I cross the threshold—and the world tilts.
At first, I think that I must’ve crossed a ward, that she is trying to kill me, but she doesn’t move. Just watches.
It starts as a tremor under my ribs, a wrong note in a familiar song. Then the wrong note becomes a scream. Pain detonates behind my sternum, white-hot and absolute. My knees hit the floorboards. The air burns my throat like salt water. The Fuegorra—Arlet—flares across my senses for the barest heartbeat, like a candle smothered between fingers.
And then nothing.
I clutch my chest. My Fuegorra is still there. My heart still beats.
What is this pain?
Arlet’s face fills my vision. I worry. I am…terrified. When I slump against the wall, it knocks back the cloak that has been partially concealing my face.
The old woman gasps at my blue skin.
“Don’t move,” Neryth snaps. She grabs onto a pair of glittering, undoubtedly sharp scissors. “Why have you come here, cave rat? Make one move, and you will die on the street.”
I drag in a ragged breath. The pain ebbs to a cold ache. “Please. I mean you no harm. I need—” Another wave of pain radiates through me. “I need a new face.”
That gets her attention.
“So you can slaughter my people?” she asks.
“Only the same ones who cast you out. Wouldn’t your god Doros approve of that? An eye for an eye? Is that notwisdom?”
She frowns. Her mouth twists. “You are either brave or stupid.”
“Both,” I say. “I need a glamour your people can’t see through.”
She studies me, taking the blue at my throat where the hood can’t hide it all. “You smell of old fire.” A beat. “It can be done.”
“I expected as much.”
For a long moment, she says nothing. Her eyes narrow, weighing what kind of grief she’s looking at. My breathing is still uneven, and I can feel the dull throb of the Fuegorra echoing beneath my ribs.
“You’ve lost something,” she says quietly. “I can see it.”
“I can pay,” I manage. “It doesn’t look like you have had much opportunity for sales lately. I don’t even know how you still keep going.”
I realize I’ve said the wrong thing when the corners around her mouth tighten. My hand quickly moves to the pouch at my belt, and my fingers brush the seed. I pause, then pull free a small handful of rough-cut citrine gems—they still carry some of the song from the deep, just the same as the day Liana gave them to me.
I do not think the woman can hear them, but her eyes sharpen. “Enduar gems,” she mutters. “You’re either desperate or foolish to bring those here. They’re worth more than a dozen lives in this city.”
“They’re all I have left.” Besides, where I come from, these types of things are abundant. Living outside of the greed imposed by cities such as these is a blessing. One I will never forget if I am allowed to go home.
She stares at the gems for a long time, jaw tightening as if weighing her pride against her need. Then, with a sharp exhale, she snatches them from my palm. “Fine. I’ll help you. But if you die in that palace, you better not mention me on your way out of this life. I’ll be sure to spend every last one of these before word reaches me.”
“That seems fair.”
“Good,” she says curtly, tucking the gems into her apron. “Now hold still before I change my mind.”
She works. The tremor in her fingers vanishes when she starts pulling thread from the air—filaments fine as spider silk, silver as spilled moon. She twists truth and lies together until lace forms. When she lifts it, it dances in the still air of her shop.
“Don’t breathe,” she says, and lays the lace across my shoulders.
The web settles, seeps, finds the edges of me, and smooths them the way water tames a fire. In the fragments on her table, I watch my shape un-blue and my features change. I become unremarkable and turn into a dusk-brown elf with nothing to recommend me.
“It will hold for a fortnight,” Neryth says, knotting the last thread at my throat. “If you don’t feed it emotion or blood. It will last longer with the moon, shorter with your temper.”