They stood on a winding slate stairway, above what suddenly seemed to be the rest of the world as all of the Below spread out in a rambling and colorful variety of houses and shops of different shapes and sizes. They were so far up it seemed the Below was nothing but a set of odd miniatures designed for a wealthy child’s dollhouse.
There was no banister to hold, no place to stop and rest during the long descent, and she hesitated there, looking back over her shoulder toward the safety and manicured simplicity of life on her family’s estate.
But his hand touched her face, turning her back to look at him. “Don’t look back,” he whispered. “Forward. Onward.” He seemed such the bold adventurer then, standing like a mountain king with the backdrop of an entire wild kingdom behind him.
She could do nothing but follow.
Down the stairs they went, her knees wobbling by the time they reached the bottom.
“Next time you must give me fair warning,” she had scolded, “so that I might wear more sensible shoes.”
“Next time?” he asked, one eyebrow arching rakishly. “You are already imagining a next time?”
She blushed so hard her face stung with heat. “I do own sensible shoes,” she said in answer.
“I’m sure you do,” he replied. “Here.” He tugged on her hand and drew her into the back of an alley.
She tripped after him and fell against him, her hands grabbing at him so that she kept her balance.
His arm wrapped around her instinctually, holding her close until she regained her balance.
But she never truly had regained it after being held so tightly against him.
There in the shade of the buildings stacked around them as awkwardly as toy blocks, Jordan first heard Rowen’s heart beat and felt the strength of him just beneath the comfort of his slightly soft frame. He became synonymous with adventure and safety all at once.
“My head is spinning,” she had whispered.
“We took the stairs too fast,” he apologized. “I did not want us to be spotted before you’d had a bit of an adventure…”
She drew back from him then and maintained a more respectable distance between them.
He smiled and said, “Come now. There are a few spots I would take you before we must make our ascent.”
“You have done this before?” It was a stupid question. Of course he had, how else would he know about the slate stairs?
But instead of saying anything sharp or hurtful, Rowen winked at her. “Here.” He grabbed her hand and wrapped it around his arm. “It will be safer if they believe we are officially together. There will be fewer questions asked. The Below is not the finest place for a woman unescorted.”
“Oh. Of course,” she agreed. She rested her other hand on the top of his forearm as she had seen her mother do with her father.
“Try to keep your eyes in your head,” he suggested. “Best to appear we are well versed in the neighborhood although we obviously do not belong to it.”
She nodded and made a conscious effort.
It was tremendously difficult not to gawk, though, especially when they stepped out of the alley and onto the main street. It was crowded with colorful shops, and windows were stuffed with displays of wares from different lands and painted with gilt and silver paint using words like New, Improved, Startling, From the Orient, Unique!
Tiny automatons puttered in circles in one shop window and wriggling puppies filled another. Hanging in the next were a variety of meats—smoked hams squeezed tight in netting, sausages in long skins, whole roasted ducks, chickens, and rabbits, dark, gutted, and strung up for display with a shelf of cheeses below them, waxed or wrapped in paper, with flesh white as the moon, yellow as the sun, and dark as tanned leather.
They paused at a flower shop, a young girl with a basket full of wildflowers standing before it to shout to passersby. Rowen pulled out a coin and gave it to the child, who did a dainty curtsy and passed a bundle of flowers to Jordan with a grin that surprised Jordan with the child’s lack of front teeth. The child giggled and began to bellow about her wares again.
Jordan sniffed at her gift and gave Rowen a smile before returning her hand to its place on his arm, now with the bouquet pressed and perfuming the air between them.
They wandered down the main street, pausing before windows and tables stacked with assorted wares, commenting quietly about the large carved wooden signs that stuck out from second stories on heavy metal supports and wasted no time on words but spoke to a less literate crowd. The cobbler’s shop was represented by a sign in the shape of a shoe, the baker’s sign was in the shape of a steaming loaf of bread, and the tavern on the corner had a spotted dog with an assortment of empty pewter mugs chained upside down beneath it so they clanged together and drew attention in any breeze.
But the doorway Rowen dragged her through had no sign that she could see and it took a moment for Jordan’s eyes to adjust to the dim lighting inside.
Behind a workbench an older man was bent over something small that shimmered and threw back the light he had tilted to focus on it. He wore a strange assortment of glass lenses over his eyes and reached up to tug one aside and then cranked an adjustment on the contraption’s other side, making one of his eyes appear amazingly large in comparison to his other.
A chime sounded behind them and the man looked up, blinked, and then readjusted the lenses, sliding most of them up and to the side so that it seemed he had as many eyes as an insect. “Well hello, milady,” he said, rising to his feet only to bow. Then he noticed Rowen and laughed, dodging around his workbench to shake his hand. “How long has it been?” he asked, looking Rowen up and down.
“Almost since you broke with the family.”
The man rolled his eyes. “You have an awkward way of expressing yourself for a nephew of mine,” he muttered.
Jordan blinked. “Nephew?”
The man looked at her, his eyes crinkling when he smiled. “Our dear Rowen is a bit of a man of mystery, is he?”
Rowen simply smiled and puffed out his chest. “Jordan, this is my uncle, Nicholas Burchette. He and Father had a bit of a falling out some years ago over the family holdings and rather than battle it out in Council Court as most of our rank do, he decided to cut all ties with the family and move to the Below to set himself up as a craftsman.”
“To be fair, it was not your father who instigated the issues, it was your mother.”
“It always is,” Rowen agreed darkly.
“And I already had the skills of a craftsman and had already served my required military time, so rather than lodge a proper complaint and drag my own family before Council, I did the truly noble thing and removed myself from nobility.” He shrugged. “I have never looked back.”
Rowen looked at Jordan and nodded. “As it should be.”
“And now you—” Jordan took in the shop’s interior for the first time. The place was lined with tiny shelves and hundreds of clocks and timepieces chattered and ticked along, some in eggs decorated with cut and colored glass, some giving life to pocketwatches that were chained to their shelves, and some mechanisms in wooden boxes that looked like miniature cottages. And some … She stepped forward to investigate the thing under the workbench’s bright light. “Is that a ring?”
“Yes. My newest project.” He slipped between the counters and her, excusing himself, and lifted the thing up, holding it between his index finger and thumb, so it was more readily viewed. Rowen stepped forward and all three of them pressed their faces close to the thing that was only the size of the stone in Lady Vanmoer’s anniversary ring. It was a metal ball perched on a narrow band with a tiny bump on its top.