“Rose, you can call me Rose.”
“Would every part of your body take as long to heal?”
Hope smiled, and this time her smile was genuine, because this man was falling into her trap, and not only wasn’t he even noticing, but he was doing it willingly.
“Thanks for the consideration, Speaker of the Scales. A cut on my thumb would be perfect, actually. It is very irrigated, so it will bleed freely and immediately. It will probably still take a long time to heal, but I could change the dressing myself and it would be less messy and dramatically full of blood all over the place.”
The merchant curled his top lip as he swallowed deeply. “I want your weapon and your blood but also want to stay on the Ruler’s good side, so of course I don’t mind where the blood comes from. I’m not a mean man.” He handed Hope the vial and remained staring at her, smiling.
She could feel Ciaran’s body next to her, more tense than the string on most crossbows, but she didn’t let herself move her focus from the performance at hand. If they wanted accurate answers from this man, her actions had to appear real.
Hope placed the vial on the counter, her right thumb an inch over the opening. With her left hand, she took the longest, thinnest blade from the sheath around her thigh, and very slowly brought it to her thumb, trying to make her hand shake a bit fordramatic effect, but her hand had never trembled and didn’t now either. When the end of the blade touched her skin, she flinched and gasped loudly, and both Ciaran—in his quickly acquired apprehensive role—and the merchant looked the other way.
That’s all Hope needed for her right hand to open further, not because of the pain of the dagger that had never touched her, but to Give the individual red drops now falling into the vial.
When she grew up in Verdania, ripe elderberries had always marked her skin when she crushed them by accident, the juice dark and sticky while it ran between her fingers. She had never used bloodroot sap before, but had read about its uses in dye—it was toxic and dangerous if ingested, so if anyone dared drink her “blood”, they wouldn’t be a worry anymore. To mimic blood’s thickness, she added a final touch of sticky pine resin mixed with red earth like the one from Cralia. In the right amount and dilution, the result was as convincing as anyone’s blood.
She made the combination of the three ingredients flow more abundantly at the beginning, as she continued flinching, and slowly, the flow decreased until it stopped, leaving an inch high of dark red, thick liquid at the bottom of the vial.
While the merchant grinned and put a cork top to seal it, she took another of her daggers out, placing it in front of the Speaker of the Scales.
“That’s my part of the deal,” she said.
“So it is, and your five minutes start now, Miss Rose.”
“All I want to know is where the South House keeps everything it has Taken and everything it Takes.”
“That won’t take five minutes, Miss Rose. We could have made a different deal if I had known all you wanted to know wasjustthat. Too late now, sadly, isn’t it?” He tilted his head, sighing, and Hope waited for the answer instead of entertaining any more of his absurdity. “The South House loves treasures andburying them, and there are lots of sand and dunes in the South Petal. One can put two and two together.”
“I’m afraid I need specifics. The South Petal is big, and as you said, there are lots of dunes.”
He swallowed, looked at the dagger and then flicked the blood vial. “The dune where the South House drops everything it Takes is called the Seizing Wind.”
“How do you know?”
His gold-injected gaze drifted past the small window as his fingers toyed absently with the full vial. “The House once Took me there, and warned me that if I continued injecting gold into my body organs, it would keep me there as I would finally be valuable.”
“Why did it let you go?”
“Because it said the South Cardinal, more than anyone else, understood how greediness can make beings blind and stupid. I never fully understood why, but I think it pitied me.”
27
Ayla
Aloud clatter in the middle of the silent night woke Ayla up. It was her own fault for not closing the balcony fully—the wind in the North Petal was always fierce. She turned in her bed, facing Nina. She felt her closeness and could only imagine her white and now also black hair falling over her pale skin as she breathed rhythmically under the always red moonlight. She had been the most beautiful sight ever to exist, a sight that would permanently live in her mind, forever.
She lifted her hand carefully, her fingers approaching in the air between them until her fingertips caressed the soft skin of Nina’s hand resting on the pillow.
“Little dove,” Ayla whispered ever so quietly.
“Please don’t wait a decade to tell her your feelings,” Raoul’s voice said. Ayla propped herself on her elbows and lifted her eyebrows. She was used to his presence, as she felt his soul hovering in the background often, especially when she was with Nina, but she hadn’t heard his voice in a long while. Even if his hair had been fully black when he died, he had always been the vivid mirror image of Nina, especially his ocean-blue eyes. “We live in uncertain times, and life can be shortened in the blink of an eye.”
“Nosy,” she muttered, laying back down and closing her eyes.
He chuckled. “Always. It’s incredibly boring being dead, honestly. All I can do is look, listen, and pretend not to exist. Let me be nosy in peace.”
She didn’t reply, and suddenly felt his translucent face staring back at her less than five inches away. “Rotten feathers,” she shouted as her heart jumped, immediately covering her mouth as Nina moved next to her. For one damned night when this beautiful woman slept seemingly in peace, she didn’t want to wake her up. “You are going to give me a heart attack.”
