The shopkeeper’s expression cooled, but then his gaze flickered to Celadon’s group as if he were considering her expression when she first arrived. “We don’t sell many enchantments in this shop, but we do have a few,” he said. “How do you feel about that?”
“I can’t work any magic myself, and I know almost nothing about it, but I . . .” She trailed off for a moment. “I’ve seen no evidence that it is harmful,” she finally said.
He nodded. “I threatened to dock Grayson’s pay yesterday for chasing off a customer, and he told me you were in here looking for a job. I suspect he hurried you away because he knows I’ve been considering letting him go. The only reason I haven’t done it is because I’m too old to start entirely over with another young apprentice.” As if in response to the blooming hope on her face, he added hastily, “I can’t promise anything, long term—I have a contract with Grayson, and I’m bound by law to give him notice and a chance to correct his behaviors—but if you are willing to work, I will pay you a fair wage for your skills for as long as you’re here.” He pressed his lips together wryly. “I don’t suppose you have any relevant references?”
She suspected this was a moment where giving the prince’s name would instantly ensure her a place. Given how guilty Terre Verte had looked upon witnessing the end of her argument with Celadon, she was sure he would be willing to put in a word for her anywhere she wanted.
“I worked as a grammar teacher in Eiderlee for five years, and assisted the mayor there with secretarial work and event planning,” she said. “If you will accept references from Followers of the Quinacridone?”
The stationer’s mouth tightened. “I’ll judge you on the merits I see,” he said, “no matter who your family follows.” He hesitated, as if considering, then admitted, “Grayson’s enamored of a Tamari sailor and has been talking about wanting to follow her to sea. I suspect he might see your presence as an excuse to break his contract. If that happens, and you show well in the work you do for me as a hire-on, we might talk about more long-term options.”
There was nothing certain about the offer, but the possibility was still enough to make Dahlia’s throat tighten. Apprentice craftsmen made very little money during their training, but their master was expected to provide living accommodations, if only a tiny room at the back of the shop. Dahlia was far older than most apprentices, of course, but as he had said, she already had a firm groundwork in the training someone like Grayson would have received since he was ten or twelve years old.
And the possibility of a long-term position that would lead toward independence was an opportunity she wouldn’t ignore.
Thank you, Numen, she prayed inwardly, for guiding me here today.
“I imagine you have plans for Festival tonight,” the stationer said, “but if you come back first thing tomorrow morning, we’ll see if you have the skills I need. Abyss knows I’m hard-pressed right now. Almost a decade training that boy . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head ruefully.
Dahlia left the stationer’s shop with a giddy kind of breathlessness, caused by the rapid swing from nervous despair to careful optimism. She successfully made it past the Quin group without meeting anyone’s gaze, and returned to the palace, deciding it would be best not to test her luck further.
Chapter 13
Naples
As the sun lifted into the sky, a chilly spring morning gave way to an idyllic afternoon. The cloudless sky was a perfect clear blue, and seemed endless. The still air made the city seem like it was holding its breath, and cradled all the scents of the day: the clean sea, thousands of flowers brought in from the country to decorate the market square, exotic spices baked into once-a-year treats, and of course wafts of magical paraphernalia ranging from incense sold by an A’hknet witch to Helio’s fancy potions.
What made it perfect, though, was the warm, firm arm around Naples’ waist.
Despite the Terra working him until he was near to collapse repeatedly over the last three days—or past it, as she had warned him she might—he had been able to make it down to the Blue Canary multiple times to see Cyan.
His last solid memory of the night before had been the Terra mingling his blood and hers—more than he thought strictly healthy—with ash in a small bowl to produce a slurry kind of ink, which she then used to paint intricate runes on the gemstones set into the ensorcelled jewelry. Each stroke of her brush had made Naples’ heart beat a bit harder, as if the blood in the ink was still connected to his own.
He woke in a heap on the couch at the back of the ritual room, some number of hours later, alone. After some trial-and-error, he was finally able to open the door, and found a note from the Terra saying she wouldn’t need him again until evening.
As a post-script, she had suggested he eat something “that once ran on four legs” to help him replace lost blood. Naples had followed the advice, bought a meat pie in the market, and eaten most of the filling out of it before forcing himself to also down the crust. Food, along with several glasses of water, had stilled the shakes. A little more sleep had left him feeling human again.
Now he was here, Cyan’s arm around his waist as they explored the market.
Several other members of the Order of Napthol were working. Helio had recently created a technique for juggling lights that was earning him grand applause, and as always Henna’s fortune-telling garnered brisk business. Naples normally spent a few hours of the day performing for tourists and children as well, but at his current brink of power exhaustion, he was content to lazily stroll through the market with his date.
Date. I have a date.
For the day, Cyan had traded the plain, unostentatious fabrics he and most of his cohorts usually wore for a vivid saffron shirt in a style he claimed was popular in Frevania, a country Naples wasn’t entirely sure Cyan hadn’t made up. Instead of lacing at the throat or sleeves, it had a loose, informal neckline and a half-dozen tiny black buttons at each cuff. It was also made of some kind of touchably soft fabric too warm to be silk but too light to be kidskin.
“Are those actors?” Cyan asked, pointing.
Naples followed the sailor’s gaze, and snorted laughter. Celadon Cremnitz and his cronies, dressed in severe black and gray, did look a little like a theater troupe preparing for some kind of tragic drama. They had taken a prominent position near the fountain, displacing the musicians who usually set up there, and were handing out flyers.
“The Followers of the Quinacridone, our local malcontents,” Naples answered, trailing behind as Cyan approached the group.
“Oh, the Quin,” Cyan said, without the exasperation Naples was used to hearing paired with that phrase. “The captain is considering a couple of Quin boys who are looking to hire on to the Canary. They’re green as spring grass, but seem like hard workers.”
Before it occurred to Naples that Cyan’s gregarious curiosity might lead him to deliberately interact with the Quin, Cyan had reached forward with his free hand toward one of the fliers.
The Quin man holding the flier had been looking away, talking to one of his cohorts, but turned toward them with a practiced smile when he sensed a willing audience. His fingers tightened reflexively on the paper as his gaze took in Cyan’s arm around Naples’ waist, and the proselytizing welcome froze in his slightly open mouth.
The woman next to him noticed, and put on her own, only slightly more successful smile as she focused on Cyan with the gaze of a raptor. “Welcome to Kavet, sailor. I’m sorry to see you seem to have found by an . . . unfortunate element.” She glanced at Naples briefly and dismissively. “Do you have a few minutes to talk? Perhaps we can—”
“No,” Cyan answered coldly, interrupting. He glanced at the flier in his hand, then handed it to Naples with a sardonic lift of his brow. “As you say, I seem to have found an ‘unfortunate element’ and should remove myself from it.”
He turned away without waiting for a reply, bringing Naples with him. Naples glanced at the flier, which seemed to be more propaganda
warning about the “epidemic” of sorcery among younger children. Lifting his hand so the Quin would be sure to see, he funneled a burst of power into the paper, which caught flame and swiftly crumbled to ask.
“Petty,” Cyan said, though his smile showed his approval. “Was that personal, or more generic bigotry?”
“Both,” Naples admitted. “Quin think relations between two men are unnatural, but they also have a particular issue with me, and that one apparently thought saving you from me was more crucial than your so-called perversion. She’s probably lamenting to her cohorts about how you would have been a good, sensible young man if only you hadn’t been seduced into wicked ways by a nasty sorcerer.”
Naples said the words jokingly, but Cyan’s response was uncharacteristically solemn. “And if they hadn’t already known you?”
Naples looked at the stark white of his hand twined with Cyan’s dark one, and admitted, without lifting his gaze, “Then it might have been me she tried to save from the foreign sailor. I’m sorry. The Quin are assholes, a bunch of country mice who can’t understand anyone different than themselves. They don’t speak for the rest of the city.”
He gestured to the crowd around them, which was currently made up of at least as many Silmari and Tamari as it did Kavetans. Other than this particular Quin group, people here celebrated the diversity.
“Good thing I didn’t plan to visit the country,” Cyan murmured, pointing out the flaw in Naples’ attempt at comfort. He turned Naples in his arms, looking at him searchingly for several moments before he declared, “Fine. Never mind them.” He dragged Naples forward to kiss him, in defiance of all the stares from the Quin and the Napthol alike. “You promised me dancing. When does the music start?”
Naples pulled back, his heartbeat rapid, and looked toward the palace. Musicians had already set up on platforms nearby, and were watching in anticipation. The afternoon festivities would officially start when the royal family opened the palace doors.
“It should be any minute now.”
Behind him he heard more raised voices, this time as the Quin picked a fight with Dove. Naples didn’t understand why, but she seemed to actively enjoy verbally sparring with the dour preachers, and would deliberately draw them into ridiculous debates. Celadon had been distracted on the other side of the group when Naples and Cyan passed by, but Naples heard him engage with Dove. Fool.
Then the large public doors to the palace rumbled open, each pulled by two liveried guards, and the musicians—on fiddle, guitar, bass, and mandolin—strummed out the first notes of a welcoming tune as Terre Verte stepped out with his date, an unremarkable, straw-haired woman Naples didn’t recognize. Since Henna had chosen not to go to the festivities, Terre Verte had probably made some kind of political match for the night.
Naples started forward, intending to greet Terre Verte, but Cyan’s arm around his waist tightened, holding him in place. Cyan asked, “Isn’t that the prince?”
“Yes,” Naples replied, puzzled for an instant too long before it occurred to him that not everyone would be comfortable with the idea of greeting the country’s monarch. “Didn’t you say the Silmari royal family is informal with the people, too?” he asked.
“With their kind of people,” Cyan clarified. “There must be a thousand royals in Silmat, once you count all the cousins and half cousins and bastards, and half the time there’s no way to know who’s who—but you always know who’s nobility. Like sticks to like.”
Naples pondered that for a minute, as he watched several others greet Terre Verte and his date in their usual jubilant way.
“I suppose we’re different here,” he speculated. “We don’t have multiple noble families, just the Terre line.”
Cyan laughed out loud, a full-bodied, unashamed sound that Naples enjoyed even if he didn’t fully understand its cause.
“What did I say?”
“You,” the sailor said, shaking his head with a rueful smile. “You prowl around the docks like the savviest scoundrel in a thousand dockside taverns, so I forget sometimes how suddenly naïve you can be. Kavet doesn’t mark its nobility the same way as Silmat, but you damn sure have them. The only difference is that, instead of land ownership and inherited titles, you have magic. And like, as I’ve said, calls to like.”
He nodded toward the crowd that had gathered around the Terre, which was almost exclusively sorcerers from the Order of Napthol.
“We work closely with the Terre,” Naples said defensively.
“Yes, you do,” Cyan agreed, his tone just as it might have been if Naples had said, “It might rain this afternoon.”
As Naples contemplated Cyan’s words, Terre Verte spotted the Quin group and approached them with a resigned expression. The woman with him followed, lips pressed together in a hard line. The way the crowd nearby shifted to watch made the Quin look even more like they were putting on a play. Naples joined the audience happily.
Celadon came to the front of the group to square off with Terre Verte, who told him, “You and your people can’t be here in the middle of the square.”
The Quin lifted his chin and announced, “It’s a public place.”
“It’s a public place that, this day, is dedicated to the celebration of the festival,” Terre Verte explained. “Your group is in the way. You can stay, but you have to move to the edge of the plaza like any other merchant.”
“I’m not a merchant,” Celadon huffed.
“You’re trying to sell something you claim is a religion. If I have to forcibly move you, you’re going to end up much farther back, so why don’t you make it simpler for all of us and cooperate for once?”
Naples watched the altercation and tried to consider it in the context of what Cyan had been saying. Sailors grumbled all the time about insufferable nobles and their blindness toward the rest of the world. Was the Order of Napthol guilty of the same where the Quin were concerned? Was that why the Quin were becoming ever more numerous, much to the confusion of the more-privileged sorcerers?
At that moment, Celadon spotted Terre Verte’s date and his eyes widened with recognition. The same man who had initially handed Cyan the flier found his voice. “Dahlia. It’s only been a few hours, and already you’re trumped up like a royal whore.”
“Oh, good,” Naples murmured to Cyan. “I was in danger of feeling sympathetic for a moment there.”
“I wasn’t,” Cyan replied.
Verte’s gaze darkened with fury, but the woman, Dahlia, just tilted her head thoughtfully, examined the Quin man with an expression that could have cut glass, and said, “I know what and who I am, and I am ashamed of nothing I have done. Can you say the same?”
At the end of the question, she shifted her gaze to Celadon instead of the man who had challenged her, and Naples saw something he had never expected: Celadon looked away first.
The other Quin man bristled. “Perhaps you don’t know what’s shameful.”
“That’s enough,” Terre Verte declared. Out of the corner of his eye, Naples saw the guards by the palace doors tense, watching the altercation closely. “Last warning. Move your little party, or I will send you all home.”
“You are only the thousandth person to threaten me today,” Celadon replied. “Sorcerers in particular seem to be intimidated by my presence. Man should not have the kind of power you try to wield, and when you use it against your citizens, you only prove my point.”
“I don’t need magic to move you.” Terre Verte reached out to grab Celadon’s arm.
Celadon jerked back, snapping, “Keep your hands off me.”
At the same time, the Quin crony who had made the “royal whore” crack lifted his fist to swing a punch.
Verte ducked away, narrowly avoiding the blow. Cyan’s arm dropped from around Naples’ waist as Naples moved forward, instinctively moving to defend his prince even though he knew perfectly well there were a dozen guards hurrying to do the same.
“What in the Abyss are you doing?” Terre Verte demand
ed.
Naples wondered the same. This went past the Quin’s usual fervor and into the realm of true fanaticism. Remembering how brazenly he had shoved past them a few days before, Naples felt a chill. If they were willing to assault the heir to the royal house in front of hundreds of people including sorcerers and soldiers, why would they hesitate to knife a hated deviant “witch” in a back alley?
Two soldiers seized the man who had raised his hand against Terre Verte, but instead of condemning their companion’s behavior and stepping away, the others rallied to his defense. One woman caught at a guard’s arm. Celadon himself attempted to push one of the guards away, which was apparently all the others needed to seize him as well.
At that point, the Quin lost their minds, kicking and punching at the guards who now poured out of the palace to subdue them.
Verte took a step back, staring dumbfounded at the group.
As Naples moved closer to the prince, he caught the distant look in the other man’s eyes—he was reading power. Naples shifted his own awareness to try to see whatever Terre Verte had noticed, without success.
Cyan caught his arm, still gazing at the fight in front of them. “I’ve seen my share of drunken brawls on holidays like Masque—I’ve been in a few myself—but I’ll admit I’ve never seen a fracas like this between priests and royal guards. Is this normal for Kavet?”
Verte heard the sailor, and blinked as he brought himself back to the mundane world. In clipped tones, he answered, “No, it is not.” He turned to the closest guard, a woman who had found the prince’s side the moment the fighting began. “Lock them all up,” he told her. “They can cool their heels in jail for an evening.” Grudgingly, he added, “Keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t hurt themselves. I think they may have been drugged. Where’s Dahlia?”
“I’m here.”
Naples had lost track of Terre Verte’s date until her choked voice identified her in the crowd, shielded by two soldiers who had taken the initiative to protect their prince’s companion from the violence. She had held up to the insults well, but now looked stricken as she stepped forward and watched as the Quin were taken away. Every freckle on her pale face stood out like ink.
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