There was the night market, for instance, the shimmering, magic-filled tents that bloomed in the shadow of the palace, and thrived in the Isle’s light. And there was the Narrow Way, an alley south of the shal that catered to darker tastes. But there were dozens of other markets on dozens of other streets, less flashy, perhaps, but just as full.
Every city street had its own rhythm, its own color, its own pulse. And the best way to learn them—the only way, really—was by walking.
So that’s what Lila did.
She walked. Not the way Kell did, with the purposeful strides of a man always on a mission. No, she walked like a body with nowhere else to be. She strolled, her head tipped back, and her hands in her pockets, fingers grazing the tokens. The same ones Kell still insisted on wearing around his neck.
A shilling, for Grey London.
A lin, for Red.
And a tol, for White.
As she felt the tol’s shape—an eight-edged coin, struck in silver—she thought of her first visit to the city after Holland’s death, how relieved she’d been to hear they’d crowned a child queen. That was, until she saw a painting of that child’s face. Lila had looked into those two-toned eyes—one hazel and the other black—and muttered, “Fuck.”
She had returned to Red London, and a waiting Kell, had told him about the healing city and the child queen and, at some point, had decided to leave out the fact she was Antari. Kell had enough problems, so Lila had resolved to handle it herself.
She’d gone back, again and again, and every time she thought about killing the young queen, and every time she decided to wait another month, another year. It wasn’t mercy that stayed her hand, not really, only the knowledge that White London was a power-hungry place, and whoever came next might well be worse.
So Lila had waited, and watched as, over the years, the city took on color like a pale body in the sun, watched as it raised monuments to Holland Vosijk, watched as the Antari grew from a child into a lanky teen, watched, and waited for those two-color eyes to turn and look to other worlds. So far, at least, they hadn’t.
And one day, if they did—well, she would handle it.
Lila turned her attention back to the city around her, the street unspooling beneath her boots. She remembered the first day she’d come to Red London, hitching a ride on the back of Kell’s magic. They’d been dragged apart by the force of the spell, and the first thing she’d come across was a parade. A vast spectacle of magic, strange and wondrous. The sight of it had made her hungry, and she felt that hunger now—not in the pit of her own stomach, but the city itself. In the gaps left between wealth and want, and how they’d spread.
As she moved away from the shelter of the palace, she felt the city change. It was a subtle thing, like the slow rise of a tide, or the air in the hours before a storm, but there all the same.
It only took her an hour to find the first sigil.
She stopped before the wall and ran her fingers over the stone. The paint was long dry, beginning to flake, but she could tell that it had been a hand.
“Where are you?” she murmured, laying her own palm flat in the center of the mark.
It was then she noticed that the hand was tipped off-center, turned faintly on the axis of an invisible wrist, as if mid-wave. She tipped her head the same direction, to the left, looked down the road. Into the shal.
Lila frowned. It felt too obvious. The roughest corner of the city was surely the first the royal soldiers would have searched. But the night was dragging on, and she had no other leads, so she took a deep breath, and plunged into the warren of streets as if the darkness were a curtain, one that parted to let her through, and swung shut again in her wake.
She found the second handprint one street down.
And then a third.
But the tilt of the hand always went to the left, which was as good as leading nowhere. Or, she realized, in a circle. Lila closed her eyes and called up a map inside her head, and laid the marks like pins, until the picture formed.
The hands made a loose ring around the block, a circle of three shuttered storefronts, a stable, a brothel called the Merry Way, and—
Lila froze. She turned her thoughts a different way, calling Verose back to her, along with the tavern, and Tanis.
If you find yourself in London, she had said, I hear the gardens are lovely.
Lila swore under her breath. The city had plenty of greenery, but Tanis hadn’t been talking about flowers. Red Londoners had a special term for brothels. They called them pleasure gardens.
She doubled back down the road until she found the canopied entrance of the Merry Way, and went in.