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.
