The cousins found a quiet doorway to settle in. The desire to sit and inhale the delicious smells of the food battled with Silver’s need to stuff it all in her mouth in one huge bite. Brajon didn’t have the same problem. He was already on his second one as Silver took a bite of her first.
“By all the dunes in the desert,” Brajon mumbled between bites, “this is glorious.”
The warm, pillowy bread and the hot, juicy meat were the best things Silver had ever tasted in her life. She almost wanted to cry. Instead, she took another bite. Then another. When she’d finished her second and Brajon was licking his fingers after his third, they both settled back against the wall, hands on their bellies.
“I feel like a new person,” Brajon said, smacking his lips. “I’ll admit that Calidian food is almost as good as my mother’s. I’m so full I could probably nap right here.”
He closed his eyes, but Silver tugged at his hand and got to her feet.
“Come on!” She laughed. With her energy renewed and the light fading quickly, she knew they needed to start looking for Arkilah. Besides, she wanted to see the rest of Calidia.
They rejoined the throngs. Just like in Jaspaton, people came out in droves at evening, when the heat of the midday sun had faded and the city was releasing its warmth back into the sky. She saw a scarf vendor and paused to consider one in a luminous shade of orange, and one stamped with big green flat-backed water dragons.
“Orange,” Silver finally said, reaching for her bag of coins. Better not to draw any connection to dragons for now.
She chose one patterned with black tears for Brajon. Despite everything they had to do in Calidia, and despite a sticky sort of remorse from selling her father’s ring, Silver was having fun with the money. There was a great sense of freedom in spending coins on the royal city’s endless treasures.
They didn’t know where they were going, but the streets were mostly flat, sloping very gently toward the center of the city, and so walking didn’t feel as tiresome as it did in Jaspaton. The farther into the Calidian labyrinth they got, the busier it was. The buildings were taller, the noises louder, the smells stronger. There were metal-and-glass structures alongside buildings made of sandstone. Multiple shades of granite, too, from the quarries Silver knew were far to the south.
And then the sandstone fell away, and there was only glass and metal and white granite, and the green of lush low-lying plants that Silver had never seen before, and the sparkle of wide, shallow pools of blue, blue water.
Silver gasped, jolting to a stop and throwing an arm across Brajon’s chest.
They’d reached the palace.
TWENTY-THREE
A low white wall ringed the whole palace. At least, Silver assumed it went all the way around. The grounds were so big that she couldn’t see the end of them. The center building was a huge rounded-edged rectangle, not quite a dome and not quite angular like all the other buildings in town, but something in between. It seemed to flow like water, sometimes straight across and sometimes curving. There were six white towers around it, three on either side. The Calidian royal flag, a circlet of gemstones on a black background, fluttered from a dome on the top of each. Gold and silver winked at them from all angles. The precious metals were used as decoration on the tower walls and ceiling, on the statues in the pools, and around the doors and windows, like the tiles in the outer Calidian ring.
“Listen. Hear that?” Silver said to her cousin.
“I don’t hear anything,” Brajon said.
“Exactly. It’s so quiet here. There aren’t as many people. And they’re not in a hurry.”
As they approached the pools, Silver looked more closely at the statues that rose from the water. They were all water dragons. Species Silver thought she recognized from trader stories, and others that were unfamiliar to her. A thin rod rose from the center of each statue, and bells hung down the side of the rods. When a sudden wind danced over their skin, the bells rang gently, eliciting a calming music.
“Oh, look,” Silver squealed. She hopped over a low fence and dashed toward one of the pools, pointing at a small creature swimming slow laps around the circle.
But as soon as the creature saw her coming, it raised its long horn-shaped snout and let loose a shrill alarm.
“You!” An angry voice sailed across the palace grounds. “Get back from there before I arrest you!”
A man dressed in head-to-toe white ran toward her. Silver hadn’t noticed him standing against the wall, since his clothes blended in perfectly with the palace, but now that she saw him, she realized there were many guards on the palace grounds, all dressed in white, all pressed against the wall. How many other guards throughout the city had they missed? The hairs on Silver’s neck stood on end. They would have to be more careful.
Silver hastily backed away. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t come in here. It’s treason to trespass on the queen’s property.”
“I…” Silver pointed at the small creature who’d continued its turns around the pool. Its gray-and-black-striped tail and the black tufts on top of its head wiggled side to side as it swam. “It’s just that I’ve never seen one before.”
Suddenly, the guard smiled, his mustache bouncing with mirth at the ends, and his whole face became friendly. “Never seen an Abruq? Not from Calidia, then. Fine little water dragons. Can sound an alarm loud enough to wake the dead. Very useful.”
“They’re so cute.”
“About the right size to cuddle in your arms, aren’t they?” The guard shook his head. “Much too restless to stay still, though. And, like I said, noisy. They don’t make good pets. People who attempt to keep them always find their homes in shambles after the first day. To be fair, I can’t think of a single water dragon that would be a good pet. Even the mild-mannered ones need lots of food and water and—”
“Do you know all about water dragons?” Silver asked. She hoped he would have an idea where the dragons were kept.
“Some, and I could talk about them all day if I wasn’t busy with my guard duties. But it’s time for you to move off the queen’s lawns now, sorry to say. Go on.”
Silver dipped her head politely as she backed all the way to the fence and stepped over to the road. The guard lifted his chin to her in farewell and drifted back to his place against the wall.
“Wait,” Silver called. “Can you tell us where the Maze Market is?”
The guard pointed to a shadowy alley over Silver’s shoulder. “The entrance is there, but they close up at twilight. No one wants to work during the social hours.”
Silver squinted to get a better look at the market entrance, but Brajon shook his head.
“Come on,” he said. He tugged on Silver’s arm. “Let’s find somewhere to sleep, and try in the morning.”
But a sense of urgency clicked in Silver’s mind. “We don’t have time to sleep. We don’t even know how long we have until the races begin. We need to find Arkilah soon, or else Kirja…” Silver couldn’t say the terrible thought out loud.
“We’ll find her. We battled a cave monster to get to her!” Brajon looked left to right, then at the white walls of the palace. “Excuse me,” he called to the guard. “Did we miss the qualifying races?”
“You’re just in time,” the guard called back. “Registration opens tomorrow morning, and the races begin in the evening.”
“See,” Brajon said, facing Silver again. “We have time, and we’re not going to find Nebekker’s friend tonight. People shouldn’t wander around in the dark in unfamiliar cities.”
Silver opened her mouth to argue that the cover of darkness could be good for their search.