“Delicacy around here.”
“Do you have anything else? Bread? Cheese? A salt brick I could shove down my throat to save you the trouble?”
“Nope. Just the bacalao.” From out of nowhere, the barman set down two pints of pale ale, then walked away.
The bar returned to life. The fight continued, the lady in the red dress beat her opponent, and the man with the knife-pistol jammed the end of it into the table to carve out a game of tic-tac-toe that he played with himself.
“I’ve never had that fish before,” Risa shared absentmindedly, then scowled at her slip of the tongue. Now he would know she was from a landlocked area of the kingdom, since bacalao came from the ocean and wouldn’t last on a merchant cart through the Bosque, cursed or not. She’d grown up with lake fish or the mysterious fish that would sometimes appear in the fountain, which were declared bad luck simply for their strangeness. Surprisingly, that didn’t stop anyone in Barrow from eating them. Beggars couldn’t be choosers and all that.
Javi made a face. “You’re better off with the salt brick.” Then, folding his hands primly on the table beside the wreckage, he declared, “I have an idea.”
“I wasn’t aware you could have those,” she sighed. She was weak from exertion, and the words held little bite in her current state.
“Be still, my heart,” Javi shot back with a wink.
“Stop flirting and concentrate.”
He turned serious as he removed his gold rings. “We won’t get far with just us two—three,” he corrected when Brunie growled. “I think we should bribe someone here to accompany us.”
Oh.
“That’s—” She cleared her throat. “That’s a great idea. I… thought the same.”
He was clearly pleased with himself, if his little smile was anything to go by. “I figured with your good luck, my charm, and the promise of gold, we’ll get there with time to spare.”
“I don’t believe we should rely on all that to get you to—”
She froze. The word she was about to say fell right out of her head, as if it had never existed. What the—
“Risa?”
Risa shook her head. She stared at the broken bits of cup, trying to piece it together in her mind along with the word she was looking for. But it stubbornly refused to make itself known, slipping from her grasp each time she reached for it. “No. I was trying to say—” The word floated away again. “Curses,whatis happening?”
They were trying to find a way to get the prince to his wedding in—again, the kingdom refused to name itself. She listed all the cities she knew in Kheadon, which happened to be an alarming few and would disappoint her parents greatly if they found out that the revolving door of tutors had done little to forward her education. Then she moved on to neighboring nations like Itra, Burgal, Niestes, and the last one that was separated from Kheadon by an entire desert and—
It came to her suddenly, like a magical storm at midnight.
“Madros!” she nearly shouted, rocking the table with the sheer force of her voice.
It melted back into the recesses of her mind almost immediately, a flare in the dark sputtering out. Something about the name falling out of her head made her insides churn.
Javi nodded slowly. “Right. We are going to—” And then he stopped, brow furrowed. “Shit. It’s happening again.”
“What is?”
But the prince was too busy muttering to himself to answer.
The overworked barman returned with two bowls of soup, which were steaming red and very pungent. He placed the chipped earthenware bowls on the table, eyes briefly alighting on Javi’s collection of rings, then turned around without another word.
The souplookedfresh, but the smell nearly made her gag. Javi, at least, didn’t seem bothered by it, though he didn’t immediately tuck in.
Instead, he collected his rings from the table, methodical in the way he slipped them back onto his fingers, turning them each once. The last was his signet ring with the ruby, and he held it between his fingers like he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He didn’t speak for a long moment.
“It’s been plaguing us for years. An inability to…mentionmy future home.” He swallowed as he returned the ring to his pinky, where it caught the dingy light that streamed in through grimy windows. “The wedding has been in the works for nearly as long as the general has been in power, simply because of how impossible it is to get letters and missives. Father will agree to a term, then forget it by the time the letter is sent off.”
It sounded like—
“Magic,” she said aloud.
