Everything inside looks too glaringly bright when I reenter. The party is still underway, people dancing and chatting as if nothing happened on the balcony just now.
As if the entire world didn’t shift on its axis, as if everything didn’t come sliding down off its surface, spilling out into the cosmos, forever changed.
They clink their glasses of beer and wine and chat and flirt and smile while I desperately try to moor myself. There must be something, anything, here that can put me back on solid ground.
My eyes catch someone moving in the shadows. He’s wearing a brown robe, an alchemist’s robe, and he’s tall and heavyset.
Hermes.
Just the alchemist I’ve been looking for.
I hadn’t seen him earlier, although would I have even noticed him with Ronan around? But here he is now, and by the looks of it, he’s heading somewhere.
Somewhere I will follow.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hermes walks the halls of the palace alone. At first, I think he’s heading to the alchemy wing, maybe sent by Adria to fetch her an elixir of some kind, but he keeps going past it and down some stairs to a familiar door.
It’s the locked door I went through when I arrived.
I don’t follow him through it—the hallway is too narrow, and he’ll be able to hear me within the passage even if he can’t see me in the shadows. But I know exactly where the passage leads, so I head through the palace gates to the same alley, stopping only to ask one of the guards—it’s Stella, thankfully, one of the few that I recognize—to borrow her cloak.
Stella gives it to me without question, but then she offers to accompany me wherever I’m going.
“No need,” I say. “I’m just heading to the market.”
“It won’t be open, ma’am.” Stella gives me a sideways glance. I hadn’t realized it before, but she doesn’t look much like your typical guard aside from the armor and closely cropped hair. While she’s clearly strong enough to wear her chainmail day in and out without complaint, her facial features are petite, almost delicate. Her brown eyes lack the sort of glazed look many of the guards take on after standing in the same place all day.They’re shrewd, cunning. Something about her reminds me of my mother.
“Fine,” I say, seeing no point in trying to lie. “I’m not heading to the market.”
“I have to go with you,” she says with zero hesitation.
“Did he order you to? If I ever left the palace alone?”
“Yes.”
“And if I tell you no, you’ll follow me anyway?”
“Yes.”
Ronan won’t like this. There’s a chance, albeit slim, that Stella could be involved in whatever Hermes and the alchemists are doing. But I don’t have time to argue with her, and I don’t have the time or the inclination to get his permission.
“Keep a distance from me. I’m trying to remain unseen.”
If she can manage to track me in the darkness, I’ll be impressed.
I slip her black cloak on and vanish into the shadows just in time to see Hermes emerging through the passage. I follow him through a series of alleys, concerned at first that he’s leading me into a trap, but eventually I realize it hasn’t even occurred to him that he could be followed. He heads directly to the alley where Ronan and I were just this morning.
There’s someone else waiting there for him in a brown robe. The other person is turned so I can’t see them, but they’re smaller than Hermes. A tall woman, perhaps, or a smaller man.
They don’t stop for conversation. They enter a door—the door Mery must have shown the guards—and close it behind them.
Itisthe alchemists, then. Or at least some of them. If Hermes is responsible in some way for kidnapping Vesper—
Did Adria put him up to it? She asked me about the missing shadow-born that time, although she’s never mentioned it since. I can’t see why she would take an interest in them, unless she somehow knew about their connection to Ronan.
But what other explanation is there for Hermes being here?
