Page 50 of Turncloak

Excitement swept through Saffron. If she was going to find a wild weaverwick wand anywhere, it was here.

The difficulty, however, was going to be spotting one in the first place. As the author of From Sacred to Sacrosanct had written, it was almost impossible to discern what sort of wick a wand possessed. A skilled wandmaker might be able to identify it from sight or feel, but these vendors were not skilled wandmakers. They were crooks and criminals who relied on the steady belt-feed of contraband from pirates and pickpockets, and they didn’t care for the class or creed of a wand beyond what they might be able to sell it for.

Strolling toward the first stall on the street, Saffron smiled at the vendor before quickly regretting her decision. The man immediately sat up straighter, narrowing his heavily hooded eyes and drawing a knife from his belt in warning.

Saffron didn’t know a word of Mersinan beyond the name of the wand market, so she switched to the common tongue, hoping the vendor was familiar.

“Weaverwick?” she asked, sweeping a hand over his small display of wands, most of which were splintered and shabby, perhaps not even wands at all but rather small branches snapped from trees and half-heartedly varnished.

He simply shook his head, scratching at his patchy ginger whiskers. Either he spoke none of the common tongue, or he had no weaverwick wands to speak of.

Many of the subsequent stalls went the same way: hostility, language confusion, terse head shakes. Some greedy, searching looks, as though examining her person for pouches of coin that might be stolen. One recognized the embroidered moon phases on her cloak and began spitting at her like an alleycat. Eventually, she stopped asking questions and instead relied upon that most ancient of magics: intuition.

One stall was a little fancier than the others. The legs of its table had decoratively carved spindles, and the wands were arranged neatly in identical boxes stamped with a mourncrow logo. A pretty, dark-skinned mage stood behind them in a blood-orange Wielder’s cloak, with coarse, close-cropped black hair and a dagger tattooed along each cheek in white ink.

There were a surprising number of higher-value pieces on offer, several of which had ascenite handles—an expensive rarity—and a handful studded with Irisian jewels. The other vendors shot the orange-cloaked stallholder vitriolic looks, and Saffron wondered how the mage kept them from ganging up, slaughtering her, and stealing her superior wares. Perhaps the daggers on her cheekbones signaled that she too was a member of some lethal criminal organization.

Shivering slightly in the shade beneath the cream canvas parasol, Saffron locked her gaze onto a silver birch wand engraved with something that looked remarkably like a wolf.

A fallowwolf, perhaps?

Or just the sigil of some long-forgotten house?

Saff reached out a hand to touch the wand, then hovered over it, looking up at the vendor. “May I?”

The vendor nodded once, her dark gaze sharp enough to cut glass. Saffron found her energy to be rather arousing in ways she did not care to examine.

She picked up the pale wand, expecting—or at least hoping—to feel something. A frisson, a flutter when it met her palm. Some sign that her body recognized the wick, that the magic in her well was innately responding to it.

Nothing.

Perhaps she could go through the motions of casting a tempavicissan spell—to see whether the wand would feel the way Lorissa’s had in the moments before those fateful words were uttered. Charged, expectant, alive.

No, that would be a fool’s errand. She could not attempt to cast Timeweaving magic on one of the world’s most dangerous streets.

The dagger-cheeked mage studied her like a curio in a shop window.

“How much?” Saffron muttered, deciding to take a punt on the wolf engraving.

“Vinta skeni.”

Twenty ascens.

Bartering in Mersina was a complex art. Pitch too low as to be insulting and you’d be swiftly killed for the insult. Pitch too high and it would be assumed you were a patron of enormous wealth, and that you should be followed into an alley, robbed, and killed. There was just a little too much killing involved in the process for Saffron’s personal tastes.

Good thing she liked to gamble.

“Desiz?” Sixteen.

The Wielder’s expression hardened. “Na.”

Saffron had been insulting with her counteroffer. She backtracked hastily.

“Fine, fine. Vinta skeni.”

The vendor held out her palm, which had a jagged purple scar bisecting it. Saffron rummaged in her coin purse and counted out twenty ascens, dropping them into the Wielder’s hand and stuffing the wand box into her innermost cloak pocket.

Saff tucked her chin to her chest and scurried back in the direction of the port. The black buildings towered oppressively overhead, and the overlapping sounds rankled at her nerves. A tin bowl rattling with coins, a piercing shriek of anguish, worn-down boots thumping unevenly over cobblestones. There was the distinctive smoky, metallic scent of spell aftermath, underpinned with something like rotten flowers.