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.
Chapter 33
Sometimes I wonder if we are ever looking at the same moon, the same stars. Or if it’s just me, and everyone else is looking at the dirt.
—Letter from Kiyan to his family, unsent
Kiyan
“Where is she?” I had returned to the bookseller’s stall a few moments later but Yaseema was nowhere to be found. I knew better than to think she was walking around the bazaar, not when her stack of books was still piled in the middle of the stall and the one she’d been looking at was flipped open.
The bookseller shrugged, avoiding my eyes.
I gave him a thin smile. “I would bet a giant’s weight in gold that you know exactly who I am, and what I am capable of. So, let’s stop pretending, shall we?”
He swallowed thickly, his toady throat bobbing with strain. “They dragged her that way. You shouldn’t leave unenthralled humans alone if you care for their safety.”
I whipped toward the direction he pointed, a small laneway off the bazaar. I raised what little power I still had in my veins, and this time it wasn’t the breath of life I conjured, but the whisperings of death.
I bolted into the alley, sniffing the air for her distinctive scent.
There.
They’d taken her out of the village, and down to the woods at the back of the bazaar.
I was a blur of wind and leaves and vines as my feet pounded the earth, wishing I had my iron-footed steed. But Yaseema’s scent grew stronger with every step, and when I started to hear voices, I slowed my pace.
Yaseema was tied up on the forest floor, her hands behind her back and a gag in her mouth.
I slipped behind a eucalyptus tree, taking in the scene.
