Chapter 20
VANN
Iknock.
“Go away,” a woman calls from within. The voice is dry as dirt.
“I can’t.” I hope I sound pitiful enough to catch her interest.
A long moment passes while I wait. And then, a latch scrapes, and a green eye peers through the crack. “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it.”
“If I were selling, I’d be in a brighter street,” I say. “I’m looking for Neryth.”
Silence. The door hesitates. “That name’s out of fashion.”
“So is mercy in this fucking city that ignores begging children and turns away refugees,” I answer. “But I still need both.”
She tries to shut me out. I plant my palm against the wood—not hard, just enough to promise I won’t be scared away. “Mrath gave me your name.”
The door doesn’t move. “I don’t know who that is.”
Shit. Desperate, I continue. “Six nights until the hunt, the ball they want to use to introduce the new consort.”
“I need to be there,” I say, pitching my voice low
The crack widens a fraction. I catch a sliver of stormglass eyes, a hand ink-stained silver at the fingertips. “Who are you?”
“Someone who won’t cause you harm,” I breathe, choosing my words carefully.
A breath. Then the door opens on a room that smells of vinegar and soot.
Worktables, ruined frames, and strings of tiny mirrors jittering lamplight like fish scales.
She’s older than the rumor. Her skin is paper-thin, and her brown hair shot through with pure white.
I wonder if she can see me, though I suppose we are more enemies than distant kin.
She looks at me the way a whetstone looks at a blade.
“Inside,” she says at last. “Quickly.”
I cross the threshold—and the world tilts.
At first, I think that I must’ve crossed a ward, that she is trying to kill me, but she doesn’t move. Just watches.
It starts as a tremor under my ribs, a wrong note in a familiar song.
Then the wrong note becomes a scream. Pain detonates behind my sternum, white-hot and absolute.
My knees hit the floorboards. The air burns my throat like salt water.
The Fuegorra—Arlet—flares across my senses for the barest heartbeat, like a candle smothered between fingers.
And then nothing.
I clutch my chest. My Fuegorra is still there. My heart still beats.
What is this pain?
Arlet’s face fills my vision. I worry. I am…terrified. When I slump against the wall, it knocks back the cloak that has been partially concealing my face.
The old woman gasps at my blue skin.
“Don’t move,” Neryth snaps. She grabs onto a pair of glittering, undoubtedly sharp scissors. “Why have you come here, cave rat? Make one move, and you will die on the street.”
I drag in a ragged breath. The pain ebbs to a cold ache. “Please. I mean you no harm. I need—” Another wave of pain radiates through me. “I need a new face.”
That gets her attention.
“So you can slaughter my people?” she asks.
“Only the same ones who cast you out. Wouldn’t your god Doros approve of that? An eye for an eye? Is that not wisdom?”
She frowns. Her mouth twists. “You are either brave or stupid.”
“Both,” I say. “I need a glamour your people can’t see through.”
She studies me, taking the blue at my throat where the hood can’t hide it all. “You smell of old fire.” A beat. “It can be done.”
“I expected as much.”
For a long moment, she says nothing. Her eyes narrow, weighing what kind of grief she’s looking at. My breathing is still uneven, and I can feel the dull throb of the Fuegorra echoing beneath my ribs.
“You’ve lost something,” she says quietly. “I can see it.”
“I can pay,” I manage. “It doesn’t look like you have had much opportunity for sales lately. I don’t even know how you still keep going.”
I realize I’ve said the wrong thing when the corners around her mouth tighten.
My hand quickly moves to the pouch at my belt, and my fingers brush the seed.
I pause, then pull free a small handful of rough-cut citrine gems—they still carry some of the song from the deep, just the same as the day Liana gave them to me.
I do not think the woman can hear them, but her eyes sharpen. “Enduar gems,” she mutters. “You’re either desperate or foolish to bring those here. They’re worth more than a dozen lives in this city.”
“They’re all I have left.” Besides, where I come from, these types of things are abundant. Living outside of the greed imposed by cities such as these is a blessing. One I will never forget if I am allowed to go home.
She stares at the gems for a long time, jaw tightening as if weighing her pride against her need.
Then, with a sharp exhale, she snatches them from my palm.
“Fine. I’ll help you. But if you die in that palace, you better not mention me on your way out of this life.
I’ll be sure to spend every last one of these before word reaches me. ”
“That seems fair.”
“Good,” she says curtly, tucking the gems into her apron. “Now hold still before I change my mind.”
She works. The tremor in her fingers vanishes when she starts pulling thread from the air—filaments fine as spider silk, silver as spilled moon. She twists truth and lies together until lace forms. When she lifts it, it dances in the still air of her shop.
“Don’t breathe,” she says, and lays the lace across my shoulders.
The web settles, seeps, finds the edges of me, and smooths them the way water tames a fire. In the fragments on her table, I watch my shape un-blue and my features change. I become unremarkable and turn into a dusk-brown elf with nothing to recommend me.
“It will hold for a fortnight,” Neryth says, knotting the last thread at my throat. “If you don’t feed it emotion or blood. It will last longer with the moon, shorter with your temper.”
“Twelve days is enough,” I say, thinking of the five days till the ball. “More than enough.”
“Even still, I recommend you keep to thresholds and half-light,” she continues, all craft and no pity.
“The palace guards aren’t so smart as to see through my magic, but the way you walk—the way you hold yourself—sticks out like a sore thumb.
Four doors down there is a tailor. His name is Flae Sprig—he might know who Mrath is.
Use her name. Get a costume for the masquerade, ask him to help you stick out less. ”
I nod and adjust the weight of my cleaver under the cloak. The glamour shivers once with the motion, then stills, obedient to my breath.
“Now is the time for you to leave.”
She unlatches the door. The lane outside is a throat of cold, the city’s glow a distant pulse. She pauses, eyeing the rigid set of my jaw. “That emptiness you feel right now won’t kill you, troll. But it will make you clumsy. Don’t let it.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.” Her gaze flicks to the faint, invisible place over my heart where my Fuegorra sings for me alone. “When your time runs out, that’s it. Don’t come back.”
I pull the hood low and step out. The air feels thinner. I keep one hand at my chest. Somewhere beyond the mirrored hill, Arlet is alive. Hurt, but alive. That is enough to move.
I head east, where the palace spears the sky and the spires catch the moon. The glamour is almost detectable on my skin, like a sheer blanket. It should hold. I pray it holds.
Soon, I will light a blazing fire on those ramparts to signal for Seraph to retrieve us.
“I’m coming,” I murmur. “Please forgive me when I do.”
Without another word, I leave this place to find the tailor.