“Well, those things are preposterous. Almost as preposterous as the first part of what you said. I don’tcutanything. Except for flowers. And dead trimmings.”
And now curiosity hooked her. She couldn’t very well leave without knowing. “All right. How do you manage it, then? Because those aren’t all found on our outsides.” She gestured again to the jars. Particularly the pink, soft parts.
“Good eye, good eye.” As if it’d been summoned, the eyeball specimen swiveled toward her. “It’s actually quite extraordinary what nature can do.” He shuffled away from her, his cane thumping against the weathered wood floor. He stopped before a small cabinet on the wall, and opened it.
Lux peered around him, but all there was to see were several tins and nothing more. She landed back on her heels.
Edgar balanced his cane against the wall in order to remove a rectangular tin. He worked the lid, and when it came free, a plume of powder puffed along with it. Lux stepped back.
“Oh, don’t worry yourself. You have to chew them, not breathe them. It’s only sugar.” His thick fingers reached into the tin and withdrew the tiniest cake she’d ever seen. A dusting of white powder sat atop it.
He held it out for her inspection, which she gave, albeit nervously.
“It’s a recipe handed down for generations. Gooseberries, juniper berries, and bayberries. Chew this and I can call up any organ I wish! Only one we agreed upon, of course,” he added after observing her look of utter terror.
Lux swallowed against a tight throat. “She vomited up her appendix?”
“In exchange for a lot, I’d say. More than fair.” He snapped the lid back into place. “And I have just the thing for you.”
Though she was relieved to see the cakes hidden away again, Lux didn’t want anything to do with whatever he had in mind for her. She backed away. “No. I need nothing.” Her fingers tightened on the hidden handle of Shaw’s knife.
“Two things,” he muttered, puttering over to a potted plant with large violet leaves and little else. But when he pried them from one another, she saw a separate stem inside, overgrown with plump purple berries. “Two…” he grunted. A single berry pulled free. “Things.” The second came away into his grasp. “They donotlike to be plucked.”
He held them out to her.
“What am I supposed to do with those? What evenarethose?”
“Gorga seeds. Fantastic plants. Their leaves clear toxins from the air, but the berries themselves are interesting. The juice issour; if you swallow it, you’ll lose your voice for hours. Ingest the seed, however, and you’ll lose your voice until the end of your days. Did I say they were fantastic?”
Quicker than she knew he could move, the botanist snatched her hand. He turned it over as she struggled to free it. “All it’ll cost you is a fingernail. That one.”
Lux seethed through gritted teeth.
“Absolutely not.”
Chapter two
Herpinkyfingerthrobbedstill.
It’d been two days.
Lux adjusted the pack draped against her hip and stared into the looming city.Loxlen,read the arched iron letters foisted over the road. She swallowed, her throat gone dry. “Crowds,” she muttered. “The bane of my existence.”
Nevermind that she had multiple banes, and crowds were only one of them.
In the four weeks since she’d left Ghadra, she’d managed to avoid anything larger than a village. She’d taken meals from street vendors or small cafés, and she’d slept in little roadside inns that boasted the same number of rooms as they did stalls for animals. And all the while, she’d kept her ears trained for very particular words. Words like “lifeblood”, “immortal”, and “Bartley Tamish”. So far, she’d encountered nothing.
Edgar Dosem and his cabin of horrors was a detour that some might not have deemed necessary, but to her, was a questionwritten in a diary and in want of crossing off. Because even after everything that’d happened in Ghadra, she still yearned to understand why it did. Only, she wasn’t sure it had been worth the fingernail.
Lux pulled at the tail of her bandage with her teeth, tightening the cloth until her finger smarted. “Here goes.” Because nothing said “potential buyers of souls” quite like a bustling trading city.
She passed beneath the overlarge iron name and forced a slow breath. The late mayor of Ghadra, Bartleby Tamish, would have argued with her purpose. Per his reasoning, he hadn’t been selling his people’s souls, but rather their souls’ tether to their bodies. Something, she believed, he thought quite a lot less evil.
It didn’t matter to him that without it, not a single one of those bodies would ever have a chance of revival. That to thendrinkit was another atrocious thing. It was irreversible and unforgivable what he had done. And though he was dead, his own over-aged body providing a slow, steady nourishment for a gallowtree, she felt justified in still loathing him for it all.
Lux tugged back the hood of her new cloak. Enough that she could absorb everything, her periphery unobstructed. A warning from Shaw rattled in her head—that she should never leave herself vulnerable to attack. Her hand rested on the handle of his knife as she walked.
The road had been dirt outside the city. Now, it was cobblestone. Her boots made a soft clack that was quickly overrun by the rumble of wheels, and she moved out of the way on instinct to make space for a death-cart. But these weren’t the streets she’d grown up with. There were no death-carts here. Lux’s attention swung instead to a carriage as it passed her by. Black, sleek, with twin lanterns, a dour driver, and a stack of leather-bound luggage.
