Feeling a little piece of me crumble away, I turn and place the pickaxe in the man’s awaiting palm, glancing up to see his eyes ignite.
“Hmm.” Weighing it in his hand, he wanders behind the counter, stamping my sudden urge to snatch it back and dash out the door. He drags it against the glass countertop, and I feel the shrill scratch on my heart, making my bones hurt just as much as my aching soul. A long gouge is left behind, and he clears his throat, looking at me over the rim of his spectacles. “Is there any way you can authenticate it?”
Another creak in the floor.
“It’s diamond, I assure you.”
He shrugs. “With no paperwork to confirm its validity, it’s as good as garbage.”
I open my mouth, about to plead with him when he stabs a finger at the ceiling. “But! I’m in a philanthropic mood.” He spins, grabs the freshly wrapped parcel, and sets it on the bench between us. “Just don’t speak of my generosity to anyone. I can’t afford to give charity to every barefooted urchin boy that wanders through my door.”
I reach for both my parcel and my coin, but he pinches the latter before jerking his chin toward the door.
“Off you go. Try not to murder anybody with that thing. The outer rim is no place for a boy like you.” He chuckles, snatching a looking glass off the table and giving me his back. “They’d eat you alive.”
I want to cry. Scream.
Take it all back.
I force myself to edge back a step, another, feeling my little brother slip from my stretched fingertips …
I jerk the door open and run from the store so fast I swear I leave my bleeding heart on the floor beside the counter.
Wild, restless rage swipes at my ribs.
The bell is still jingling fromherdashed departure as I step into the aisle and stalk toward the store’s rear, cloak fluttering in my wake. Cracking my neck from side to side, I pass the empty counter doused in lantern light.
They love their lanterns here. Think the bright can protect them from everything. Most of them are too young or uneducated to know that worse monsters used tothrivein the light.
Some of them still do.
I follow a whistling tune and the distinct aroma of roasted duck—a delicacy sourced from Ocruth. All I can smell isgreedas I step through the open doorway at the far corner of the room.
The office is such a contrast to the rest of the shop, padded with expensive furnishings from all over the continent: a chandelier dripping beads of amber; plush, velvet chairs studded with sterling; an almond-shaped shield hanging on the wall, carved from the impenetrable skull of an Ocean Drake; the tan pelt of a Rouste Dune Cat stretched across the ground, so big it leaves only glimpses of the blue stone beneath.
There’s even a Vruk talon mounted on his wall, long and curved and black.
The shopkeeper whistles away with his back to me, turning the dial on the tall, freestanding safe in the corner of the room.
My gaze is drawn to the glass statue of a broad male I recognize, his dreaded hair a transparent churn around his face, wrathful hunger consuming his lucid eyes, fangs bared as he hisses at nothing,lungesat nothing—the transparent Vruk talon he’s wielding paused mid-strike.
Must have cost him a lot of coin to procure that statue. To have it carved from the inhospitable heart of Arrin, dragged for days across the stark, windswept plains, then hauled on a barge down the River Norse without even a hairline fracture.
Nobody would go to such effort unless they were bribed or paid a handsome sum. Unless, of course, he did it himself.
But I somehow doubt that.
The safe clicks open.
“You know …” My words crack through the whistling tune, and the man whirls around so fast his spectacles slip off his face and clatter to the floor, Orlaith’s pickaxe clutched close to his chest. “The Shulák say the battlefield at Arastile is sacred. That mining from it will bring you eternal bad luck.”
“Wh-who are you?” he blurts, bending to retrieve his spectacles and thread them onto his scrunched face.
I turn to look straight at him from beneath my hood.
His mouth falls open, gaze flicking to the hilt of my sword that’s visible over my shoulder, then to the brooch at my nape—the Ocruth sigil. He drops into a low, sweeping bow. “High Master …”
Not tonight.
