“You can’t trust Vima, you know,” Adlai said. They sat at a table in the food stalls with a couple of peach juices, sharing a platter of almond bread, cheese, yogurt, and rice balls. “I sold him leather gloves once for thirty turns, and then I find out from Izel that he sold them to a lady for three silvers. Plain lied to my face when I asked him about it.”
Adlai sat with Penna on the bench, both of them turned to the fountain and scanning the crowd.
“Or Izel lied,” Penna said breezily. She fiddled with the delicate beads on her sleeve. “I quit the dressmakers last week. Vima knows people in the Unmade Stalls who pay me more for my work. I’ll be able to settle my training debt faster doing odd jobs.”
Adlai tore off some more bread and listened in wonder. How amazing it was to be sitting with Pen again. Penna had changed in the weeks she’d been away, and while Adlai didn’t trust Vima, the sad thing was that most situations would be an improvement to an orphan from Mother Henson’s.
“That’s great, Pen,” she said honestly. “You’re not still doing Henson’s work though, are you?”
Penna smiled. “I never minded helping,” she said. “But no, I found a place. It’s smaller than the attic and I have to share with two other women, but they’re nice and it’s cheap.”
“You think everyone is nice.”
“Most people are,” she said. “Gilly’s left as well. She got adopted. Mother said the couple had three sons and really wanted a daughter.”
Adlai’s brow rose. “And they were happy with Gilly being that girl?”
“I suppose. I see her playing along the river some days. She’s the same as always, but now she has a home to go back to.” Penna looked sideways at her. “And you? What happened, Adlai?”
She wasn’t sure how to answer. A lot of things had happened, and most were things she couldn’t tell Penna about. The fact that she had shadow powers for one, and that she could kill with them. Or the fact that she lived on an island hiding dozens of people that, if they used their powers out here, would be killed. As she had been. Or that she didn’t know if it was better to go back and be with people like her, or whether she should live her life without a shadow.
“I found somewhere . . . safe. I have an uncle and I’ve been living with him.”
Whatever Pen had been expecting Adlai to say, it wasn’t that. “You have family? Where? Is that why you left?”
“It doesn’t really matter,” she said. Then, seeing Penna’s face, corrected herself. “Okay, it does matter. It matters a lot. But I don’t really know him.” She scanned the crowd again. It was too early for Erikys to be coming back, and city guards were never in the market, but Adlai couldn’t help being nervous every time she saw someone wearing a hood. Trappers could be anywhere. “I think he cares about me but I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Penna’s large eyes fixed on Adlai. “Are you okay?”
She swallowed. Adlai could answer yes or no and both times would be telling the truth.
Yes, she had a home and someone to call family, and she had more power than she ever thought possible.
No, she was stuck with a life she didn’t choose, with powers she didn’t want and the only person she’d come to really care about was leaving if she didn’t go with him.
“I’m fine,” she said instead. “It’s you I should be worried about. Vima’s a crook and a cheat.”
Far from being embarrassed, Penna nodded. “He’s a realist and an opportunist,” she said. “He told me that stories only matter if they’re books he can sell, and dreams are big ideas for making money.
“But when I brought all your things to him, he wasn’t interested in haggling on prices. He hardly looked at them. All he wanted to talk about was me.”
She nudged Adlai. “I didn’t think he was my type either. And I thought he wasn’t serious about me being his type. But if he hadn’t asked, and we hadn’t tried, I would still be where I was. Stuck. Alone. Fantasizing about when things would change. He made the change happen. I hadn’t realized before him how far I was from ever rolling the dice for myself.”
“Vima made you realize all this?”
She nodded. “And you leaving,” she said quietly.
Adlai bit her lip. She wished she could tell Penna everything, but her friend had finally found a life for herself, one with silk dresses and a man she talked about as if he were the hero to her story.
Penna, Gilly, they had left the orphanage behind and were loved. She had a desire to play their old game. Tell me how, she would ask, How can I do the same?
* * *
As stars clustered in a darkening sky, market stalls started to close up shop and Penna left to help Vima pack up. Adlai, with an unsettling feeling, headed for the fruit stall.
She still wasn’t sure what she would tell Erikys. The island was beautiful but it wasn’t her home. Maybe she could find one with Erikys. Her parents would want that for her, surely. And yet leaving felt like abandoning them. Giving up the idea that her parents would ever be a part of her life again. Her uncle had promised her that he was doing everything to make that a possibility. Running wouldn’t help her parents.
Drinks were still being poured in a bar area but the crowd parted for her in happy stumbles and merry pats on the back. Finally, she came to the crates of fruit. Colors like wildflowers were all around the stall. She thought she recognized the vendor as the same man who had been there the last time.
Yes, he was the same and the stall was the same, but that was all she saw. There were no customers around. Erikys wasn’t there.
The heat pressed on her, making her body and mind slow as she forced herself closer.
The vendor was busy sealing lids and taking down signs, ready to close shop. He swatted her away when she asked if he’d seen a boy matching Erikys’s description.
“I see plenty of people today,” he said. “Maybe for customers I be remembering.”
She would have to buy something, she realized. The thief part of her protested, but she had a few coins on her. She needed to know how much time had passed since he’d been here. If he’d been here.
Adlai came away from the stall holding a bunch of grapes and a hollow in her chest.
The tents were closing and he wasn’t back.
Something’s happened.
She knew she was right. Even if she had missed him at the stall, he surely would have asked the stall owner when he hadn’t seen her there. It was what she had done, and she didn’t think the stall owner would have forgotten being pestered twice that same day.
Which meant he hadn’t come back to the market. But why hadn’t he? Had something happened with his family? Or had he been unlucky and met with a guard who’d recognized him?
Or worse: Had a trapper been around and somehow known he had a shadow?
It had happened to her. Erikys was as little prepared to meet a trapper as she had been. His shadow would be ripped from him. And that wouldn’t even be the worst of it. Nothing could prepare you for the horror of having someone standing over you, blade in hand, as your life seeped out in blood and sweat on the sands.
Couples strolled past her, swaying to music Adlai couldn’t hear. She couldn’t see the market. It blurred and glistened behind tears she didn’t want to shed. She wanted to scream instead because this place was cursed.
* * *
Going to the desert market had been a bad idea. It had always been a bad idea, even before today. How, why had her father made the market seem so wondrous? She’d grown up viewing the tents and stalls as places to feast her eyes on, where gifts could be found on every table and shadow powers were just a game to play.
The game should have ended after her father disappeared, yet she’d kept going back. She’d kept playing, turning the game into a gamble every time she stole with the slip of her shadow. Until one day she lost. She’d lost and still she’d dared to go back one more time.
How much more did she have to lose?
“Erikys didn’t meet you?” Penna asked.
Adlai came back to herself. Vima was packing away his goods. Colors were ripped from the sky as pink, blue, and orange tent hangings were pulled down around her.
“No,” she said. Her answer sounded distant, like someone else was forming it.
“Do you want to stay with me tonight?”
The crowd was scattering. Dust clung to the air. Everything was falling apart.
“I’ll be fine,” Adlai said, mechanically. “How much longer will this take?”
Vima slammed the lid shut on a crate of goods.
“With such help as you give,” he said, “expect to be leading the back of the line.”
Adlai shot him a dark look, but Penna shushed him and ducked under the stall, emerging with a small wooden box. She handed it to Adlai. “You can carry this,” she said. “It’s yours anyway.”
Adlai frowned. The box wasn’t familiar. Yet when she opened it, her hands gripped the sides and she sank to the ground with it.
Inside was useless, worthless junk; fake gold bracelets, relics with cracked gold paint, a frayed sun-yellow scarf. It was a treasure trove of no value, except the beating it stirred in Adlai’s heart.
“You kept these?”
Penna nodded. “They were from your father, weren’t they?”
Adlai swallowed hard and brushed her fingers over each one, remembering.
She was wrapping her hair in the scarf when she noticed someone in the crowd that made her freeze. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Her body turned rigid as if it didn’t know how to process the man coming toward her. It seemed so unlikely that he was here. She’d died and he hadn’t come to find her, and now, when she least wanted to see him, here was her uncle wearing a look that told her he wasn’t about to be helpful.
Dressed all in black, Luth stood out from the crowd the way a blot of ink muddled words on a page. His presence clouded the ones around him until he was all she could see.
“Dying gods.” Penna never cursed, but the sight of Luth made her gasp and she looked from Adlai to him with wide eyes. “Is that . . .? He looks just like you, Adlai!”
“My uncle,” she muttered.
Adlai snapped the wooden box shut and stood up as Luth approached the stall. The violet tent hanging Vima still had up shivered above him.
Her uncle looked down at her.
“I had to come,” she said. “Erikys needed to see his family.”
“You placed yourself in danger for that boy,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He didn’t even use Erikys’s name. That boy, he seemed to say, wasn’t worth the risk.
“He’s coming back,” she said quickly. “But he’s late. I’m worried something’s happened.”
A crowd of people shuffled past, wheeling crates and leading camels down the path to the city. Penna was pretending not to listen, trying in her gentle way to give them privacy, but the stall wasn’t large, and Vima wasn’t being subtle about being ready to leave. It was time.
She turned back to her uncle and caught the exact moment he pulled his shadow out. It seemed to happen in slow motion for her. He didn’t move, he didn’t blink. His black coat shivered in the breeze but his shadow was steady. She could almost mistake it for a normal shadow; it was as still as he was, and like Caster Shani’s, it didn’t have a whisper of smoke. He was in total control of it.
“You can’t,” she said, her voice scraped with panic. “Not here.”
Her uncle didn’t seem to have heard her. “You could have been lost to a trapper,” he said. “Again.” He paused, letting the implication hang in the air.
The weight of his stare should have been enough to bow her head, but it didn’t. Perhaps if her father had been saying the words, it would have, but she didn’t think he would say them. He’d taught her to be safe, to play the game cautiously. He hadn’t taught her to be a coward, and suddenly that was exactly what the island felt like: a coward’s hideout.
“What’s the point of gaining powers if we don’t use them to help anyone?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, and you’ve done enough today.”
His shadow caught her, moving so fast she didn’t have a chance to step back. Coldness seeped into her and it was like being submerged into icy water. She could drown in it. A part of her thought she was. She tried to call out, tried to pull out her own shadow and stop this, but it was too late.
Darkness and bitter cold dragged her down, and the market was ripped away.