My heart pounded in my ears as I took in the folded, aged papers. An awareness tinged my thoughts, a familiarity in the drops of dried liquid that seemed to sprinkle a corner of the papers.
It couldn’t be.
But of course it was. Alaric had always been playing an entirely different game than the rest of us. I shouldn’t be surprised. Recognition flared, and a memory surfaced.
The first time I’d delivered youngleaf to Alaric’s workshop, the jeweler had still been a stranger to me. Ava trusted him, though, and she’d arranged for me to traffic the herb into the city.
He kept very little for himself. I had liked that about him from the start. Mostly, he distributed to those in need. Ava had indicated he’d worked with Alysa and the Storm directly until he became Jeweler to the Blessed. Now, due to his position, he didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to his extracurricular activities, and he seemed to have quite a few.
When I slid behind the thick golden curtain of his workshop to deliver the youngleaf after hours, he took great pains to appear completely absorbed in a project.
I could tell he wasn’t.
His focus darted toward the bookshelf across the room. The tea beside him on his workbench was well steeped, and he hadn’t removed the sachet. I had only met him twice toset up this exchange, but I’d come to understand his behavior.
Usually fixated, he was near obsessive about any project on his workbench. He didn’t like me getting too close when something was in progress. Every other time I’d visited, he met me in the middle of the room, as if my mere presence would disrupt his carefully curated experiments. The fact that he didn’t seem to care about my approach now was another giveaway.
“Per your request.” I set the bag of youngleaf on the workbench. I couldn’t help myself as my gaze drifted across everything strewn across the top. He’d never allowed me to examine it so plainly before. Tools for cutting and shaping the stones, glass beakers filled with mixtures I couldn’t begin to guess at, and a few books open for good measure.
“Thank you, Hart.” He cleared his throat. “It seems Ava was right about you.”
“How so?” I asked. I’d been working with Ava for years, since I hired her to run Forest’s Edge. Still, she rarely recommended me to anyone for a service such as this. I knew she had a larger partnership in mind for the jeweler and me, but she’d been stingy with the details of his next ask.
“She said you get things done. You have freedom to come and go that many don’t.”
I grunted in acknowledgment.
“I won’t ask how, or why.”
“I’m sure you have your own suspicions,” I said, glancing at the wall of books. The ones I could see looked like history books and encyclopedias on plant properties. He also had a few books that my dear father was known to be fond of, but the spines on those didn’t look broken. If I were a betting man, I’d say he had a few select volumes that my father wouldn’t appreciate.
“My suspicions are my concern,” he replied.
“Alright. I’ll bite. What do you want to make my concern?”
Alaric laughed and turned to face me, giving up whatever game he had been playing. “Have your travels taken you far?” He glanced at the mirror over his workbench, as if to ensure the shop was empty. Little did he know I’d locked the door behind me.
“Far,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Linia?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to question him, but I hesitated. It shouldn’t surprise me that he had an interest in the other kingdoms on the continent. He clearly used the youngleaf on himself. It protected him from my father’s hold on Kavios. I didn’t know what this man, the key to my father’s stolen magic through the adamas gem, was up to, but I desperately wanted to find out.
“Sure,” I said.
Alaric folded his arms across his chest. It only accentuated the jeweler’s thin frame, the same way his too-loose clothes did. “What would you charge to carry a package there?”
“Depends who it was being delivered to,” I hedged.
“Let’s just say it’s going somewhere I think Sebastien will need to go, not Hart.”
I tensed. Indecision flooded me. Very few in Kavios knew that name. In fact, Ava was the only one I’d told myself. I couldn’t imagine she had shared that detail with Alaric.
As if the straightening of my spine were all he needed, Alaric walked past me. He crossed the room to the bookshelf he’d been eyeing when I entered, and reached into the shelf, beyond the row of books, pulling something hidden behind them. At this point, I was unsurprised to see a secret door swing open from within the bookcase.
The hidden room wasn’t too full. It had a few booksstacked inside, and a small dragon statue just to the right of the entrance.
Frankly, that was what did me in. If the jeweler worshiped Chaos beneath my father’s nose, I would run his errand for him.
