The dock was where traders waited for news of their goods, where merchers and fishers plied their wares, and where Anders and Rayna picked pockets once a month, during the trial—and occasionally on other days too.
The Trial of the Staff was a spectacle, and it meant a square full of visiting merchers who were usually so busy gawking at the twelve-year-olds on the dais that they never noticed the twelve-year-olds right beside them, slipping a hand into their pocket or basket. The visitors all knew of the elementals found in their homelands, but ice wolves—and scorch dragons—were unique to Vallen, and nobody wanted to miss seeing a child transform into an ice wolf before their very eyes.
Anders was never entirely easy at the docks. He and Rayna had no idea where they’d been during the last great battle, ten years ago. But Anders thought perhaps they’d been here—there was always something about the place that made him nervous. He would look at the scorch marks on the wooden doors, and for an instant he’d think he could smell smoke. The crowd would jostle him—which never bothered him anywhere else—and it was as if he heard a scream, quickly snatched away. Sometimes he had nightmares about it.
Today the twins climbed down from the rooftops a couple of streets away and made their way on foot to the square. As they reached the edge of the crowd, a warm, salty smell came wafting in their direction, and Anders knew it immediately. Somewhere, a mercher was selling roasted veter nuts, their favorite. They’d only managed to pickpocket two coppers on the way down to the docks, but . . .
He and Rayna whispered the same words at exactly the same time: “What about—” They both paused to snicker, then finished together: “Breakfast?”
“We’ll have more money before the morning’s out,” Rayna said. “Let’s have a treat.”
They squeezed their way through the tight press of bodies, following their noses. And sure enough, there was a woman in a bright green coat roasting glossy brown veter nuts in a large cast-iron pan. There was no fire underneath to warm it, but there were runes carved all around the outside of the pan, marching along its edge in a neat procession, and it was heating itself without any fire needed.
“A copper a bag,” the mercher said, noticing them looking.
“Usually it’s a copper for two,” Rayna protested. “Are they some kind of special nuts?”
“They’re artifact-cooked,” the woman replied. “The heat’s more even than you’ll get over any fire, and you’ll taste the difference. No burned bits.”
Rayna grumbled, but Anders knew her mouth had to be watering as much as his, and in the end she handed over their two coppers. The woman handed them each a fat paper bag the size of their fist, stuffed full of roasted nuts, and they drifted into the crowd, munching through them as fast as they could. It was nearly time to start.
They dodged a pack of four Ulfar Academy students—teenagers who had passed the monthly trials already, and would one day be Wolf Guards—who wandered by in their gray uniforms, trimmed with white to show they were students. They were often in fours, Anders noticed.
Suddenly everyone’s attention turned to the dais on one side of the square, and though Anders couldn’t see over the heads of the crowd, he knew the trial must be beginning. He licked his fingers clean and stuffed the last of his veter nuts into his pocket.
It was the start of spring, and the only remaining traces of the snow were the gray lumps around the edges of the square, but he was still wearing his winter coat. It was lined with pockets where he could stash his takings, and the cold wind that still blew meant it wasn’t out of place.
He and Rayna drifted along the edges of the crowd, where the people were less tightly packed, looking for their first target and pretending not to know each other. The siblings might have the same curly black hair and the same medium brown skin, but somewhere like Holbard, where people came from every place there was, that was no reason to think they were related. And everything else was so different about them that they looked nothing like twins.
Anders spotted a woman with her head craned back, staring up at the sky nervously. The rumors about dragons were everywhere. Her expression was distracted, and her clothes looked expensive, which might mean good pickings. He bumped his shoulder against Rayna’s, nodding in the woman’s direction.
Rayna stopped to fiddle with the buttons on her coat, looking over his target from beneath her lashes. Then she shook her head, just a fraction. “Zips,” she murmured.
Anders shuffled a step to his left, taking a surreptitious look at the woman’s pockets. He sucked in a quick breath. No wonder she was so absentminded; she had no need to worry about her pockets at all. They were lined with chunky metal zips, and hanging from each zipper was a small metal charm, engraved with a pair of runes.
He’d nearly reached for a thiefcatcher. If he’d laid his hands on the zips to open her pockets, the charms would have started blaring a quick, high alarm, turning every face in the square toward him. It would have been a disaster. Trust him to get it wrong.
He bit his lip, and Rayna gave his hand a quick squeeze—never mind, the squeeze said—and led him onward. He let her pick the next target. He wasn’t as good as she was at pickpocketing anyway—or at lock picking, or at anything, really—but he was always worst of all in the square, where he was nervous.
Rayna chose a mercher just as the leader of the wolves—the Fyrstulf, Dama Sigrid Turnsen—took to the dais. The mayor of Holbard and two members of Vallen’s parliament already stood waiting for her in their finest coats and gold-linked chains of office, but everybody in the square—everybody from Vallen, at least—knew where the real power was on the wooden stage. Sigrid Turnsen was a pale woman with short, white-blond hair, lean in her gray uniform, the opposite of the man Rayna had picked for their target.
Their mark was a broad-shouldered man with a bright red-and-blue jacket of thin, silky material that fluttered in the breeze. The red on his coat was their first clue that he would be an easy target—it was the color of a dragon, so locals rarely wore it.
The flimsy materials and the long, sweeping sleeves of the mercher’s coat suggested he came from the Dewdrops Archipelago, and that he’d most likely arrived recently, since he clearly hadn’t planned for Vallen’s cold winds. As a newcomer, all his attention was probably on Sigrid Turnsen right now. And possibly on how much he wished he had a more practical coat.
“Now, more than ever, we must remain vigilant,” the Fyrstulf was saying, her voice ringing out across the square as Anders took up position. He’d heard this speech every month since he was six, but it never sounded boring. The power in the Fyrstulf’s voice always kept a part of his attention on her. Rayna did a pretty good impression of the speech, but Anders could never find it in himself to laugh at Sigrid Turnsen.
“After ten years of peace,” she continued, “the dragons wish to turn toward war once again.” Well, that part of the speech was new. Things really must be serious if the Fyrstulf was acknowledging them out loud.
“Ten years ago the Wolf Guard drove them back from Holbard to their refuges in the mountains, and now we stand ready to do so again. We know that anyone here could be of scorch dragon blood. Could be a spy, willing to risk the safety and stability we have worked so hard to build in the last decade across all of Vallen.”