Giantess Township is teeming on market day. The town proper is set in a grove of redwoods, dominated on one end by the Giantess herself, a tree so tall the top becomes blue and hazy even without a mist. Turquoise streamers stretch from the trunk—Soe tells me the color is changed to coordinate with each month’s new si.
In the center of town is a large clearing, left when one of the massive trees must have fallen. Its stump remains in the middle of the town square, set over with boards to form a central stage. Soe explains that most of the time, the stage is free for public use, but on market days, merchants can rent it out to sell their wares. Right now, it’s being dominated by a stock tender auctioning off goats.
Most of the other stalls are set up around the periphery, selling everything from candles to quilts to briny crocks of seaweed. Only a few vendors look permanent—a blacksmith’s shop pouring acrid smoke, a furnace boiling molasses, and a small mill. The rest of the stalls are cloth or canvas stretched over temporary frames, some right off the backs of carts. Soe sets up her awning under a redwood with a split trunk, and almost immediately, people materialize to purchase a quart of walnut oil or to bring goods for her to press. Soon she hands Iano and me a bag jingling with crescents and coppers, along with a list of the things we need at the cabin. Shouldering an empty hamper, we set off into the crowds.
The food stalls are teeming with summer produce, and we fill the hamper with knobby squashes, meaty orange mushrooms, and baskets of plump berries. While we stand in line at the dairy stall, we hear a woman buying the same number of squashes we did for half the price. Iano frowns.
“We’ve been marked as newcomers,” I remark.
He looks down at the copper coins in his palm, stamped with an approximation of his profile.
“It is my first time in the market,” he says. “Yours?”
“Sort of. If my parents or siblings want to visit the market, a special afternoon is cleared for them, and a squadron of the Palace Guard makes a perimeter. Vendors would never overcharge the king and queen, even though they’re the most able to afford it. My ma always overpays.”
He turns a few of the coins. “We don’t go into the city much, and when we do, it’s always in litters lined with mosquito netting. But I remember my grandmother saying they used to go a lot when she was a child, often to visit the soup kitchens. They stopped once the fever started to climb.”
I can’t help myself. “You mean once the palace atriums were built?”
“And all your little birds started hitting the glass, uah,” he says, matching my barbed tone, but his gaze is still serious, on the coins. After a moment, he closes his fist on them. “I guess . . . I never really thought about how that might have impacted relations between the monarchy and the populace.”
I open my mouth to reply, but I cut off abruptly. The woman standing in line in front of us has turned her head—as if listening. Iano sees my frozen expression and glances, too. He goes still and silent. I realize how loudly we were speaking.
There’s a long, awkward pause as the woman waits for the dairy maid to fill her order. The very edge of her face is visible, enough to see that her eyelid is twisted and lashless with a faint scar. We try to stand nonchalantly and act as if we weren’t just chatting about our lives as pampered princes. After a long, breathless moment, the customer collects her goods, pays her fee, and moves away, giving us room to conduct our business.
When we finally make it back to Soe’s table, her stock is almost gone and her coin box is rattling.
“Where have you been?” she asks. “I thought you’d be back an hour ago.”
“We’re market beginners,” I say, setting down the hamper. “Took us a while.”
“Well, give me your change, and I’ll see how much more you need—”
“Uh, no change,” Iano says.
Soe tosses up her hands. “What’d you do, let every granny swindle you? Colors.” She opens her coin box and counts out a few handfuls of crescents. “Here—you’re going to need to split up, if we want goods of any quality. Iano, why don’t you go to the herbalist, she’s over there by the well. Veran, you go get the blankets and clothes. Most of the clothiers are by the stage. If someone asks about your accent, just say you’re from the islands.”
With some trepidation, we do as she says, splitting up. I poke through the coins in my hand, trying to orient myself. Despite my grasp on the language, I haven’t had to spend much Moquoian coin, and the rate is different from Common Eastern silvers. I spy the quilter and head her way, trying not to look like an easy target.
It goes better than I expected, as does the men’s clothier, where I buy a few changes of clothes for Iano and myself. I’m tripped up at the dressmaker, not sure how to estimate Tamsin’s size. I choose two that look like they’ll be short enough for her, and then move to the women’s work shirts and trousers.
“What size are you looking for?” the vendor asks.
“Uh . . .” I stare at the shirts, suddenly realizing what I’m doing. Picturing a garment to go over Tamsin was one thing. Picturing one to go over Lark . . . I’m hit suddenly with the memory of this morning, of the muscles bunching and sliding under her bare skin, her shoulder blades drawing together.
I break into a cold sweat.
“Well?” the vendor asks.
My gaze falls on a pile of vests, not unlike the one she ripped off in Tellman’s Ditch to make a firebomb. A glint of thread peeks out from a fold, and I shift a few aside to get a better look.
“That one,” I say, pointing. The vendor pulls it out, and I can’t help it—I grin. I couldn’t have found something better if I’d commissioned it myself. As blue as any Lumeni flag, the vest has golden embroidery on either side of the lapel, bursting outward like unmistakable sun rays. The buttons flash bronze, like her eyes.
“Definitely that one,” I say.
“It’ll cost you,” the vendor warns.
“I don’t care. I’ll take it,” I say. “And two long-sleeved shirts—those’ll do.”
She wraps up my picks and charges me a whopping seven crescents for the bundle, but I couldn’t care less. I pile my finds with the quilt and turn away from the stall, satisfied. I poke down the final row of stalls, rounding out my purchases with several pairs of stockings and a few handkerchiefs. Hefting the massive quantity of cloth in my arms, I’m about to pass by the last vendor when I see what his wares are.
Hats.
Most are straw sunhats, but there’s a small selection of broad-brimmed leather hats. Eastern Desert Hats, Genuine Alcoran Leather, says the sign beside them. My gaze falls on one sitting above the others, a handsome work of brown-and-white patch cowhide. At first glance, it looks too large, but then I remember how big Lark’s old black hat was to fit over her dreadlocks.
“I’d like that hat, please,” I say.
The hatter looks me up and down. “That’s twelve crescents.”
“I’ll take it for seven.” I only have eight left, plus a few odd coppers. Please sell it for seven. I could always go back to Soe and see if she’s made any last sales today, but something tells me both she and Iano wouldn’t technically approve of this purchase.
“The hide in that hat alone is worth nine,” the hatter says, disapproving. “If you can’t do better than twelve, you can move along.” He looks over my shoulder at a customer drifting up behind me.
“No! Um . . .” I shift my pile of cloth onto his table, which makes him tsk in disapproval. “No, here. I can do eight crescents, and this.” I dig in my pocket for the laurel-flower medallion, the one I hacked off my boot in the water scrape. I hold it toward the vendor.
“That’s genuine Silverwood silver,” I say. “Not sterling. It’s worth another eight crescents, at least.”
The hatter blinks in surprise, perhaps at my desperation to buy his hat. He takes the medallion and turns it over, studying it. I watch, drumming my fingers anxiously.
“Very well,” he says, rubbing his thumb over the metal. “Eight crescents, and this silver piece.”
Victorious, I hand him the rest of the money. He lifts the hat from its stand and rests it on top of my bundle. I breathe in the scent of clean leather. I gather it all up and turn.
Then I stop short.
The customer standing right behind me is the same woman who was in front of us at the dairy stall, the one with the scar twisting her eyelid. I stare at her. She stares back. Her eyes narrow.
“Desert hats are selling real good right now,” the vendor comments behind me. “Thanks to that Sunshield Bandit. You from out East? Is that where you got foreign silver?”
I swallow but don’t turn back to face him, still holding the gaze of the woman. “No,” I say with what I hope is conviction and not fear. “The islands.”
And then, without another pause, I step around the customer and walk away as fast as I can without appearing to be running. I start to head back toward Soe’s cart, but veer off at the last second—if the woman is watching me leave, I don’t want to make it too easy for her to find me again. Instead, I circle toward the central stage built over the redwood trunk.
The stock tender has been replaced by a chemist hawking some miracle cure to a small crowd. I sidle around the edge of the stage. There’s a signboard tacked with adverts and notices, flanked by a few little saplings springing from the base of the long-dead tree. I shuffle close to them to screen myself from view and draw a few breaths.
“Hey!”
I start at the quick shout.
A man is at the signboard, tacking up a new piece of parchment. He takes the nails out of his mouth and angrily brandishes his hammer at me. “Get off the roots!”
“S—sorry?”
“Get off the damned roots! Where were you raised, under a rock? Have some respect for your environment!”
I look down, where I’m standing in the space between two small redwood saplings. Their roots crisscross under my feet.
“Oh—sorry.” I step sideways, rattled. The man shakes his head, hammers a final nail in the board, and then moves off, muttering about soil compaction and careless youths.
I lean against the signboard, taking a few deep breaths. The bundle in my arms is getting heavier by the second—I need to get back to Soe. Hopefully I can cross through the crowded square without being picked out by that woman with the eye twist.
Maybe I’m just imagining things. It is market day after all—why should it be unusual to bump into the same person at two different stalls? Maybe she needed a new hat. That’s all. Maybe she didn’t actually hear me chatting about palace life with Iano in my accented Moquoian at the dairy stand. Maybe she didn’t hear me boasting about Silverwood silver to the hatter.
I swallow.
We should get going.
I pick myself off the signboard. At the last second, I remember Lark’s suggestion to check the news, and I skim the notices on the board.
My gaze is drawn immediately to her bounty sheet, and I suck in my breath. Iano and Soe hadn’t exaggerated. Two hundred crescents, dead or alive, plus an extra fifty for accomplices. Still, the portrait is out of date. Lark doesn’t have her sword and buckler, or her big black hat and eyeblack anymore. Next to hers is Tamsin’s, but it’s partially hidden by a newer sheet, one of many with the same bold text riffling in the breeze.
My jaw drops.
Come Out to Witness
Tolukum’s Newest Ashoki
Kimela Novarni
on Her
Debut Circuit
Below it is a list of town names and the dates of each performance. Giantess Township is in the middle of the pack, listed for Mokonnsi 31—the last day of August. The day before Iano was originally supposed to be crowned—and Kimela officially instated as ashoki with him. What’s she doing on a debut tour the week before?
I whip my head around. The man who just tacked up the notices is standing in front of the stage with the crowd, listening to the hawker shouting about his miracle tonic. I rip one of the pages from the board, stuff it in my tunic, and hurry his way.
“Excuse me,” I say breathlessly. He turns to face me and frowns. “That notice you just put up—about the ashoki. Where did it come from?”
“From the printer’s, didn’t it?” he says in irritation.
“No, but I mean—where did the news come from? Tolukum? Who gave the order to put them up?”
“The palace,” he says. “A messenger brought the woodblock this morning.”
“Did the order come from the queen?”
He shrugs. “I ’spect so. The royal seal is right there at the bottom. It’s not up to me to nose about palace orders.” He squints at me. “You’re not from these parts, are you?”
Too late, I see the woman with the eye twist standing a few paces away, looking up at the stage with a faraway expression, as if not actually focused on the hawker’s presentation.
I clamp my arms tighter around my bundle, and without another word, turn and rush back across the square, not caring whether I’ve come across as rude. I weave in and out of buyers and sellers, children and carts, until I spy Soe’s stall. She and Iano are just finishing breaking down the table. They both look up as I join them, panting and sweaty.
“Where have you been?” Soe demands. “We thought you’d been mugged.”
“We need to go,” I gasp, flinging my bundle into the cart. “There’s someone following me around—that woman who was listening to us in the dairy line, Iano. And that’s not all. Kimela will be coming through Giantess on a debut tour in just a few days. She’s been appointed ashoki without you.”
Iano’s face pales. “What? When? By whom?”
“I don’t know. I have the notice here. Let’s get on the road, and I’ll show you.”
We rush to get the last of the goods packed into the back of the cart. I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting to see the scarred woman materialize from the crowd. But she doesn’t appear. Soe rouses the mules, hitches them back to the cart, and guides them out into the busy causeway. Iano and I hop into the cart, he into the seat and I into the back. I wriggle down between the hamper of groceries and the pile of clothes, trying to keep my head low as Soe drives the team through the crowds. I chew my lip, pondering what the appointment of the ashoki means—for us, for Tamsin, for Moquoia, for the East, for our doomed alliance. Ashoki, after all, is a lifetime appointment.
After several minutes of lurching, the towering trees start to close in over us again. The clamor of the market fades away, replaced by the squeaking of the cart and the call of birds in the distant branches. I lean my head against the balled-up quilt, staring at the sky peeking through the dark boughs. Between the stuffy glass interior of Tolukum Palace and the blazing, wide-open Ferinno Desert, I’ve forgotten how much I miss being cradled in trees. I breathe through some of the tight apprehension in my chest.
Iano turns in his seat. “All right. What’s this about Kimela?”
“Here’s all I know,” I say, handing him the crumpled notice from my tunic. “The fellow who put it up said the woodblock came from the palace this morning.”
Iano takes it, but he hesitates before turning around to read it.
“What is that?” he asks, laying eyes on the patch cowhide hat.
“A risk,” I say. “But I’m beginning to think it was a good one.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I admit. “But I think I might have a plan.”