After waiting a few more minutes, to be sure Evaine was settled into her shop and Anaya wasn’t going to come back downstairs,Rolan peeled himself off his pallet. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he was so wrapped in bandages that he almost didn’t need one. Everywhere he’d been cut, Evaine had smeared truth salve.
At least, hehopedit had been Evaine, and not Anaya.
Cheeks hot, he opened his small sack of belongings, all things Luc had given him. He was down to only one last shirt, and he pulled it on slowly, grimacing as the movements sent spiky jabs of pain through his body. When he was dressed, he had to sit for a few minutes just to blink away the stars in his vision. Nothing would banish the pain.
Rolan hunted all through the kitchen as quietly and quickly as he could, but his knives were nowhere to be found. They were probably upstairs, in Evaine’s room, and he couldn’t risk sneaking past Anaya.
Cursing the loss of them as he pocketed a dull paring knife, he then stole out the back door and into the alley, pausing only to collect his small stash of relics from their hiding place in the bricks. From a scrap pile around the corner he pulled an old rusty nail. He used it to quickly scratch an aleth in the paring knife’s blade. The double spiral was lopsided and uneven, but he hoped it would be enough to transform the knife from an ordinary kitchen peeler to an Arcane blade capable of storing magic, if it came to that.
He did not plan to return to the apothecary. He suspected that even if he did, he’d find the doors locked to him. Evaine wouldn’t forgive him a second running away.
He hesitated at the alley’s mouth, knowing this was his last chance to turn around. To be sensible. To prove Evaine wrong—that he wasn’t reckless and stupid.
But then he looked down at his boots. Rather, the boots that had belonged to Mylas, Luc’s dead son. The son who’d died in a fire, just like the fire that Rolan had plunged into to save Anaya.
He couldn’t go back. Maybe hewasreckless and stupid, but he wouldn’t leave Luc to fight this thing on his own. Not when Rolan was sure he could help. Not when he could prove to Luc that he’d made a mistake in sending Rolan away.
All he had to do was show Luc he had something to offer, that he was worth keeping. That hehadlearned everything the man had tried to teach him. He could be quick and clever and helpful, just like Anaya. He could be a perfect apprentice. And he would start by finding the man posting the secrets around the city, stirring the people against the Arcanist.
He would prove himself, and Luc would never throw him away again.
- CHAPTER 30 -SHADY BUSINESS
Ordinarily, Rolan would have taken to the rooftops for a mission like this, clearing the streets in daring, dramatic leaps.
In his condition,climbingto the rooftops was out of the question, much less jumping across them. So he had to settle for sneaking through the streets, no easy feat given they were always brightly lit. Any shadow big enough to hide a boy could also hide a Cryptic. He ached for his knives.
“Where are you going, Cabbot?” he muttered.
The man he was following was two blocks ahead, ambling easily, hands in his pockets and shoulders slouched. As if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Rolan would bet that those pockets were also full of papers, each one with some incriminating secret written on it.
Cabbot was a fence, a guy you could sell stolen stuff to. Then he’d turn around and resell it, clean, to some unsuspecting, honest shopkeeper. Or maybe to asuspecting, slightly less-than-honest shopkeeper who’d decided the risk of jail was worth the guarantee of profit. Rolan had sold a few things to Cabbot himself, though nothing of much value. The man had a face scarred by pox and a personality scarred by drink, and Rolan preferred to avoid him most of the time.
But tonight Rolan was hunting, and Cabbot was his prey.
He ducked behind a corner as Cabbot suddenly turned, peering carefully to be sure he hadn’t been spotted. Cabbot was clearly suspicious of being followed, which was a pretty sure way togetyourself followed at this time of night. Nothing got you robbed quicker than acting like you had something worth robbing, and Cabbot was very much acting like a man with secrets. Having already come eye to eye—or allsixeyes—with one of Cabbot’s secrets, Rolan wasn’t eager to meet another, but he pressed on anyway once Cabbot turned back around.
The man eventually sauntered south, toward the river. Rolan shivered, following the same path he’d taken three nights ago. A path that had nearly gotten him killed. But if he was right about Cabbot, the man was going to the river for the exact same reason Rolan had: to hunt Cryptics.
Or… to meet someoneelsewho’d been hunting Cryptics.
Cabbot didn’t go to the river. Instead he turned left and stopped in front of a ramshackle inn, its slatted board walls slimy with mold and its sign hanging by a single chain. The Duke’s Honor. There wasn’t anything remotely honorable about the place, except perhaps for that single chain, which was really doing its level best to keep the sign from dropping on some poor patron’s head.
Rolan slinked along, giving the place a wide berth. There was a balcony clinging questionably to the upper story, a perfect vantage point. Normally he could scurry up one of the supports and over the railing in a blink. Well, inthreeblinks at the very most. But he was already exhausted from shadowing Cabbot through the shadowless city, and he was pretty sure the stitches on his hip had opened. Something warm and wet was oozing down his leg. Hehopedit was blood, anyway. Any other explanation would be painfully embarrassing.
Guiltily, Rolan’s eyes slid to the pouch on his belt where he’d put the relics…
“No,” he whispered to himself. “I can’t.”
In the end he ground his teeth together and made the climb, though the pain it brought him made tears squeeze from his eyes. When he finally hauled himself over the top, feeling like he weighed as much as a horse, he lay on his back, gasping in agony.
Only through sheer stubbornness—truly one of his underrated qualities—did he manage to crawl across the rickety boards. The one advantage of his frustratingly slow pace was that he didn’t make the old wood creak, at least not too much.
By the time he shimmied himself into a position where he could see Cabbot again, the scab had already met up with his… partner in crime? Client? Just who was he meeting, anyway?
Rolan slid forward another inch, taking a splinter in his ankle for it, but also getting a look at the new player in this wretched little performance.
