I race down the steps and out of the palace. I don’t bother to hide who I am or where I’m going; there are far too many people around for anyone to notice what I’m up to.
The market is so incredibly full of people that I can barely enter it. It seems that everyone from the entire region is in Faros today for the end of the tournament. There are new merchants selling pennants and banners for spectators to wave, and I realize some of them are in our house colors. Nithyrian green and blue.
People are actually buying flags in Nithyrian colors. Are they going to cheer on Adria?
“You’d better get over here before they see you,” a familiar voice whispers.
Soren.It’s so wonderful to hear his voice.
It’s Ronan’s voice really, I know, and it’s Ronan’s face under the illusion, but there’s something just so comforting about seeing him like this again.
I let him lead me into an alley near where I first encountered him. “That was lucky. If they spotted you, we’d be in trouble.”
“What? Why?”
He tilts his head as if I’ve said something stupid. “Sylvie of House Verran, the hero of Selara? The savior of the king?”
“Is that what people think?”
“Some of them do, at least. We leaked that you saved me this morning to some of the town’s biggest gossips. It was that or face people who thought you were trying to kill me coming for your head. Though I can’t guarantee that won’t happen, not until the ceremony later.”
“Ceremony?” He’s talking about it like I should know what’s going on, but I don’t.
“The crowning of Sai’s Champion of the Bow?”
I think he means me, but that’s absurd. “We didn’t even compete. I don’t need a pity trophy.”
“You killed a would-be assassin with a single arrow during the archery competition. With one of the other competitors disqualified and the other unfortunately deceased, I’d say that makes you the winner. And judging by the colors on sale, the people seem to agree.”
The Champion of the Bow. The hero of Selara. The people will recognize me after tonight, if I go along with it, assuming they don’t know me already. I don’t know how to feel about it. I was known in Nithyria, but as the third child in a noble family. Almost everyone who knew me had met my family personally. They worked our lands or kept our house.
But the people here don’t know me at all, except for what I did for Ronan.
How can I be a hero to them?
“Can you disguise me?” I ask him. If we’re getting closer to the mole or at least what happened to Vesper, we should try to avoid being noticed.
“Not unless you’re sitting still. The illusion works because it’s on my own body. I don’t think I can keep it close enough to you. Here,” he says. He takes his hat off, the hat that hides his perfectly coiffed hair, and hands it to me. “Put your hair up in that. It will help.”
“Mess your hair up, then. You look like you spent an hour on it.”
“Two hours, thank you very much.”
“Come here,” I say, reaching my hand into a planter filled with sandy soil and a very dead succulent, the only thing in this alley that seems reasonably sanitary. “A bit of this will do.”
“Absolutely the fuck not,” says Ronan, dodging me.
“You have to. You literally look like a god fell down to earth, even with the scars.”
“You think I look like a god?” He drops Soren’s voice in surprise.
I roll my eyes at him. “You know you do.”
“Butyouthink so?”
He leans a little closer to me, and I can’t resist the opportunity. I shove my dirty hand into his hair, messing it up as best as I can.
“Fuck!” he yells. He tries to get away from me, but I have years of experience wrestling with much older siblings. I manage to make him look very reasonably human in just a few moments of mussing.
