“Exactly. And don’t you go looking for a new rig. If you’d pulled the stunt you did to get onto her ship, she would have cut your throat and dumped you overboard.”
Lila smiled. “Sounds like my kind of captain.”
* * *
“Here we are,” said Alucard when they reached the inn.
The name of the place was Is Vesnara Shast, which translated to The Wandering Road. What Lila didn’t know, not until she saw Lenos’s unease, was that the Arnesian word for road—shast—was the same as the word for soul. She found the alternate name a bit unsettling, and the inn’s atmosphere did nothing to ease the feeling.
It was a crooked old structure—she hadn’t noticed, in her short time in Red London last fall, that most of the buildings felt new—that looked like boxes stacked rather haphazardly on top of each other. It actually reminded her a bit of her haunts back in Grey London. Old stones beginning to settle, floors beginning to slouch.
The main room was crammed with tables, each of which in turn was crammed with Arnesian sailors, and most appeared well in their cups, despite the fact it was barely sundown. A single hearth burned on the far wall, a wolfhound stretched in front, but the room was stuffy from bodies.
“Living the life of luxury, aren’t we?” grumbled Stross.
“We’ve got beds,” said Tav, ever the optimist.
“Are we sure about that?” asked Vasry.
“Did someone replace my hardened crew with a bunch of whining children?” chided Alucard. “Shall I go find you a teat to gnaw on, Stross?”
The first mate grumbled but said nothing more as the captain handed out the keys. Four men to a room. But despite the cramped quarters, and the fact that the inn looked like it was far exceeding capacity, Alucard had managed to snare a room of his own.
“Captain’s privilege,” he said.
As for Lila, she was bunked with Vasry, Tav, and Lenos.
The group dispersed, hauling their chests up to their chambers. The Wandering Road was, as the name suggested, wandering, a tangled mess of halls and stairs that seemed to defy several laws of nature at once. Lila wondered if there was some kind of spell on the inn, or if it was simply peculiar. It was the kind of place where you could easily get lost, and she could only imagine it got more confusing as the night and drink wore on. Alucard called it eccentric.
Her room had four bodies, but only two beds.
“This’ll be cozy,” said Tav.
“No,” said Lila in decisive, if broken, Arnesian. “I don’t share beds—”
“Tac?” teased Vasry, dropping his chest on the floor. “Surely we can work something ou—”
“—because I have a habit of stabbing people in my sleep,” she finished coolly.
Vasry had the decency to pale a little.
“Bard can have a bed,” said Tav. “I’ll take the floor. And Vasry, what are the odds of you actually spending your nights here with us?”
Vasry batted his long, black lashes. “A point.”
So far, Lenos had said nothing. Not when they got their key, not when they climbed the stairs. He hugged the wall, obviously unnerved to be sharing quarters with the Sarows. Tav was the most resilient, but if she played her cards right, she could probably have the room to herself by tomorrow.
It wasn’t a bad room. It was roughly the same size as her cabin, which was roughly the same size as a closet, but when she looked out the narrow window, she could see the city, and the river, and the palace arcing over it.
And the truth was, it felt good to be back.
She pulled on her gloves, and a cap, and dug a parcel out of her chest before heading out. She closed the door just as Alucard stepped out of a room across the hall. Esa’s white tail curled around his boot.
“Where are you off to?” he asked.
“Night Market.”
He raised a sapphire-studded brow. “Barely back on London soil, and already off to spend your coins?”
“What can I say?” said Lila evenly. “I’m in need of a new dress.”
Alucard snorted but didn’t press the issue, and though he trailed her down to the stairs, he didn’t follow her out.
For the first time in months, Lila was truly alone. She drew a breath and felt her chest loosen as she cast off Bard, the best thief aboard the Night Spire, and became simply a stranger in the thickening dark.
She passed several scrying boards advertising the Essen Tasch, white chalk dancing across the black surface as it spelled out details about the various ceremonies and celebrations. A couple of children hovered around the edges of a puddle, freezing and unfreezing it. A Veskan man lit a pipe with a snap of his fingers. A Faroan woman somehow changed the color of her scarf simply by running it through her fingers.
Wherever Lila looked, she saw signs of magic.
Out on the water, it was a strange enough sight—not as strange as it would have been in Grey London, of course—but here, it was everywhere. Lila had forgotten the way Red London glittered with it, and the more time she spent here, the more she realized that Kell really didn’t belong. He didn’t fit in with the clashes of color, the laughter and jostle and sparkle of magic. He was too understated.
This was a place for performers. And that suited Lila just fine.
It wasn’t late, but winter darkness had settled over the city by the time she neared the Night Market. The stretch of stalls along the bank seemed to glow, lit not only by the usual lanterns and torches, but by pale spheres of light that followed the market-goers wherever they went. At first, it looked like they themselves were glowing, not head to toe, but from their core, as if their very life force had suddenly become visible. The effect was unsettling, hundreds of tiny lights burning against cloak fronts. But as she drew closer, she realized the light was coming from something in their hands.
“Palm fire?” asked a man at the mouth of the market, holding up a glass sphere filled with pale light. It was just warm enough to fog the air around its edges.
“How much?”
“Four lin.”
It wasn’t cheap, but her fingers were chilled, even with the gloves, and she was fascinated by the sphere, so she paid the man and took the orb, marveling at the soft, diffuse heat that spread through her hands and up her arms.
She cradled the palm fire, smiling despite herself. The market air still smelled of flowers, but also of burning wood, and cinnamon, and fruit. She’d been such an outsider last fall—she was still an outsider, of course, but now she knew enough to cover it. Jumbled letters that had meant nothing to her months before now began to form words. When the merchants called out their wares, she could glean their meaning, and when the music seemed to take shape on the air, as if by magic, she knew that was exactly what it was, and the thought didn’t set her off balance. If anything, she’d felt off balance all her life, and now her feet were firmly planted.
Most people wandered from stall to stall, sampling mulled wine and skewered meat, fondling velvet-lined hoods and magical tokens, but Lila walked with her head up, humming to herself as she wove between the tents and stalls toward the other end of the market. There would be time to wander later, but right now, she had an errand.
Down the bank, the palace loomed like a low red moon. And there, sandwiched between two other tents at the far edge of the market, near the palace steps, she found the stall she was looking for.
The last time she’d been here, she hadn’t been able to read the sign mounted above the entrance. Now she knew enough Arnesian to decipher it.
IS POSTRAN.
The Wardrobe.
Simple, but clever—just as in English, the word postran referred both to clothing and the place where it was kept.