But it was impossible not to respond to Nessa’s smile. Impossible to refuse her friendship, something Blue had learned years ago when the young princess decided she liked spending time with Blue more than she liked her tutors and their constant efforts to figure out why she could produce sound but couldn’t move her mouth correctly to form words.
Nessa’s hands moved again. Excited! I have news.
“What is it?” Blue’s hands moved as well. She’d always thought it was polite to use Nessa’s form of communicating as much as possible. Some of the signs were a language the scholars in Akram had developed for citizens who were deaf or had speech difficulties. Some of them were Nessa-specific signs that the princess had come up with on her own.
Nessa raised her hands as if placing a crown on her head and then lowered them to gently bang her fists twice against her chest. Kellan.
Blue’s lip curled.
Coming home from school today. His carriage arrives soon.
“How . . . nice.” Blue turned to tie a square of cloth over the mouth of the glass jar that held the queen’s medicine.
Nessa laughed, a full-bodied sound that filled the stockroom with warmth. Blue raised a brow at her.
Kellan is my favorite. He’d be your favorite too if you gave him a chance.
Blue would rather suck on an entire bucket full of unripe shirellas than spend time with the insufferable, full-of-himself, rules-don’t-apply-to-me Kellan, but she wasn’t going to say any of that to Nessa. Instead, she said, “I’m glad you’ll get to spend time with him this summer. We’re going to have a short lesson today because Ana didn’t show up to do the deliveries, so I’m going to have to do them myself.”
I can help.
“I hardly think your mother would approve of you making shop deliveries, even with your guards in tow. Besides, I know you want to get back to the castle to see Kellan, may a wagon run over his”—she caught Nessa’s eye—“um . . . enemies. Now gather up some bolla root, thorn fern, and essence of lyllis. I’m going to show you how to safely brew a batch of poison.”
An hour flew by, with Nessa competently handling the ingredients and judging when the brew had coalesced enough to be transferred into glass jars for safekeeping. Once the princess and her guards left to return to the castle, Blue placed the deliveries in a large canvas tote and set off into the Gaillard quarter to bring the goods to the shop’s customers.
A thick blanket of early summer heat shimmered against the cobblestone streets as Blue scanned the alley behind the shop for any children old enough to handle deliveries. The alley was empty. She sighed as she hoisted the tote over her shoulder and started walking.
She’d known it was a long shot. Most of the older homeless children who lived in the alleys and back streets of Falaise de la Mer were skilled at finding odd jobs each day or would take up begging on their favorite corners until the magistrate’s guards chased them away. It was rare to find one of them still looking for work this late in the day.
She hated that they had to look for work at all.
The farther one got from the main roads with their pretty buildings and clean-swept cobblestones, the more the sordid truth about Falaise de la Mer and its head families became apparent. Some streets were full of ramshackle homes that were falling down around the people living in them. Some were full of children whose parents were gone—jailed by the magistrates, killed by the brokers who ran a host of dangerous, illegal enterprises throughout the city for being unable to pay their debts, or dead of starvation.
A familiar pulse of anger galvanized Blue as she hurried down the wide, gracious street that ran in front of the Mortar & Pestle, ignoring the gentle rustle of the iron bells that hung from every doorway to warn the city if Marielle the wraith, imprisoned in the wilds far to the west, returned.
The blood wraith that had terrorized the city sixteen years ago didn’t currently worry Blue. The poverty and desperation of the children who were conveniently forgotten by the city’s wealthy until they needed a job done, however, did.
A carriage rushed past her, the horse’s hooves clip-clopping briskly along the road as Blue pulled a square box tied with twine out of her tote and turned down a street of two-story stone homes with red doors and polished iron filigree.
She had to find the key to turning lead into gold. Every day she failed was another day the children in her quarter were at risk.
THREE
KELLAN RENARD, CROWN prince of Balavata, was in serious danger of losing his lunch all over the beautiful interior of the royal carriage, an offense his mother would be slow to forgive.
It wasn’t the fact that the road leading south through Balavata wound around the grass-covered hills like the curling sugar candy the cook made each Wintermass, though that certainly wasn’t helping.
It wasn’t that his mother had spent the past two hours lecturing him in great detail about the expectations on his shoulders now that he’d graduated from his boarding school in Loch Talam and would be permanently assuming his duties as heir to the throne, though that really wasn’t helping.
It was the hint of sea salt in the breeze and the distant roar of the waves as they neared the seaside capital city of Falaise de la Mer, where both his home and his memories waited to swallow him whole.
And all right, fine, it was also the five pints of cheap ale and the scant two hours of sleep he’d had the night before after sneaking out of the inn while his mother slept. He’d only meant to have a single drink at the local pub, but a boy’s best intentions could hardly stand up to the sparkling eyes and charming smiles of three pretty maidens who’d all wanted a dance partner. And if he’d needed more than one pint to face the idea of returning home to become king, who could blame him?
He’d made the long trip home from Milisatria Academy ten summers in a row. Each time, he’d been hit with a cold, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach once he got close enough to smell the sea, though a few ales, some pranks pulled on the castle staff, and a wild night or twelve in the more unsavory neighborhoods of Falaise de la Mer usually provided enough distraction to count as a cure. Or maybe it was simply because he’d known he only had to stay for nine weeks before he could head north again for another year at school with its rigid routine, his friend and roommate Javan, and so many glorious opportunities to break the rules and get away with it.
This time, Kellan was coming home to stay. This time, he’d have council meetings, power struggles, and worst of all—
“Are you listening to me, Kellan? Your birthday is a mere six weeks away. By law, you must be betrothed by then. We can do the betrothal proclamation at a ball, which we’ll hold a bit earlier than your actual birthday. I thought we’d announce the ball at a royal reception for the head families. Say, in one week’s time?”
Kellan sighed. Worst of all, he was bound by law to be betrothed by his nineteenth birthday to a girl from one of Balavata’s nine head families. The law was designed to ensure that heirs to the throne were produced consistently, and that the head families had opportunities to increase their influence while one of their own sat on the throne beside the heir. It didn’t matter if he liked any of the eligible daughters, or if they liked him. To be fair, Kellan rarely met a girl he didn’t like, but enjoying some harmless flirting was a far cry from promising to love someone until he died.