Halfway to the door, the headache started.
Tes knew it was only a matter of time before it made itself at home inside her skull, made it hard to see, to think, to do anything but sleep. The pain no longer took her by surprise, but that didn’t make it any less a thief. Stealing in behind her eyes. Ransacking everything.
“Avenoche, Haskin,” she murmured to the empty shop, fishing the day’s coin from the drawer with one hand and sweeping up Vares with the other, heading past the shelves and through the heavy curtain into the back. She’d made a nest there, a corner for a kitchen, a loft with a bed.
She kicked off her shoes, and put the money in a metal tin behind the stove before heating up a bowl of soup. As it warmed, she freed her hair from the pile on her head, but it didn’t come down so much as rise around her in a cloud of nut-brown curls. She shook her head and a pencil tumbled out onto the table. She didn’t remember sticking it there. Vares bent his skull to peck at the stick as she ate, soaking up broth with hunks of bread.
If anyone had seen her then, it would have been easy to guess that the apprentice was young. Her bony elbows and sharp knees folded up on the chair, the roundness of her face, the way she shoveled soup into her mouth and kept up a one-sided conversation with the dead owl, talking out how she’d finish the negater, until the headache sharpened and she sighed, and pressed her palms against her eyes, light ghosting on the inside of the lids. It was the only time Tes longed for home. For her mother’s cool hands on her brow, and the white noise of the tide, the salt air like a salve.
She pushed the want away with the empty bowl, and climbed the ladder up into the little loft, setting Vares on a makeshift shelf. She pulled the curtain, plunging the cubby into darkness—as close to dark as she could get, considering the glow of threads that hovered over her skin, and ran through the little owl, and the music box beside him. It was shaped like a cliff, small metal waves crashing up against shining rocks. She plucked a blue thread, setting the little box in motion. A soft whoosh filled the loft, the breathlike rhythm of the sea.
“Vas ir, Vares,” Tes whispered as she tied a thick cloth over her eyes, erasing the last of the light, and then curled up in the little bed at the back of Haskin’s shop, letting the sound of waves draw her down to sleep.
II
The merchant’s son sat in the Gilded Fish, pretending to read about pirates.
Pretending to read, because the light was too low, and even if it weren’t, he could hardly be expected to focus on the book in front of him—which he knew by heart—or the half-drunk pint of ale—which was too bitter and too thick—or anything but the waiting.
The truth was, the young man wasn’t sure who—or what—he was waiting for, only that he was supposed to sit and wait, and it would find him. It was an act of faith—not the first, and certainly not the last, that would be asked of him.
But the merchant’s son was ready.
A small satchel rested on the ground between his feet, hidden in the shadow of the table, and a black cap was pulled low on his brow. He’d chosen a table against the wall, and put his back to it. Every time the tavern door swung open, he looked up, careful not to be too obvious, to lift only his eyes and not his whole head, which he’d learned from a book.
The merchant’s son was short on experience, but he had been raised on a steady diet of books. Not histories, or spell guides, though his tutors made him read those, too. No, his true education had come from novels. Epic tales of rakes and rogues, nobles and thieves, but most of all, of heroes.
His favorite was The Legends of Olik, a saga about a penniless orphan who grows up to be the world’s greatest magician/sailor/spy. In the third book, he discovers he’s actually of ostra blood, and is welcomed into court, only to learn that the nobles are all rotten, worse than the scoundrels he faces at sea.
In the fourth book—which was the best one, in his opinion—the hero Olik meets Vera, a beautiful woman being held hostage on a pirate ship—or so he thinks, but then discovers she’s actually the captain, and the whole thing was a ruse to capture him and sell him to the highest bidder. He escapes, and after that, Vera becomes his greatest foe, but never quite his equal, because Olik is the hero.
The merchant’s son feasted on those stories, supped on the details, gorged himself on the mystery, the magic, and the danger. He read them until the ink had faded and the spines cracked, and the paper was foxed at the edges from being thumbed, or from being shoved into pockets hastily when his father came around to the docks to check his work.