"Quite sure," she said.
"Alright. You're sure." My voice came out small and weak, but the woman smiled and the gray all disappeared. The room fell back to normal.
"Tomorrow night," she said. "Go out to the desert. It'll make things easier, to be out in the open."
On the table, the two figures began to move. The assassin's robe fluttered out behind him. The girl – I couldn't think of it as me – took small hesitant steps backwards, her hair swirling around her face.
"This is how it's going to go without me," the woman said.
And in one movement, the assassin lashed out with a tiny sword and the girl collapsed on the ground.
I jumped in my seat, my blood pushing violently through my veins. I cursed in the secret language of the Confederation. The woman raised an eyebrow.
"That's not going to happen," she said. "I'm going to give you something. A few things, actually. What they are isn't important."
She raised her hand over the figures. They reset themselves. This time the girl carried four tiny vials in the palm of her hand. When the assassin's robes began to flutter, the girl hurled the vials, small as grains of rice, in his direction. A flash of green light. The assassin was gone.
"Where he'd go?" I asked.
"Elsewhere," the woman said. "A place where he'll never be able to track you." She waved her hand over the table and the figures slid back down into the wood.
"So he'll die?"
The woman stood up, walked to a counter on the other side of the room. She pulled out four narrow vials.
"No," she said. "Don't ask so many questions." She set the vials on the table. "Four ingredients," she said. "Equal parts each. Throw them all at once. Say the invocation. That opens up the doorway. They'll pull him through."
"Who's 'they'?"
The woman didn't answer.
"So why can't you do it?"
She scooped up the four vials and handed them to me. All four fit in the palm of my hand.
"Practice," she said.
"What? You can't do it cause of practice?"
The woman glared at me. "I've better things to do than follow you out to the desert. It's enough of a favor giving you the vials at all, let alone two sets. Their contents are rare and very expensive."
I scowled.
She pointed to a clear stretch of wall, empty of any dresses or jars of enchantments. "Throw them there. I want to see if you can open up the portal; the invocation is tailored only for the assassin, so no threat of getting pulled in ourselves. Oh, and I suppose you'll be needing the invocation, won't you." She stood up and glided over to the counter and wrote something down on a scrap of paper, folded it over, handed it to me.
I opened it up.
"I can't read this," I said. I assumed it was another language, cause even though I knew the alphabet the words looked like gibberish. "Sound it out a few times," she said. "I used the Empire spelling."
There was no way this was going to work. Trying to work magic in an unfamiliar language? Taking advice from a beautiful woman with weird gray eyes? But if I didn't, I'd be dead. The only kind of death.
I stumbled over the words a few times, until the woman said, "That's good enough. They'll know what you're saying."
"There's that they again. Any reason you ain't telling me who they are?" I didn't like that she wouldn't.
"That's not what you need to worry about." She
jerked her head toward the blank wall. "Now say the invocation and throw the charms. Do it all at once."
I took a deep breath. I recited the incantation in my head once for good measure. Then I drew my arm back, stammered out the words, and threw the vials into the air.
They exploded into a corridor of glass-green light, powerful enough that I staggered backward. The air swirled around me, and I thought I could hear a hum, deep and reverberating, coming from the slash of green. Light scattered across the floor of the shop. That corridor of light darkened and widened until it became a doorway. On the other side I saw mist.
Then, slowly, the light faded, growing dimmer and dimmer until there was nothing left but the doorway, and then that faded away too. I shuffled over to the table and collapsed in the chair. I felt like I'd just been through a thousand sea-battles.
"Now you know why I don't want to do it," the woman said. "It takes all your energy to open a portal like that."
I dropped my forehead to the table. The wood was cool against my skin.
"I have to do that again." The thought left me unsettled. "You sure this is going to work?"
"As sure as I'm standing here before you," she said. "You send him away, and he won't ever come back."
I felt my heart beating in my chest, reminding me I was still alive.
"I suggest you go somewhere to sleep," she said. "Rest. I've got a protection spell on you that'll last until sundown, but I'm not staving him off for another night."
I lifted my head and drained the rest of my coffee, then dumped my cup upside down so I could look at the dregs. Not that I ever remember what they mean. This time wasn't no different.
"Satisfied?" the woman asked. I didn't like the way she asked that. Almost like she was making fun of me.
"Maybe," I snapped.
She laughed. And then she handed me a fresh set of vials and sent me on my way.
CHAPTER THREE
I left the inn at sunset. The four vials were tucked away in my pocket, but I kept my knife out. Even though Papa had partially gotten me into this mess, I hated to think what he would say if I went out there completely unprepared.
I walked across the sand for a long time, long enough that the sun melted into the horizon line and the stars began to twinkle in the unending blackness overhead. The wind pushed my hair away from face, tangled my dress up in my legs. And I was so scared I kept choking on my own empty breaths. I'd been in battle before. Battles with weapons, though. Battles against people, not ghouls. And even in those battles my skin turned clammy and numb beforehand, even then I had to remind myself to breathe.