Nara picks up speed, taking us past a blacksmith, an apothecary, and a seamstress who specializes in mending. All trades the soldiers patronize. A tavern next, then a bakery.
Separate walkways run parallel to both sides of the main path, and both are busy with fae hurrying about their errands.
We make it an astonishing fifty paces before anyone notices us.
A little lowborn boy freezes on a spot on the walkway to our right, his pale-blue eyes widening.
I isolate his whisper from the noise around us.
“Mama, look.”
Without taking his eyes off us, he reaches for the hand of a woman standing at the bakery’s shop window.
She tugs him to her side without looking up. “Come away from the path. Stay clear of the soldiers.”
Nara glides on by.
Thyra’s head turns, her focus on the boy.
She gives him a smile, as if he were in on some secret with us.
His jaw drops as he watches us go, glances up at his mother, and then gives me a gap-toothed grin.
A surprising moment of peace.
My tension only rises.
As Nara proceeds farther along the path, I count her paces, focusing on every step she takes, narrowing the breadth of what I can overhear to what’s happening in the nearest buildings, where any threat is most likely to originate.
With every passing second, I expect the worst.
Up ahead, again on the walkway to our right, ayoung woman plods in our direction carrying a heavy-looking basket covered in a cloth. She’s wearing a fur coat, but it’s threadbare and she doesn’t have mittens.
She glances up. Puffs. Keeps going. Takes a second glance.
Her pale-blue eyes are suddenly pinned on me.
The basket drops from her fingers. I expect her to scream, but her throat has visibly closed up.
The basket hits the ground, the cloth falls to the side, and five precious plums bounce out from it.
Thump, thump, thump…
One splats directly in Nara’s path, causing her to stop.
Thyra’s hand twitches on mine and my mind whirls with every possible action she and I might take, along with all the potential consequences. None good.
Thyra’s instinct will be to help pick up the fruit, but she shouldn’t. The young woman will have to refuse the return of the food since she caused me an inconvenience, but if she refuses, she’ll insult Thyra, and if she insults Thyra, then I’ll have to punish her.
My arms tighten around Thyra’s waist as that heartbeat of calamity passes through my mind and we come to a standstill.
Thyra’s head turns slightly and then seems to lock in position.
She speaks barely above the volume of an exhalation, and the sudden, immense power in her voice is as clear to me as a chiming bell.
“Whispers weaving… Listen.Listen…”
It’s the first Oracle vision she’s had in a week and now it’s happening at a moment so fraught that every other fae on the street has stopped to look at us and has fallen into a tense silence.
