Chapter Twelve The Night Market
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Night Market
The fourth Trial began with everyone being kidnapped politely.
At dusk, candidates were told to dress in ordinary clothes without insignia. Their wrist bands were covered with cloth. One by one, they were taken through service tunnels and loaded into unmarked trams.
Anya's tram carried eight candidates, including Sela and Mirel. No one knew the destination.
"If this is another water emergency," Sela said, "I am throwing you off the tram."
"Reasonable."
Mirel peered through the slatted window.
"We're going south."
"How can you tell?" Sela asked.
"Freight-yard smell."
Anya looked at her.
Mirel shrugged. "My family may be terrible, but we do know transport."
The tram stopped in the Lower Crown district.
Anya had never been there. Tour broadcasts showed palace avenues, museums, government gardens. They did not show streets where ten families shared courtyard pumps beneath royal towers visible on the horizon.
Director Kelm waited beside a closed market gate.
"Tonight you will move through the South Night Market anonymously. Each of you receives twenty silver marks. Your task is to return in four hours with an item that best represents what Aldermere needs from its next royal consort."
Sela stared at him.
"An item?"
"Yes."
"We're shopping for political philosophy?"
Kelm ignored her.
"You may speak to citizens. You may spend all, some, or none of your marks. You may not reveal candidate status. Hidden evaluators are present. Public filming will be delayed until after the Trial to preserve anonymity."
The gate opened.
Music, smoke, lanterns, and bodies flooded the street beyond. Anya smiled despite herself.
For the first time in weeks, no one knew her number. She disappeared into the crowd.
The market ran beneath old rail arches. Vendors sold spiced potatoes, repaired boots, illegal foreign novels, mechanical parts, dyed scarves, secondhand schoolbooks. Children darted between stalls carrying trays of tea.
Anya spent nothing for the first hour. She talked.
A baker said the next royal consort needed ears.
A tram mechanic said a spine.
An old woman selling buttons said a shovel.
"A shovel?"
"For all the manure in the palace."
Anya laughed so hard she bought three buttons she did not need.
At a tool stall, she found a small brass valve key like the ones used on public pumps. Simple. Useful. Shared access. Too obvious. She kept walking.
Near the south end of the market, a crowd had gathered around a broken communal pump. Water trickled from the base.
A child held a bucket under it one slow drip at a time.
The pump casing was old Greybridge pattern. She crouched.
"How long has it leaked?"
The child's mother eyed her. "Three days. City ticket says two more before repair."
"Have a wrench?"
"Do you?"
Anya smiled.
Ten minutes later, she had borrowed tools from a stall and removed the access plate. The packing nut had split.
Easy fix if she had a replacement. She did not.
A voice behind her said, "Use leather." Anya's hands froze.
Lucen stood in the crowd wearing a plain brown coat and a cap pulled low. No insignia. No visible guard.
"What are you doing here?"
"Shopping for political philosophy."
She stared. He crouched beside her.
"Leather strip around the stem as temporary packing. It will hold a day."
"How do you know that?"
"I read your maintenance manual after Southworks."
Something warm and stupid moved through her chest.
"That may be the least royal thing you've ever said."
"Thank you. I practice."
They bought a scrap of leather for two copper bits.
Anya cut it with the vendor's knife, packed the stem, tightened the nut, and reopened flow.
Water surged clear into the basin. The child cheered. No camera was visible. No score updated.
Anya felt better than she had after any Trial.
The mother tried to pay them. Anya refused.
Lucen accepted one fried pastry instead and split it with her as they walked away.
"You realize you're interfering with candidate evaluation," she said.
"I am participating anonymously."
"You're the prince."
"Very few people look at faces while eating."
"Your face is on money."
"Fortunately no one has much of it."
She glanced at him.
The joke was bitter beneath the humor.
"Do you come here often?"
"Not enough."
"Can you?"
"With security planning. Tonight the Trial gave me cover."
They wandered through the market together without discussing whether they should.
Anya forgot to look for an item.
Lucen bought a chipped ceramic cup from a potter because the woman had repaired it with metal staples instead of discarding it.
"Too symbolic," Anya said.
"You bought buttons."
"They are practical."
"You don't have anything to button."
"Future planning."
At a bookstall, Lucen paused over a banned history of the pre-Compact civil war. The bookseller squinted at him.
"You look familiar."
Anya grabbed Lucen's arm.
"He owes money everywhere. Common face."
The bookseller nodded as if that explained it. They escaped into an alley.
Lucen laughed silently against the brick wall.
"Common face?"
"I panicked."
"My portrait is on the five-mark note."
"You look thinner on currency."
"I will inform the engraver."
Their laughter faded.
The alley was narrow and dark. Lantern light from the market touched one side of Lucen's face.
Anya became aware that her hand was still wrapped around his forearm. She let go. Neither spoke.
The archive kiss existed between them like a secret door neither had closed.
"We said we wouldn't," she whispered.
"We lied."
"You admitted that too easily."
"I'm learning honesty from you."
She should have stepped away.
Instead she looked at his mouth. Lucen touched her cheek. This kiss was slower.
No panic. No dust. No classified laws pressing around them.
Just warmth and the distant noise of the market.
Anya slid one hand into his hair beneath the cap.
He made a quiet sound that went straight through her.
She forgot the Trials for three impossible seconds.
Then someone shouted from the street.
"Candidate!"
They jumped apart. Sela rounded the corner. She stopped. Her eyes widened. Lucen closed his eyes.
Anya wanted the ground to open.
Sela looked from one to the other.
"I have several questions."
"No," Anya said.
"I wasn't going to ask now."
"Good."
"I was going to save them for when I can enjoy your suffering properly."
Lucen adjusted his cap.
"Candidate Morcant."
Sela curtsied badly.
"Common-faced stranger."
He laughed despite himself.
At the end of the Trial, Anya returned with the brass valve key after all.
When asked what Aldermere needed from its next royal consort, she held it up.
"Access," she said. "Not to the palace. To systems. To information. To the places where small failures become crises because nobody important has to live with them."
She finished first. Again.
Lucen returned with the repaired cup. The public loved them both.
By midnight, the broadcast office had identified him in market footage and released clips of the two of them repairing the pump together.
They did not have footage of the alley. Sela did. Not with a camera. With memory. That was worse.
? ? ?
Sela waited exactly eleven minutes after they returned from the Night Market before cornering Anya in the laundry room.
"I have demonstrated extraordinary restraint."
Anya folded a borrowed cloak.
"Go away."
"You kissed the prince in an alley."
"Quiet."
"An alley."
"It was a structurally sound alley."
Sela sat on a linen chest.
"I need details."
"You need a hobby."
"This is my hobby."
Anya turned.
"Nothing is happening."
Sela made a face.
"You keep using that word after things happen."
"We kissed twice."
"Twice?"
Anya closed her eyes.
"Forget I said that."
"Never."
"Sela."
Her friend softened.
"Fine. Serious again. Does he know you want to lose?"
"Yes."
"Does he want you to win?"
Anya thought of Lucen's complicated warnings, the bargain, the way he watched her scores with dread and fascination.
"No."
She believed that then.
"Does he want to marry you?"
"We have not discussed marriage."
"You are in a marriage competition."
"Exactly why I refuse to discuss it."
Sela considered.
"And what happens if you get Released?"
Anya's hands stopped on the cloak.
She had imagined Release every day.
Train home. Mira at the station. Greybridge waterworks. Her folding bed. Nemi stealing her boots.
She had not imagined leaving Lucen. The omission frightened her.
"I go home."
"And him?"
"He stays here."
"You sound pleased."
"I sound practical."
"Same expression?"
"Do not start."
The Trial office made avoidance impossible the next morning.
Candidates attended a market-review breakfast where public reaction metrics were displayed on large screens.
Anya's brass valve key had tested highest among returned objects. Lucen's repaired cup ranked third.
Their joint pump repair had generated the strongest emotional response of the Trial cycle.
A broadcast analyst used the phrase "complementary service archetypes." Anya wanted to die.
Lucen sat two tables away, expression carefully blank. Senn watched both of them. That mattered more than embarrassment.
After the briefing, Lucen found Anya in the corridor.
"We need to be less obvious."
"I was about to say that."
"Were you?"
"Do not look pleased."
"I'm not."
"Your face is."
He rubbed one hand over his mouth.
"Senn has requested private compatibility footage from future meetings."
"Meaning more cameras."
"Meaning fewer blind angles."
Anya remembered the alley.
"Then we stop."
The words hurt on the way out. Lucen's face changed.
"If that's what you want."
"It is what makes sense."
"Not the same question."
"Sense is the only safe one."
He looked at her for several seconds.
"All right."
Again, reasonable. Again, infuriating. They separated. That should have ended it.
Instead the day became full of absences.
Anya noticed him at lunch and did not sit near him.
She noticed him speaking with Mirel and disliked the irrational twist in her stomach.
She noticed him leave the judge balcony during candidate medical briefings and wondered where he went.
At sunset, the palace hosted a charity music recital with candidates seated in formal rows. Junia performed piano.
Anya had not known she could play.
Junia sat at the black instrument under a single light and became someone else—not quieter, but larger. The piece began delicate, then built into something restless and sharp. Anya forgot the cameras.
When it ended, the room stood. Junia bowed, cheeks flushed.
Later, in the common room, Anya said, "You lied about being a school instructor." Junia blinked.
"I teach music."
"That counts as concealment."
"You never asked what subject."
Sela pointed at Junia.
"See? Dangerous."
The evening softened around them.
Mirel opened a bottle of expensive mineral water sent by a sponsor and poured it into mismatched kitchen cups as an act of class warfare. They talked about homes.
Sela's cliffs. Junia's students. Mirel's freight docks. Tarin's barracks.
Anya described Greybridge during spring floods when every pump crew worked through the night and strangers brought them soup.
"You love it," Mirel said.
"Of course."
"Even with rationing?"
"Especially because I know what is wrong with it."
Mirel looked at her cup.
"I don't know if I love my family or only feel responsible for them."
No one made a joke. Tarin said, "Could be both." Mirel nodded. Anya thought of Lucen.
Want and responsibility. Love and obligation. The Crown had spent forty-seven years pretending those things were interchangeable.
She did not want to repeat the mistake privately.
At midnight, she left the common room and found Lucen in the dark corridor outside.
He had probably come to see Ren, whose security office was nearby. They stopped.
No camera directly above them, but one at each end. Lucen looked tired.
"Good recital."
"Junia is terrifying."
"Agreed."
Silence. Anya should have walked away.
"I miss you," she said.
The honesty shocked both of them. Lucen's face softened painfully.
"It's been one day."
"I know. Embarrassing."
"Very."
"Do not enjoy this."
"Impossible."
She laughed quietly. He did not move closer. That mattered.
"Stopping is still sensible," she said.
"Probably."
"I hate sensible."
"I have noticed."
They stood six feet apart, wanting something neither trusted the palace to leave untouched.
Anya finally nodded toward his apartments.
"Good night."
"Good night."
She walked away.
At the corner, she looked back. Lucen was still there. He raised one hand. She raised hers. No kiss. No touch.
Somehow it felt more intimate than the alley.