Privately, Alizeh smiled.
Some people, she noticed, were carrying signs—some held high, others dragging behind like a dog on a leash. She tried to make out the printed words, but none could be deciphered in the dim, flickering light. One thing was for certain: this was an unusual level of merriment and madness, even for the royal city, and for a moment Alizeh’s curiosity threatened to overcome her better senses.
She tamped it down.
Strangers jostled her, a few swiping at her snoda, laughing in her face, stepping on her skirts. She’d learned long ago that servants of her station were the most universally despised, considered fair game for all manner of cruelty. Others in her position were eager to remove their snodas in public spaces for fear of drawing unwanted attention, but Alizeh could not remove her snoda without great risk to herself; though she felt certain she was being hunted, she did not know by whom, which meant she could never let down her guard.
Alizeh’s face was—unfortunately—too easily remembered.
Hers was the rare exception; it was otherwise difficult to spot the difference between Jinn and Clay, as Jinn had thousands of years ago regained not only their vision but the varying levels of melanin in their hair and skin. Alizeh, like many in Ardunia, had yards of glossy, coal-black curls and an olive complexion. But her eyes—
She did not know the color of her eyes.
Occasionally they took on the familiar brown of burnt umber, which she believed to be the natural color of her irises, but more often her eyes were a piercing shade of ice blue, so light they were hardly a color at all. It was no wonder then that Alizeh lived always with a perpetual chill, one she felt even in the sockets of her eyes. Ice sluiced through her clear veins even in the pit of summer, immobilizing her in the way she imagined only her ancestors could understand, for it was from them that she’d inherited this irregularity. The resulting effect was so disorienting few could bear to look at the girl—and yet, Alizeh’s face might’ve been more readily ignored had her irises only ceased to change shades, which they had not. Instead, they flickered, alternating color constantly; it was a problem over which she had no control, and whose provocation she did not understand.
Alizeh felt a touch of moisture on her lips then and looked up. Fresh snow had begun to fall.
She pulled her arms tighter across her chest and darted down a familiar road, her head bowed against the wind. She’d been growing slowly aware of a pair of footsteps behind her—unusual only in their consistency—and felt a frisson of fear, which she forcefully dismissed. Alizeh felt she was growing too easily paranoid of late, and besides, the glow of the apothecary’s shop was just up ahead. She sprinted toward it now.
A bell chimed as she pushed open the wooden door, and she was nearly shoved right back out by the crowd jammed within. The apothecary was unusually busy for the hour, andAlizeh could not help but notice that its standard aroma of sage and saffron had been exchanged for the mephitic vapors of unwashed latrines and aged vomit. Alizeh held her breath as she took her place in line, resisting the urge to stamp the snow from her boots on the rug underfoot.
Present clientele were shouting obscenities at each other, jostling for space while cradling fractured arms and broken noses. Some were dripping red blood from the crowns of their heads, their mouths. One man was presenting a child with the bloody tooth he’d plucked from his head, a souvenir from another who’d thought to bite his skull.
Alizeh could scarcely believe it.
These people needed baths and surgeons, not an apothecarist. She could only imagine they were either too stupid or too drunk to know better than to seek aid here.
“All right, enough,” boomed an angry voice over the crowd. “The lot of you:get out. Out of my shop before you—”
There was the abrupt sound of glass shattering, vials knocking to the ground. The same booming voice shouted renewed epithets as the crowd grew only more agitated, and there was a veritable stampede for the door when he brandished a cane and threatened not only to horsewhip the group of them, but to turn them over to the magistrates on charges of public indecency.
Alizeh flattened herself as best she could against the wall, so successful in her aim that when the horde had finally cleared, the shopkeeper almost missed her.
Almost.
“Get out,” he barked, advancing on her. “Get out of mystore,out, you heathen—”
“Sir— Please—” Alizeh shrank back. “I’m here only for some salve and bandages. I’d be terribly grateful for your help.”
The shopkeeper froze, the angry expression still etched onto his face. He was a narrow man, tall and wiry, with dark brown skin and coarse black hair, and he very nearly sniffed her. His assessing eyes took in her patched—but clean—jacket, the tidiness of her hair. Finally he took a deep, steadying breath, and stepped away.
“All right, then, what’ll it be?” He moved back around the main counter, staring down at her with large, ink-dark eyes. “Where’s the damage?”
Alizeh clenched her fists, stuffed them in her pockets, and tried to smile. Her mouth was the only part of her face unobscured, and it was as a result a point of focus for most people. The apothecarist, however, seemed determined to stare at her eyes—or, where he thought her eyes might be.
For a moment, Alizeh was unsure what to do.
It was true that, from the outside, Jinn were mostly undetectable. It was in fact their stunning physical resemblance to Clay that had made them the biggest threat, the more difficult to suspect. The Fire Accords had attempted to bring organization to these sorts of problems, but under the veneer of peace there remained always an uneasiness among the people—an ingrained hatred of their kind, of their imagined association with the devil—that was not easily forgotten. Presenting strangers with clear proof of her identity had always inspired in Alizeh a halting fear, for she never knewhow they might react. More often than not, people could not hide their contempt; and more often than not, she did not have the energy to face it.
Quietly, she said, “I’ve only a few scrapes on my hands that need tending—and a few blisters. If you’ve fresh bandages and a salve you’d recommend, sir, I’d be most obliged.”
The apothecarist made a sound in his mouth, something like atsk, drummed his fingers on the counter, and turned to study his walls; the long wooden shelves housed stoppered bottles of untold remedies. “And what of your neck, miss? The cut there seems severe.”
Unconsciously, Alizeh touched her fingers to the wound. “I beg—I beg your pardon, sir?”
“You have a laceration at your throat, of which I doubt you’re unaware. You must be feeling the pain at the incision, miss. The wound is likely warm to the touch, and”—he peered closer—“yes, it looks like there’s a bit of swelling. We must get ahead of any major infection.”
Alizeh went suddenly rigid with fear.
