I kept going, pausing every now and then at a stall. A woman with tightly bound hair under a loosely knotted scarf sold various oils and ointments in glass jars. I couldn’t read the labels, of course, but I picked up one with a viscous purple substance inside and held it up to my eye to see the light through it, feigning interest.
“Two drops of that on your pillow, and you will dream of your true love,” said the woman with a wide, sly smile.
“Oh,” I said vaguely. Then a thought struck me. “Wait, do you have other oils … for memories? For regaining memories?”
“Is it your own memories you want to see, or someone else’s?” said the woman. “Say, your sweetheart’s? Do you want to know if he was true?”
“No, my own,” I said. “Something to help me remember.”
The emptiness of my memory of that day in the Tower still frightened me—a snowstorm of white, eternally restlessnothing. Nameless, formless, impossible to touch. If I spent too long in the contemplation of it, I felt, I would melt away into it like a raindrop into a river.
“And what do you have to offer me in exchange for this, my dear?” The woman suddenly seemed a lot less wheedling and a lot more businesslike, sitting straight on her stool and dropping the old fortune-teller act. I fished out the embroidered handkerchiefs I had brought with me and proffered them. She shook her head.
“They are pretty, and you have skill,” she said. “But I don’t deal in things such as these.”
“Then what do you want?” I said. “I don’t have anything else to give.”
“Give me your hand,” she said.
I extended it nervously. She took it in her own, which was bony and weighed down by a number of heavy rings, and studied it, then dipped her mouth to my palm. I felt the wet scrape of her tongue and jerked my hand away.
“What in Plague’s name are you doing?”
She licked her lips. “Interesting,” she said. “Many layers of magic here. Some affinity with animals, I taste … and, ah, yes, there’s the needlework. But beneath …”
I watched her, frozen with horrified fascination.
“Hmm.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Interesting. But I don’t think you’re quite ready to hear about that yet, my dear.”
She reached out a hand and touched a slender strand of Hair that had escaped from my hat—lightly, caressingly. It shivered under her hand.
“I would take a lock of your hair, my dear, in exchange for the memory potion.”
The Hair bristled in indignation.
“I would give you one, and gladly,” I said (the Hair pulledat my scalp, hard, as punishment), “but it will not suffer being cut.”
“By ordinary methods, perhaps,” said the old woman.
She pulled out a pair of silver scissors shaped like a standing heron. The shanks and handles served as its legs, and the blades were its upward-pointing beak. The carving was so skilled that it had captured the tension in the bird’s posture, its sense of poised attention, as if it had heard a sound and was just about to fly away. I could swear I saw it blink.
“Just a few strands,” she said, “and I will give you what you seek.”
“I need to see it first,” I said, a little shakily. My Hair had never been cut. It wriggled now against my shoulder, and I patted it down. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s only a little bit.”
Mieka appeared and slapped the scissors out of the woman’s hand. “All right, Grizel,” she said. “You can leave this one alone, thanks very much.”
The woman bared her teeth. “I’ll thank you not to interfere in my business, Mieka.”
“This one’s mine,” she said briefly. “And she’s keepingallher hair, thanks very much.” She took my arm. “Come on. She’s a charlatan. Her oils are nothing but cloves and dye.”
“Ladran’s little lapdog,” Grizel called after us as we retreated. “Take your politics out of the Undermarket and leave us in peace.”
Mieka spun round. “Mypolitics, as you call them, are the reason you’re able to keep hawking your colored water in the Undermarket. Without anyone standing up for unregulated magic, the Templeownsus. They’ll harness every mage to their will and become more powerful than the king at last. Is that what you want?”
“You bring attention to us,” hissed Grizel. “You and your friends. We are content enough, down here, beneath their notice, and you want to force us into the light.”
“I want everyone to live as equals, Grizel,” said Mieka.“Mages, those with affinities, and those with nothing at all. Is that so terrible?”
