Chapter 32
I adorned myself in Tashuna gold,
Like I was the most precious gift,
But when my true love came to claim my hand,
It was too laden to lift.
—Songs of Astola, collected and compiled by Mahira Nazir
Yaseema
If he thought I was just going to stay in my room quietly while I’d been shepherded around and he’d just told me this was a town where all the fae relics were made, he didn’t know me at all.
I slipped out as soon as Kiyan was gone, creeping back down the stairs and out of the front door of the caravanserai.
It was dusk, and the town was very different from what I’d seen at the palace and the city.
Every building, every streetlight, even the cobblestone streets were accented with gold.
Occasionally I’d bend down to the bricks of gold in the cobblestone streets and read ancient fae that had been inscribed there.
They were all words of protection, safety, and love.
When I turned the corner, I ended up in the bazaar that Kiyan mentioned.
I thought it might have closed, given that night was falling, but the bazaar was still bustling, the warm glow of the streetlights making everything look like a hazy dream of gold, jewels, and magic.
If Safiyya had been with me, she would have been raiding the gold stalls like a mad woman, filling her satchel with all the magical objects she could carry.
I walked through the market, pausing at a stall with a collection of rings, each one heavily engraved with ancient fae.
“What do they mean?”
The female who operated the stall had long dark hair and glowing blue eyes and looked as though she’d just been dragged through a swamp, wearing strips of fabric that fell off of her in waves.
Khapisi. I thought the word, having heard Kiyan say it.
She was a bog hag.
“They are for love,” said the khapisi, her voice raspy.
“How much do they cost?” I didn’t need a spell for love, but any ancient fae magical object sparked my interest.
“How much do you want to bargain, sweets? I can take your last breath, or your first one if you wish. Or I would be happy to part with one for the first memory of your mother, you don’t need to remember such a thing, do you?” She grinned at me, her mouth rows of sharp, jagged black teeth.
“She’s not bargaining with a khapisi, and you know better than to deal with humans, hag.”
The bog hag hissed at the man behind me, whose voice rumbled like the low roar of a river.
I turned and saw Kiyan, a mulish expression on his face, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Trying to escape?”
“How could I when you’re hunting me?” I returned, sweetly.
He leaned close to me, the smell of rain and pine and new spring taking over.
“If you wanted to see the night bazaar, you should have asked.”
“You seemed determined to lock me up.”
He reared back, a thick groove appearing in his brow. “It isn’t safe in Tashuna, not for anyone traveling with the Viceroy.”
“And not for you?”
“Especially not for me. This isn’t friendly territory for the Court of Salt. I want us to get in and out without causing any trouble. If it were up to me, we would have ridden through this place and stayed in the forest.”
“Well we’re here now, and I want to see the bazaar.”
He glared at me. “We should go back.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I could make you.”
“What are you going to do, wrap me in vines and throw me over your shoulder?” I arched a brow.
His tongue ran along his teeth. “That sounds like a great idea actually.”
“Who needs a peri ring for romance when I’ve got you.” I skipped past him, brushing by his hand when he tried to stop me. “At least let me look at the bazaar.”
“This isn’t the time to go shopping,” he growled.
“I’m just going to have a quick peek. I promise I’ll be back in my prison cell in an hour.”
He followed behind me, as I perused the large piles of tea at the next stall and then again as I inspected the goods of a swordsmith.
The excavators at the Citadel would die to get their hands on some of these artifacts.
I wished I could just transport them all back across the River and bury them across Astola.
I stopped to look at the gold bangles at the next stall, and a tall peri with golden hair and skin darker than the bark of a eucalyptus tree leaned forward to greet me.
But when her eyes caught on my bangles she froze, a frown tilting her face.
“Where did you get Tashuna gold like that, human?” Her voice was ageless, and reminded me of spongy moss with how soft and heady it was.
I knew that my mother’s bangles likely had magic in them, especially after they’d helped me with the dead halmasti when I’d burned inside it, but to hear it confirmed that they were Tashuna gold felt like a secret part of me unlocked.
My mother kept these for me. She’d been here. And then she’d gone back to save us.
I clutched my wrist to my chest. “They were my mother’s,” I said, not bothering to keep that private.
Kiyan’s attention was on me, the weight of his gaze trying to dig deeper, discover all my secrets.
But this secret even I didn’t know. He was welcome to find the answer that I wanted myself.
“Your mother had access to peri gold, then?”
“I don’t know where she got them.”
The peri held her hand out, gesturing for my wrist. She had such a calm air that I didn’t question it when I handed them to her. She examined the two thick bangles, tapping them.
“Hmm. One is missing.”
“What?” I looked at the two wide gold bands on my wrist, trying to see what she was talking about.
“Look.” She pushed the bangles together on my wrist, then twisted them so that they aligned.
I gasped when she slowly turned them at a certain angle and the partial engraving of a jasmine appeared.
The top petals lined up perfectly, together forming one third of the same type of engraving as on the vault in Astola, as the emblem on Kiyan’s pin.
“Just missing the stem.” She tapped on them again. “Then you’ll know what their power truly is.”
I gaped at her, emotion inexplicably rising up in me, my eyes burning. “Thank you,” I said, though it couldn’t encapsulate what she had made me feel with this simple knowledge.
“You don’t want any of my wares, not with those on your wrist.” She turned to her next customer.
Kiyan was quiet beside me as we walked through the rest of the bazaar. “Did you know your mother gave you peri gold?”
“No. I had no idea.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. I hadn’t been aware of their importance until fairly recently, but I still didn’t know where I stood with Kiyan enough to be totally honest with him.
Our conversations at the river last night and while we rode side by side had made me understand him much more than I wanted to.
We were two sides of a coin on each side of the River.
Only, it scared me what he was willing to do for his Court. Who would he kill, what depths would he go to? Was that the same level I was prepared to go?
“Come over here, I saw something you’ll like.”
He guided me to a stall filled with books piled atop each other like a library.
Some were leatherbound, with intricate detailing on the spine—lotus and jasmine flowers, carvings of hearth sprites and river crocodiles.
A giant hardback book sat on display, a hand painted gharial on the cover, it’s long snout and jagged teeth set in gold.
Some volumes had blackened edges, or were stained red with dye, designed like I’d never seen before.
Titles jumped out at me, histories and journals, folktales and song collections that I was itching to get my hands on.
Others had clearly been made with magic and had green curling vines sprouting from the spine, or words that seemed to disappear as I read them.
Most written in ancient fae, but I spied some in the common tongue.
I wanted to dive into the pages and never come up for air.
“By the River,” I exhaled, barely able to breathe.
“I take it that’s a good thing.”
I gripped Kiyan’s arm with a squeak when I saw a compendium of peri magic, my heart in my throat. “A very, very good thing.”
He chuckled, his laughter rumbling through him, causing him to shift closer to me.
Tearing my gaze away from the books at the table, I glanced up at his dark eyes, the lanterns from the festival making them glow warm and bright.
We were very close, so close I could see the tiniest dimple in his left cheek and the hint of a smile.
He nodded towards the books. “What are you waiting for?”
A startled laugh burst out of me and I began rifling through books, combing through all the volumes on ancient fae relics and magic that I could find.
There were handbooks on peri creatures, a detailed comparison guide of all the magical abilities across the different Courts, an anthology of poisons with ingredients I’d never heard of.
I even found a detailed book on how to transmute peri magic into Tashuna gold, creating tools that would fill your garden with vegetables, inspire animals to trust you, and assist you in finding infections and injuries on a body or forging weapons that would protect you better than any sword.
I poured over this one, though it seemed few peris could imbue gold with magic and the objects created were rare and valuable.
That certainly described Queen Azari’s crown.
I could’ve stayed there all night. I looked back at Kiyan, worried I was keeping him there too long, but he didn’t look bored.
Instead he was watching me read through the books with an all consuming expression—as if I were the stall of books to him.
At my worried glance, his face smoothed out, and he nodded back towards the stall.
“I’ll leave you to go through the books, I’m going to be over there.” I nodded, watching him walk to a bazaar stall a few down from the books, before I turned my attention back to the book on peri gold and jewelry making.
A few minutes later I lifted my head from my thick stack of books to see Kiyan speaking to a hooded figure at the end of the bazaar, his face pinched in frustration. I stood straighter, trying to see more of what was going on, when I felt a slight smack on my hand.
“Are you going to be buying these books, human? This isn’t a library.”
The bookseller was a mottled green creature, with thin, spiny wings that stretched above him, iridescent in the glow of the bazaar lights.
The beauty of his wings was incongruent with the grotesque way the features on his face were put together, as if he were made of frogs and moss and pieces of wet log.
“Um, I’m sorry, I don’t have any money.”
He harrumphed and pointed to my bangles. “What are those, then?”
I clutched my mother’s bangles to my chest. “These aren’t for sale.”
“Then sell something else. Your face is pretty enough, you could likely get quite a few things here with one of your ears, or that nose.”
I stared at him, my mouth falling open.
Right at that moment someone bumped into me, shoving me against the stacks of books.
“You shouldn’t be here alone, human,” a rough voice whispered in my ear.
But before I could respond, my arms were locked to my side, and I was yanked from the bazaar before I could even scream Kiyan’s name.