of her, but weariness made up her mind.
Even on a windrunner-class ship, it would take an hour to get back to the Helm Naval office in Renstown.
She’d already crossed once today, at the crack of dawn, to help with the last finishing touches before Song’s Scrap opened, and bed and HNE’s latest trade logs called to her more than revelries.
With a final, mournful glance as a server walked past the window with a tray of winter-themed spiced teacakes, Calya made her way to the town of Sylvan’s small harbor. She caught the last ship of the evening and settled in for the trip across the lake to Renstown.
Making herself as comfortable as a person prone to seasickness could be, Calya reached for her belt purse and the ginger candies she relied on to make the trip bearable.
Her fingers scraped the bottom, no organza bag of sugar and herbs to be found. All she managed to scrounge up was a single empty paper wrapper.
“Shit,” Calya hissed. She’d been planning to spend the trip catching up on correspondence from her father’s trustee, Wembly.
Despite his dour manner, he was admittedly an efficient man, but their business relationship was tepid at best. Sometimes, Calya wondered if her father had instructed him not to oversee and advise her in the running of Helm Naval Engineering but to oppose and question every decision she made.
Given that Andrin Helm had named Wembly to act in his stead rather than officially relinquish control of the company to her, whenever she found herself diametrically opposed to the trustee, she lost.
Wembly would want at least a brief discussion as setup for a longer meeting once she arrived at Helm Naval’s office in Renstown. It would be unwise to go into any meeting without having reviewed the letters he’d couriered to her while she visited Anadae and friends in Sylvan.
Before she could disembark in hopes of finding a dockside vendor with the motion sickness candies, the ship’s horn blared.
Calya grimaced as the blend of active and passive spellwork that enabled the windrunner’s great speed came alive.
Her stomach protested the way the floor moved beneath her feet and the tingle of magic lacing the air.
Calya dropped back into her seat with a muttered, “Goddess fucking break me.”
She’d put off Wembly until the morning. She wouldn’t even be lying when she claimed sickness. The tea she’d had at the Sentinels’ office was already threatening to reappear.
Closing her eyes, Calya let her mind drift, searching for anything but the nausea building at the back of her throat.
Lowe’s scowling face came to mind. Those piercing eyes.
Nice ones, Calya would give him that. Gray, like the storm clouds so often present in the Valley’s skies.
He always seemed to wear an expression that matched.
Brow perpetually furrowed, jaw tight. There was a ruggedness to him, a bit of weathering in his face, a tousled quality to the dark hair that fell past his shoulders.
It all made for a hard, imposing man. But then, Calya had never been interested in soft or sweet.
Lowe wasn’t quite a barrel of a man, but his chest was broad enough to fill out his rangers’ leathers.
The forest green of the Sentinels’ cloaks suited him well.
He was a bit older than her usual partners.
Gruffer and more growly, too. None of that bothered her. As distractions went, he’d do nicely.
Calya’s lips twitched with a smile. There’d been something charged about their interaction at the meeting.
Tension, but the antagonism had lessened more and more.
She’d nearly made him smile, even if it was at her own expense.
Their tension was a type that needed only a nudge of encouragement to go from wary to smoldering, unless she was mistaken about the look in Lowe’s eyes, and rarely did Calya make those kinds of mistakes.
What secrets did the ranger keep locked behind his stoicism? She’d seen the barest hint before she left. A whisper of wicked humor. It left her hungry for—
“Caly?”
She jerked in her seat, eyes snapping open.
Her elder sister, Anadae, peered down at her.
“Ana… dae.” Calya sat up, mentally chastising herself for relapsing into her sister’s former, now discarded, nickname. “Dae. What are you doing here? I thought you’d be with Eunny and the others.”
“I stepped out to say goodbye to a colleague heading back to Rhell.” Anadae slid into the seat next to Calya. She dug in her cloak pocket and pulled out a small pouch of ginger candies, dropping it into Calya’s lap. “You’re already looking green around the edges.”
Calya greedily stuffed two of the candies into her mouth. “I’d take offense, but I don’t care.” She breathed a sigh of relief as the queasiness in her stomach abated.
“I was planning to stop by the HNE office tomorrow, but then I saw you boarding,” Anadae said, helping herself to a candy. She ignored Calya’s squawk of protest. “What? I like how they taste.”
“You should’ve mentioned you needed something at the office. I could’ve brought it over.”
Anadae shook her head hard enough for her wavy, dark brown hair to bounce.
“It’s no trouble.” She glanced around to make sure the other passengers were occupied before continuing in a lower voice, “Have you had any more issues with the joint protection deal you worked on with Brint and Avenor Guard?”
Calya’s eyes narrowed, but she kept her tone as calm as her sister’s. “There’s still some accounting that needs to be straightened out, but nothing overly concerning as far as I know.” She waited a moment, watching Anadae’s face. “What don’t I know, sister dearest?”
“It might be nothing,” Anadae said. “The environmental resto project Brint drove into the ground out in Desmond’s Landing—”
“The one that caused his fuckery with my route deal with AG,” Calya said.
Anadae nodded. “Some of the mages who joined the remaining staff to get things in order are from SU. About a month ago, they wrote requesting some of the wards Ez and I made. Not prime stock, so we sent a few that were marked as seconds,” she said, naming Ezzyn Sor’vahl, the youngest prince of Rhell as well as her partner in both love and work.
Together, they’d devised the containment warding system keeping the poison from completely destroying his homeland.
“Why did they want them?” Calya asked.
“Apparently, to see if there were relevant applications of technique. But we never heard back.” Anadae’s expression turned grim. “I wanted to see if there was an error in the HNE logs when I made the request.”
“The logs,” Calya said slowly, wracking her brain for any memory of such a request.
“They were supplemented to a shipment following the new route with Avenor Guard,” Anadae said. “There should be records and receipt of payment. Ez insisted on paying for the additional stop.”