“First, I’m going to buy you a mead,” he says, thieving one off the tray of a passing barmaid when she has her back turned.
I raise a brow.
He gives me a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do look and ushers me toward a sheltered corner table with two leather seats, pinching a cap off one and slapping it atop my head. He nudges it low, casting half my face in shadow and concealing my mess of wet hair that’s dripping all over my shoulders. “Then,you’re going to sit right here until the shift swap in an hour and hope like hell the High Master doesn’t come back and recognize you through all that mud.”
I take the corner seat and tuck myself out of view. “He’s out?”
Gun shifts his own chair, shielding me from all angles. “Yes,” he says, tipping his mug and drawing a hearty gulp, frosting his mustache. “Why the plant?”
I twirl my mug-o’-bells round and round. “They remind me of someone ...”
“They’re also one of the thirty-four ingredients required to make a certain outlawed drug.”
My stare whips up, mouth dropping open. “How do you—”
“My Enry. He’s a botanist with a big mouth. We have a plant shop in the city beneath my parents’ old house.”
“Your partner?”
“The one and only.”
I lift my drink, sipping the sweet liquid that’s crisp and cool and tastes a bit like honey. “Then Idefinitelylike him.”
He grunts.
I pick at the dried mud on my arms, and it falls to the tabletop riddled with discolored rings and burn marks.
“What do you know about thisMadame StringsVanth mentioned on the ship?”
Gun’s hand pauses mid-lift, and he takes a stretched moment to set the mug back on the table.
Quietly.
“You have something you want to know?”
Lots of things.
I rest my cheek against my bunched fist and shrug, looking up at him from beneath the rim of my cap.
He clears his throat and checks the window nearby that reflects the rowdy crowd. “She’s a nomadic merchant who claims no color and never seems to age. Comes and goes as she pleases,” he finally grinds out. “Sells herwaresin the city square. She can sometimes be found around a campfire surrounded byimpressionablechildren who gobble up her stories like they’re spiked sweets.”
“And you don’t believe them?”
“I don’ttrusther,” he growls, the words grating across my skin as he drains his mug.
I frown into mine, like all the answers I seek are swirling at the bottom ...
Hate to admit it, but Vanth was right. Though provoked, that creaturedidend up almost sinking our ship in a wild lash of fury—just like in the stories he claimed to have heard from thisMadame Strings.
I know it’s a long shot, but perhaps ...
Perhaps she knows something aboutme.
The real me.
The closer I creep to the mountains, the colder it gets. Like one of the Gods drained all the warmth from the world. The biting wind tills up flurried curls or snow, the half-moon throwing patches of light disrupted by racing clouds.
I can’t see the Alps through the lantern’s flaming aura, even as the trees thin along The Stretch—the band of barren land at the mountains’ feet. But Ifeeltheir nearness like a waiting giant; can hear it in the way the icy snow cracks beneath my boots.
