CHAPTER 4

When Westruun woke up around them the following morning, loud voices, the clattering of cart wheels, and birdsong filling the air, some part of Vex was still tempted to pack up and skip town. Choose the solitary wild over judgmental cities. But she’d made herself a promise once that she wouldn’t let anyone hurt her again. So she wouldn’t.

Instead, while Vax returned to scouring for new jobs, she resolutely continued gathering the supplies they needed, with enough coin for once to not have to worry about running low or choosing between necessary provisions.

She visited one of the other apothecary stalls in the Market Ward to add a few more healing herbs to her collection. Enough for simple poultices that she could use both for her brother and herself, and for Trinket. She eyed the glass vials with different-colored liquids, all of which promised the most wondrous effects, and all of which were out of her price range—even with the lordling’s purse. The apothecary’s assistant—a young man with a shock of red hair and laughing blue eyes—did offer her a jar of root salve, a foul-smelling herbal concoction that helped heal cuts and bruises. After a few minutes of intense haggling, she got a bundle of herbs and a jar the size of her palm—and a hearty wink from the assistant, after she’d tried to sweet-talk him into dropping the price further.

Still, she was restless. Midway through the morning, a gentleman with blond hair and a familiar hat passed her by at a distance, and Vex tensed. Without a second thought, she ducked behind a cart full of soaps and perfumes. When she showed herself again, he was nowhere to be seen. She held her head high and kept walking.

Sometime after noon, she thought she saw a figure in the same sleek gray coat, but when she leaped out of the way and tracked him, it turned out to be someone else entirely.

As the sun arced high over the Market Ward, Vex returned to the bowyer, who perked up when she saw Vex. She pushed her dark hair behind a pierced ear and produced the bracers she’d set aside. “I was hoping you’d come back.”

Vex smiled, something about the way the bowyer fidgeted with a leather archer tab disarming her. The spark in the bowyer’s eyes was one of genuine delight. “I had to come back for those bracers, didn’t I?”

The bowyer’s pink cheeks darkened and she bit her lip. “I’m sorry you missed drinks. The bracers are still seven gold.” She held them out to Vex.

It was expensive for a pair of leather bracers. Vex reached for the pair and turned them back and forth in the sunlight. She’d fallen in love with them the moment she’d laid eyes on them. They were of a high quality, and the decorations were spectacular. The bowyer, who looked young to be a master craftswoman, had carved out an intricate design of branches and leaves that wrapped around the curve of the leather. They weren’t enchanted, but they were beautiful.

“This is stunning work,” Vex said sincerely.

The bowyer’s smile deepened, and briefly Vex wondered what it would be like to have a friend to go shooting with, to compare skill and strategy with someone who loved bows and arrows not simply as weapons—like her brother did—but as pieces of art.

Still, archery wasn’t the only art form. “Five gold,” she countered.

The bowyer grinned, and she leaned forward over her stall, her face close to Vex’s. “Seven,” she said softly.

“Six and my everlasting admiration for your fine work,” Vex tried.

“I already have your admiration,” the bowyer said, and her emerald eyes danced. She considered Vex carefully. “Seven, and I throw in the tab.” She held up the archer tab she’d been toying with, made from an uneven piece of leather, with tiny flowers carved along the edges. She tilted her head.

Vex hesitated. She could find plain bracers for a gold piece if she asked around, and with the gloves she wore, she didn’t need tabs. They could put the coin to better use. Maybe she should accept something simpler.

But she loved pretty things. Before she could talk herself out of it, she counted out seven gold coins from her purse and slapped them down in front of her.

The bowyer snatched up the coins with one hand and held out the tab with the other. When Vex reached out to grab it, the bowyer’s fingers gently brushed against hers. “The offer for drinks still stands too.”

The haggling and the conversation would usually have lifted her spirits, but today the unease remained.

The late afternoon passed in a blur of shopping and haggling. At the edge of dusk, she was sure someone followed her, but when she turned around to check, she saw nothing untoward, just a group of three girls who played with a small cluster of kittens, all of which were focused intently on a piece of string with a feather tied at the end of it.

Vex watched the chaos that ensued before she continued on her way, and as day bled into night, reminders of Lord Berin’s threats lost their sharpest edges, easing instead into becoming simply another part of the city life she hated and yet still longed for. Deep down she knew it wasn’t—necessarily—the cities she hated, but being made to feel like an outsider. While life in the wild was simple and free of scorn, it was lonelier too. It didn’t hold the riches and the vibrancy of the city. She wanted a part of that. Somehow. Even as it scared her to be denied it.

Perhaps that was why, when everything else disappeared to the background, Lord Berin’s suggestion to visit the library still piqued her interest. And it stuck with her, like a burr. It stuck with her when she returned to the inn with new supplies, when she and her brother shared another meal of questionable ingredients, and all through the night when sleep wouldn’t come.

When the streets around the inn emptied but for the occasional drunkard stumbling home, and bats and barn owls took to the skies, Vex did the only thing she could do. She sneaked out. She’d pulled on her brother’s darker cloak so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself.

And she walked.

The tall spire of the mountain Gatshadow loomed over the city like someone had cut out a slice of sky and stars and all that was left was a triangular void. Vex kept the strange outline as an anchor to walk in a northwestern direction. Toward the Scholar Ward and the library of the Cobalt Reserve. She didn’t know the way exactly, but the past two days had given her a solid understanding of the layout of the city, and she didn’t easily get lost. She could retrace her steps if she needed to.

As she wound down streets and through squares, making her way across Westruun, she found she liked cities better at night. The rats only concerned themselves with the day’s waste, and those random few passersby kept their hands on their weapons and their eyes firmly on the road. This deep into the night was not a place for pleasant conversations or curiosity.

She saw the city change around her. The buildings near the ramshackle inn all showed some level of dilapidation. In the interplay of light and shadow, the cracks in the walls looked like ivy, and the boarded-up windows were unmistakable. The roofs all leaned against each other, making the whole block a precariously balanced pile of bricks and beams.

Somewhat closer to the city center, the houses grew more stable and bigger too. They were decorated with neatly painted shutters and doors that locked and kept all the worries of the world out.

Near the library, crammed residential areas all made way for erudite consideration. The streets were wider. Framed by the outline of Gatshadow against the night sky, a tall gray tower overlooked a number of well-kept buildings that could be schools or other places of learning, and there were even spots of green here. Some grass and flowers. A handful of trees scattered around the buildings. Finally, beyond the tower, the magnificent library of the Cobalt Reserve stretched as far as the eye could see. Underneath its vast blue dome, it held an unimaginable wealth of knowledge.

Vex placed a hand on the outer wall and stared up at it. It did look awe inspiring. She could find her way in, if only to prove to herself that she could. She wouldn’t let the slick words of some self-important, conceited creep stop her from visiting if she wanted to.

She didn’t.

Besides, why would they welcome you? that treacherous voice in the back of her mind asked her. Tonight, it sounded remarkably like Lord Berin. You’re nothing. You’re no one. Never good enough. Never smart enough. Never enough. All you know is how to run away, and you’ve never stopped running.

Vex scraped her fingers over the rough stone of the outer wall, before she turned away and shut that voice down. She wasn’t a scholar and she had no desire to be. She researched dragons for what they ultimately were—prey. Her studiousness belonged to another time and place. Where knowledge wasn’t stored between the walls of a library, but where tall redwood trees encompassed as much history as the books in this building did, and countless scholars worked to preserve the memory of their home.

Her home was on the road, with her brother.

She stepped back from the wall and stilled when, in her periphery, something shifted. Everything around her grew quiet, and she reached for her belt knife. Vex had brought her survival instincts out from the wild into the city, and quiet meant danger. Quiet meant a predator nearby.

She turned slowly so she could pinpoint where she’d seen the movement, but both the street and the rooftops across the street were empty. Only a handful of rats had followed her as if hoping for crumbs. She cursed and kept turning, making sure to take in the whole of her surroundings.

The moons overhead were bright enough to illuminate the cobblestones and to color the world in dim shades of gray, even as the buildings cast their shadows and the street corners made for deadly hiding places. She disliked how angular and hard cities were. In the wild, she knew how to read her surroundings. She knew how to trace others and how to get rid of her own tracks. She knew the various tricks to disappearing. Here, she felt closed off.

Shit. She shouldn’t have come here on her own. She needed to get back to the inn.

She held a firm grip on her knife and began to walk away from the library. With her back to an open street, she felt painfully exposed, especially when she realized the silence followed her. She glanced over her shoulder once, twice, and saw nothing. A third time, she was sure she saw the same flicker of movement: there and gone again.

She picked up her pace. From carefully to casually to determined. Her heartbeat increased. Every other time she looked over her shoulder, she felt that glimmer of a presence. No weapons, no immediate threat yet, but impossible to avoid. She’d been so preoccupied with proving that obnoxious lordling wrong, she hadn’t stopped to think about the dangers of the city by night.

The streets in front of her tapered and twisted, and Vex made a split-second decision. She avoided going back to the quiet residential areas, and instead chose the city center with its taverns and bars. It was late enough that she didn’t expect the place to be bustling, but at least she wouldn’t be on her own.

Suddenly, she spied something moving over her left shoulder. A discordant shadow on the edge of a roof. Then: a glint of metal.

She did the only thing possible: she ran. She widened her stride, swung the knife back and forth, and dashed through the alleys as quickly as possible.

She rounded the corner and flung herself out of the way at the last moment when something small and metal zoomed past her ear.

Desperately, she tried to keep her balance. Before she could find her footing, a rat ran straight into her path. A second followed the first. Vermin crawled her way from all corners, not scurrying away in panic, like they were supposed to, but flinging themselves at her legs and feet.

She kicked one of the rats off her boot, sending it flying into the wall, where it disappeared from sight. Before she could take another step, a new rat had already appeared in front of her. They didn’t squeak and they certainly didn’t behave the way rats normally would, but she wasn’t planning to stop and study them.

“Go away, go away, go away.” She swung her knife at them, nearly dropping it once when she overextended her balance, and pushed through. In the distance, she could hear the off-key tones of a drunken shanty and she could see the faint glow of lanternlight mixed with the moonlight from above.

Another buzz. Something snagged on her cloak, and this time the knife went flying. It clattered on the stones a few feet away. She grabbed at it, but a trio of rats immediately crawled on top of it, and shy of stopping to fight them off, she couldn’t do anything.

She rounded another corner, the maze of streets an unexpected blessing, and caught her breath. She reached for her bow, nudged an arrow from the quiver on her belt, and in one fluid motion nocked the arrow and pulled the string back. She leaned around the corner and tried to calculate where her assailant was. When she saw the same flash of metal she’d seen before, she released and immediately sent another arrow flying after the first.

She didn’t wait to hear if either of them hit. She only needed the distraction. She reached for whatever had snagged on her cloak and found a long needle, the size of her palm. Careful not to touch the pointy end, she flung it against the far wall and picked up her pace again, toward the tavern lights and the sound of laughter—the few remaining rats still trailing her.

VAX LEAPED FROM ONE ROOFTOP to the next, keeping an eye on his sister from a distance. After her worries yesterday, she’d been restless all evening today too, so he’d let her think she could sneak out on him, but there was no way he’d let her wander the streets of Westruun on her own. Not with that creep threatening her. He knew she could take care of herself, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t also take care of her.

He’d spotted the shadow slightly before she had. He’d seen the hooded figure darting across the rooftops with an ease that could only come from intimate familiarity, and he’d immediately begun to trail them both, ready to leap on top of the figure with his daggers out if they got too close to his sister.

But while he knew how to stay close to Vex without being seen, it was harder to do that with her shadow present. The figure kept weaving in and out of sight, scurrying between rooftops that seemed to have no connection whatsoever, and Vax constantly felt two steps behind. When the chase lasted beyond the first narrow, empty alleyways and grew closer to the city’s nighttime revelry, he became convinced this wasn’t a chance robbery.

Cold fury settled inside him. The shadow moved with purpose and a kind of determination that only came from a decent quantity of gold or favors or a personal grudge. If someone had put a target on his sister’s back, Vax wanted to know who, where to find them, how to get rid of it, and how to get rid of them.

When two arrows suddenly arched over the rooftops, the shadow dropped and pushed themself flat against the ridge of a narrow roof to avoid them. Across the street, Vax saw his opportunity. He clambered up to the highest rooftop, ran, and launched himself across the emptiness between buildings. He landed on the edge of the ridge, his hands clinging to the rough stone and half dangling above the street. He pulled himself up at the same time that the figure crawled to their feet.

The shadow—a young man—was roughly the same size as Vax, dressed in all black, a cloak running from his shoulders to his ankles, with a hood low over his face and a piece of cloth in front of his mouth, bright-silver eyes awash with confusion. “There’s two of you?”

Refusing to dignify the obvious with a response, Vax grabbed two of his daggers.

His adversary reached inside his sleeve.

Before he could attack or escape, Vax leaped forward, both daggers out. The shadow took a step back to meet him, and they collided with each other, a tangle of limbs and weapons. Vax felt one dagger cut through fabric and flesh, while something sharp jabbed at his leg. The hooded man blocked another strike, and the ridge beneath their feet creaked.

The last thing Vax thought before the roof gave way from under them was that this would at least allow his sister to get away. Then they both went sprawling and tumbling toward the street.