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"Where've you been, girl? S'been weeks since the orators harangued that the stuff'd been tampered with." She swore and wiped a weepy nose against a dirty sleeve. "Never worked much anyway, 'cept with babies and old men. But it's gone now."
"Would you like some?" she asked gently.
Yohan's fist clamped over her elbow like a vise.
"S'all been confiscated. Ain't none left in the city. You got some, you keep it far and away from me. Don't carry no stuff from the rotted-yellow customhouse. Don't want no rotted yellow-robes bustin' in here, roustin' me outta house and home."
The woman took a deep breath, staring at the single roof-beam of her establishment. Aware of her own foolishness- treating a vendor of the elven market as if she were a woman of Quraite-Akashia tightened her mind-bending defenses. But the woman was no master of the Unseen Way; her vacant expression was the product of a Tyr-storm of wildly suspicious thoughts whipping through her mind.
"You bringin' me trouble?" she shouted. Her eyes were sharp-focused now, and filled with rage and madness. "You settin' the yellow-robes on me? You wantin' my place, my trade?" She swore and stalked forward, head down and shoulders raised. "I'll give you trouble. I'll give you more trouble than you dreamed-"
The hysterical woman came toward Akashia, Yohan sidestepped between them before harm was done.
"No trouble," he insisted, retreating with cautious, well-balanced strides, pushing her back toward the curtain door.
"I'm sorry," she apologized as soon as they were both in the alley.
The red-dressed woman's shouts quieted to inarticulate muttering, but they could still hear her moving through her shop. Fingers with ragged nails appeared at the edges of the curtain, pulling it taut, lashing it to the flimsy frame.
"Go away! Go away, you hear! Take your trouble somewhere else!"
The Quraiters were eager to obey. Yohan grabbed the cart traces and, without saying a word, started for the street. Once they were milling through the crowds, Akashia insisted softly, "It was my fault,"
Yohan pursed his lips together and adjusted his grip on the traces. He was as angry as she'd ever seen him, and angry at her as well-which, she knew, was an anger he., found difficult to express.
"I'm ashamed of myself." She said the things she thought he'd want to say, that she needed to hear. "I was wrong. I made a terrible mistake, thinking because she was my age, she was like me-"
"Don't talk, that's all," Yohan grumbled. "Let me do the talking. All the talking."
"I won't forget again," she assured him. "We learned something, though. The Lion-King's confiscated the remaining Ral's Breath. He must know it's been tampered with. Pavek's-"
"There's no 'must' with Urik or the lion. We don't know anything, yet."
They went along in stony silence awhile, until she spotted the distinctive signboard slung out over a cross street
"Do we try there?" she asked. "I'll be quiet, I swear it."
"See to it," Yohan replied with the same sternness he'd used in the earlier street confrontation.
Then, after rolling the cart from the street to a less-trafficked alley and leaving the two farmers to stand guard beside it, he led her into the apothecary's shop.
This second proprietor was an elf, lean and shifty as any lifelong desert nomad, and clear-headed, as the red-dressed woman had not been. His establishment was better stocked, with neat shelves full of bowls and boxes, each labeled with a picture of its contents and the symptoms those contents were purported to relieve. One smallish box bore one picture of a yawning moon and another of a crying baby with an oversized tooth. She nudged Yohan gently and made arrowlike movements with her eyes to direct his attention to the proper place. He acknowledged with a deliberate blink.
Yohan and the elven proprietor observed all the rude forms of Urikite conversation. They traded smooth insults and sly insinuations, but the result was the same: the apothecary had no Ral's Breath in stock-the box she'd noticed was, in his words 'as empty as our Lord Hamanu's tomb.' And the elf was adamantly uninterested in purchasing anything they might have to offer.
"Too much trouble," he insisted. "If you're in pain, go to a sawbones healer, or buy yourself something that works-" He gestured toward a shelf of amber bottles, each labeled with a sleeping or smiling face.
"And that doesn't attract too much attention?" Yohan inquired.
"That's always wise, isn't it? Who but a fool wants to attract attention?"
Yohan pointed at the empty Ral's Breath box. "A fool with a baby that's cutting a tooth? There'll always be mothers with babies, and always the fathers who provide them. How does a licensed apothecary meet the demand when yellow-robe scum take away his goods?"
It seemed for a heartbeat that the elf was going to give them a useful answer, then shouts erupted outside. Akashia instantly recognized the distressed voices of the Quraite fanners and feared the worst. The elf didn't know about the farmers or the loaded cart they guarded, but he came to the same conclusion.
She felt the mind-bending assault too: a burning agony that lanced her eyes and roared in her ears. It threatened to engulf every mote of knowledge and identity in her mind, but it was not the worst she'd encountered: when Grandmother taught the Unseen Way she hadn't pulled her punches. After an eyeblink of monsters from the mind-bender's nightmares, Akashia successfully wrapped herself in a fortress of peace. The attack beat harmlessly against her defenses, which, in the nature of the Unseen Way, formed an invisible sphere around her body that extended to Yohan and the apothecary, both of whom had fallen to the floor in screaming terror.
The power of an Unseen attack was such that the invading images summoned up the victim's direst memories that continued to wreak their havoc after the mind-bender had withdrawn. Akashia had thrown up her fortress before the invasion took root; she cast out the mind-bender's repulsive images one by one.
