“Bring me something worth paying for.”
V
GREY LONDON
Rain dripped from the signs that hung over the darkened shops.
Tes squinted, trying to make out the words, and wishing she had kept up with her lessons. They were not ostra, her family, but her father still insisted all his daughters knew the tongue they spoke at court, in hopes that they would make it there. Make him proud. Now she struggled to make sense of the signs.
Dressmaker. Butcher. Spirits. Baker.
Of course, he’d lost his fervor halfway through her lessons, when it was clear she wouldn’t bring him glory. Her father—Tes tried to push the thought of him from her thoughts, as she always did, but she’d lost too much blood to fight her body and her mind, and soon his voice crept in.
What are you worth?
Four words, and there he was, standing at the counter of his shop, a rare and precious purchase hefted in one palm, his dark eyes sliding from the talisman to her.
Tes stumbled, gasped as she caught her balance, the jolt tugging at the stab wound in her side.
A small, frustrated sob escaped. The rain had stopped, but it was the middle of the night, and everything was closed. The streets were empty, and even with the lampposts, it was impossibly, unnaturally dark, and her head was spinning, and the pain had grown less sharp, which should have been a relief, but she knew enough to know it wasn’t a good thing, when wounds this bad stopped hurting.
She was beginning to lose hope when she saw it.
Not a shop window or a sign.
A thread.
It crept down the street, a single tendril of light, so faint she would have missed if it not for the glaring absence of any other magic. Even still, she blinked, sure it was a phantom, her eyes finally beginning to fail.
But when she looked again, it was still there—a filament, unlike any she’d seen before. It had no color, nothing to define its element, was rendered instead in black-and-white, a core of darkness limned in light. Tes followed it to a break in the road. For a moment, the thread vanished, and she stumbled as she turned, desperate to catch sight of it again, then—there. At the corner, it flickered, returned a little brighter.
She followed it, until the river came into sight.
The Isle—though of course, it was not the Isle, only carved the same path. She thought the thread must stem from there, but when she neared the river, it was an oily black, lightless in the dark. It was eerie, to see the water at the heart of the city without a pulse.
Tes shivered, her shirtfront long soaked through with blood. She closed her eyes, swayed, forced them open again. Found the thread. It ran along a nearby wall, brighter still, until it dove between the bricks of a house and disappeared. The windows of the house were shuttered, but light seeped beneath the door, and Tes used the last of her strength to pound against the wood.
No one answered.
She kept knocking, but the sound seemed far away. She was so tired. Her forehead came to rest against the door. Her fist slipped. She closed her eyes, felt her legs begin to buckle. She heard a voice, a set of footsteps, the scrape of an iron lock. And then the door swung open, and she was falling.
* * *
“She’s been stabbed.”
“I can see that, Beth.”
“Girl shows up half-dead at your door, leaving bloody handprints on the wood and leaking on the floor, and you don’t think to call someone.”
“I called you.”
Tes dragged her eyes open, and saw that what she’d taken for a house was in fact a tavern. Low wooden beams drew tallies overhead, and the scent of ale wafted through the room. Her fingers twitched against the slats of wood beneath her. She was lying on a hard, raised surface. A table.
There were two voices, somewhere beyond her sight, talking loudly, as if she were not there. A man, his voice not deep but even. A woman, her tone drawn taut as she said, “If she dies, you’ll have a bigger mess.”
Tes tried to move, but her limbs felt like sacks of sand. She closed her eyes again and strained to catch the words as they rushed past in High Royal.
“It’s my tavern.”
“Aye, and last I checked, I’m a barmaid, not a surgeon.”
“I’ve seen you truss a roast.”
“Ned Tuttle, if you don’t know the difference between a side of beef and a young woman, it’s no wonder you’re still single.”
The slosh of hands in water, the twisting of a rag, and then—the soft, bony click of a dead owl’s beak. Vares. Tes dragged her eyes open. She turned her head toward the man’s voice. He was thin, and younger than she would have guessed, with a narrow nose and floppy brown hair. He leaned back against the counter, and there, laid out on display, were her coat, a short stack of red lin, and her owl. In his hands was the repaired doormaker.