I wandered around the market for a while, wondering how to broach the subject and whom to speak to, until I saw again the sign I had seen on arriving in the city: advertising quills and paper, and “Letters Read and Written.” Behind it sat a bespectacled man.
I started toward him, with the vague idea that someone who was around ink and paper a great deal would have more knowledge than the average person. And then I realized—I couldn’t believe this hadn’t occurred to me before—I could write to Da! I could explain where I was and what I was doing, far better than in my hastily scribbled note that I had left on the counter back home.
“Need something read?” asked the scholar when I approached, eyeing me dubiously. I suppose my fine clothes made me look less illiterate than usual.
“You’re a scribe?”
“That is my trade,” he said, tapping the sign.
“Could you get a letter out of the city? If I wrote one?”
“A letter? Nothing easier. Shall I write it for you?” He was still looking at me oddly, as if he wanted to say more.
“No, my hand is fair enough. But I will need pen and paper,” I said.
He passed me both, wordlessly, and I palmed him a coin. I wrote a few lines, telling Da where I could be found, and that I was working as the sorcerer’s housekeeper (“andnothing else,” I added and underlined it, because I knew he would worry). I told him I would be back as soon as I found a way, and then I signed my name and addressed the letter.
I feared it would do little to ease his worry. He would know better than to come to a sorcerer’s house looking for me, of that much I was sure, but we all knew what the magic-workers did to a person. Well, we had thought we knew.
“Thank you,” I said to the man as he stashed it in a leather bag filled with papers. I waited until he had tucked it away safely and then said in a low tone, “I’m looking for someone who can tell me about the sorceresses.”
He jumped, then rearranged his face into a neutral expression. “The what?”
“The sorceresses. The ... beautiful women. The magic-workers.” I gestured vaguely at where Sylvester and the sorceress were still talking.
“The Magic-Workers!” I could hear the capital letters he added, dropping them like a couple of sugar cubes into tea.
“Right. Them,” I said.
“What do you want to know about them?” he asked, still guarded.
I hesitated, wondering if anyone was eavesdropping and if it would matter. The man saw me twisting my skirts in my hands like a bashful country girl and took pity on me.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Foss Butcher,” I replied.
“My name is Basil,” he said. He looked at me narrowly and moved a little closer, although the bustle of the market already smothered our voices, and I doubted anyone would have overheard us.
“You want to know about thehearts?” he whispered.
“I know that they take them. But I don’t know why, exactly, or what they do with them afterward.”
He peered behind me, as if expecting an army of guardsmen to jump out from behind the fruit stalls.
“Why do you ask?” he said. He leaned in even more. “Have you beensnagged?”
I wondered if it was a dirty question.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
He looked at me closely, peering into my face as if he could read it like one of his scrolls. It was disconcerting, I tell you.
“I think you have,” he said. He scribbled something down on a scrap of his paper—an address.
“Come here tonight, at midnight,” he said. “It is best if no one sees you.”
I raised an eyebrow. A strange man giving me an address and telling me to go there alone, in the middle of the night? He must have read these thoughts in my expression, because he waved his hands.
