And there she was—the ward girl, still blissfully unaware of Leith the next morning.

She wore a sleeveless tunic and loose cotton breeches. Flour dusted her dark skin, sweat streaking through the fine white powder. She brushed by him on the way out of the building, smelling of orange blossom and clove.

The door closed behind the departing ward, and the modest bakery front dimmed. Light filtered in through the ruddy window, casting a warm glow on tables laden with all sorts of loaves, rolls, and pastries. Specks of flour drifted through sunbeams, suspended in the air.

An old, round woman grunted at him from her place at a large wooden work table. A scarf held back the tide of the woman's abundant grey hair. She worked a great ball of dough with her meaty hands.

The old woman uttered something at him in her language, and Leith responded with a raised brow.

She sighed. “What are you looking for?” the woman asked in a clipped Trade tongue. She held an air of impatience. Her hands still moved the dough in a rolling motion like cresting waves that folded over themselves. “Tampani? Bread? Sweet?”

Leith didn’t answer, humming to himself as he paced around the small perimeter of the display room. He lifted a mesh basket to look closely at a bunch of scones. He thought he’d smelled something he wanted.

The teak floorboards thumped softly, and Leith turned to face the old woman. She peered up at him with her weathered eyes. The wrinkles along her temples fanned and contracted as she sized him up. “What are you looking for?” she asked again, in a tone that demanded an answer.

Leith shifted his weight onto one leg, folding his arms as he regarded the old woman from an angle. He smiled. “I’m looking for a weaver.”

Her overgrown eyebrows, dusted with flour like pine boughs on a winter day, rose up her forehead. “Weaver?” she asked.

“Yes. Weaver,” he repeated. “You have them?”

“Like—” Her hands came in a quick motion, fingers undulating. It was almost a blur how quickly she moved. She was deceptively agile for someone who looked older than the jagged ridges of Dragonspine.

Unsure what to make of her clumsy clarification, Leith gave her a long stare before deciding that there was a chance they were on the same page. He nodded.

The baker woman nodded back, smacking her fat lips as she thought. “You want Sasha.” She gestured out her door and pointed further down the road as she rattled off instructions. Leith could tell some of it was in Old Kvash, her voice outright guttural sometimes.

“Sasha,” he repeated after her, trying to condense her directions. “Toward the palisades”—the woman frowned— “toward the wooden wall”—the woman nodded—“two story building, five minute walk after the pier ends, before the red adobe building with cross-hatches on the wall.”

With the frown fixed on her face, the baker nodded. “Anything else?”

“I’ll take some of these,” Leith said, lifting the wire basket cover from the scones. The scent of oranges lingered in the air. As he reached beneath his jacket for his crescents, a large hand stopped him. He looked at her in surprise, unused to being so casually touched by a stranger. This woman had no fear.

“Aldar,” she said, face twisted as if she had bitten into a lemon. Her head shook as she trundled across her worn floor. With a snap of a wrist, a large cotton square unfurled on the work table and the old woman piled three scones into the middle.

“The wards,” Leith mused. “They give their life… so you give things away?”

She nodded as she bundled the corners up into a swift knot. “Aldar. Restitution.”

“Seems a bit unfair still.”

The baker woman grinned. “You taste my tampani before you run your mouth.”

She trundled toward the back corner of the room, a cask of polished wood sat gleaming from a high shelf. It boasted that it was the most expensive thing in the shop with its metal bands gilded in gold and embossed with leaves. A silver spigot tapped into its side.

Lifting a small leather bladder to the spigot, the old woman unscrewed the spigot’s top until it released its contents while Leith watched curiously. The liquid came out clear. Once the bladder was bloated, she sealed it and handed it to him alongside the pastries she’d gifted him.

“What is this?” He uncapped the bladder to give it a sniff. Nothing but the smell of aged leather.

The old woman ignored him. Her eyes roved up and down, settling on his face with a hard squint. “How many summers?” she asked.

“Sixteen and a hundred,” Leith answered honestly, taken aback by her forwardness. Though he wasn’t sure what it had to do with the sudden addition of the bladder.

She raised a shaggy eyebrow at him. Then she cackled. “Young.”

“Relatively,” he muttered, and she scowled at him. “What are you doing with that?” he asked as the woman lifted a small shallow bowl with a wet mash of orange powder. It smelled like lemon and spice. She ground her thumb into it, and held it up to his face. Leith leaned away with a glare.

“Bad luck,” she warned, holding her hand up insistently before him. “No mark today, the sands might take you too.”

Leith didn’t need any more bad luck. Losing the raven and his only lead yesterday were already injury enough. And the actual wound, the slice to his arm, throbbed as a sore reminder.

He stood still as the baker woman brushed the paste on as a thick streak across his right cheek. It was cool against his skin and stung like ice on a sunburn.

Unlike most of the buildings in Penth, the baker and the weaver were both settled on land. Calling back to the rotund body of the old baker woman, it made sense that some people were just meant to be on solid ground.

The little lane, well-tamped by daily foot traffic, had a view with only sand and pier and an endless stretch of blue and white that was the eastern sea. The horizon hid behind silhouettes of little fishing boats with small sails and even smaller figures dashing across their decks.

Beyond that, just barely visible, were the faint outlines of the Shattered Ring, an erratic and jagged row of deep purple where pieces of the continent lay in ruins.

A loud braying sound drew Leith from his reverie. A procession of camels traversed the docks as the camel traders set out to display their wares beneath little awnings where tables and crates were laid out.

Men and women worked together, their laughter echoing beneath clear skies. They pulled in large boulders to settle deep into the sand in the formation of a ring. As if setting up a giant campfire, dried stacks of wood were constructed within the circle.

Nearby, another ring was being assembled. This one was made of large round drums in a variety of sizes. Some stood on their sides as tall as the burly men who pounded their bases into the sand.

Leith spotted the boy first. A slender but toned figure and brilliantly golden hair. Sweat made his dark skin glisten in the sun. He had a princely face, a complimentary nose and a golden smile, as he lifted both his hands to receive a familiar cloth bundle.

One very similar to the one Leith held.

It was the eldest ward who the boy spoke to. And how Leith could have missed her, he wasn’t sure. She stood in stark contrast to the boy’s relaxed stature. A frown on her face, arms crossed beneath her ample chest.

The deep bass of a drum lifted in the air, so deep that it seemed to make the air tremble. Others joined in, all sounding inharmonious with one another, loud and echoing over the village.

It startled everyone for a moment, though it affected Leith the most, as everyone soon returned their attention to whatever they were doing. He scowled at the host of men and women pounding away at the taut canvas of the drums, waves rippling the surface of the instruments.

He couldn’t get away quickly enough.

Leith watched the ward and the boy out the corner of his eye as he passed them. Two children who were far too beautiful for a laboring village like Penth. But save for scars and calluses, he’d noticed that everyone in Kvashine had a far more youthful appearance, and their teeth most of all, brilliantly white and unblemished.

Granted everyone had eternal youth. Until their twilight hit them and then they turned into something like the old baker woman who was due to return to the weave any moment now. But the Kvash who were untouched by twilight glowed with a certain kind of youth and vigor.

And the weaver’s house loomed over Leith. A two story building made of adobe and exposed beams of dark wood. It seemed cozy with an upper balcony filled with plants that trailed down between the balusters.

He listened for the telltale sounds of birds, but there were none. It seemed odd, a practicing weaver without birds. But any weaver skilled enough to operate outside the range of the Conduit tended to be eccentric. Maybe this one worked with roaches or mice. With a frown, Leith pulled open the weathered door and stepped through a curtain of pearl-knotted silks.

Inside the drumming was quieter. A muffled beat that he heard more through the soft rattling of buttons and beads. He could feel it in his feet as he turned from the cluttered corner into the front room of what looked like a tailor’s studio.

A woman bustled around the room in an attempt to wrangle a herd of wild children. A woman and four girls, each girl a step taller than the last, busied themselves with rolls of fabric and scraps of half-done clothing.

The oldest carried a child in her arms before she set the small girl down to wipe some charcoal marks off the face of another girl. She was careful not to wipe the crusted orange stripe off the younger girl’s cheek. All of them bore the same mark Leith did except for the oldest.

Somehow he’d gone unnoticed, standing among tall columns of colorful fabric that cluttered the small foyer. The smallest had staggered his way, but she was fascinated by a heavy roll of white leather that was bound neatly together with a scrap of ribbon. Tiny grubby hands tugged at the open edge of the material.

“Mayah,” the woman intoned. The little girl drew her hands back for a hesitant moment. She looked over her shoulder and, upon realizing her mother wasn’t watching her too closely, she resumed playing with the different rolls of fabric.

A long unbroken piece of supple doeskin was quite a luxury, especially one with such consistent coloring and cured white as driven snow. He knew many tailors in Lyons that would pay a significant amount of coin for the leather this woman had stowed so carelessly in her foyer. It might not even have come from Kvashine. Surely it had to be imported.

The only people important enough for such extravagance in the village were the wardens. It occurred to Leith that it could be for the eldest ward. Her exceptional height and powerful body would look svelte beneath the leather.

Leith ran a hand over the material, supple beneath his fingers. The grain was exquisite with subtle pebbling. He could just imagine the way it split beneath the edge of his knife.

“Mayah!” the woman snapped. She turned to admonish the girl and the child jerked her hand back, tucking it behind her back shyly before looking up at Leith. He flicked her on the forehead and she let out a yelp. “How many times—leave it alone! She could be here any minute and if you—” All eyes turned to Leith where he stood in the foyer.

“Hello,” Leith said blandly.

“Can I help you with something?” she asked, tugging the child away from Leith. She also pointedly took the roll of leather into her hands.

And for a moment, he was tempted to slam the point of his knife down red through one of her hands and into the white grain.

The woman, who was obviously a tailor and not the kind of weaver Leith was looking for, had an easy voice for Trade tongue. Her clothes were a giveaway. Worn but well-cared for—far from mere rags.

A small but busty woman with a mottled scar that reformed the shape of her cheek. Opposite the scar was the same streak of orange paste right beneath her eye. She was still pretty, studying him with slanted violet eyes.

“I’m looking for a weaver,” he said, leaning against the precarious columns of fabric beside him. “To send off a bird.”

“There are no weavers in Penth,” she said.

His fingers flexed at his side, tapping lightly at the rod strapped to his leg. For a moment, he considered if Sasha with her pretty eyes would look better if he opened her up from groin to chest. Like a linen doll split down the middle.

If he did that, the eldest girl would put up quite a fight. He’d enjoy that as well. But the smaller children however—

“There’s a man at Tualakh,” Sasha says quickly. Her eyes darted around the room. “He doesn’t usually do courier services, but he might get a message out for you if offered enough coin. Or for a favor— he’s always in need of favors.”

Leith scoffed at how novel it sounded. As if the weaver came straight out of a child’s fairytale, peddling magic gifts for errands. “Splendid,” he said. “Does he accept children? I can take one off your hands. You seem busy eno—”

A string of what sounded like foreign curses had Leith retreating back into the foyer with a hasty farewell. The door opened to the sound of drums. They marched in through the opening to fill the house. Rolls of fabric trembled where they rested against the walls. The different drums were out of harmony, erratic. They dictated his heartbeat.

Leith departed from the tailor’s house, leaving Sasha and her children unharmed inside.

The sun warmed the brisk salt air to something pleasant, and it infected the inhabitants of Penth. They gathered in the road, up and down the strip of buildings, their doors and windows open to the world. Families milled about and greeted their neighbors, holding bladders and gourds. Leith watched as they served each other drinks and left the same marks upon each other as the baker woman had given Leith.

People streamed around him. A strange mix of their language and trade tongue joined in on the backdrop of the incessant drumming. He passed a family whose faces were somber, their speech subdued as they hugged a teenage boy who had drunk from a gourd. His eyes met Leith’s, his cheeks—still round with youth—were clean, marked with only dark freckles.

In the air, the faint scent of orange blossoms. Leith turned when a man bumped his shoulder. And there she was; a sculpted shoulder, a long torso, a dark braid, just turning into the tailor’s house. How she could have slipped past Leith, he couldn’t fathom.

The door closed behind her. The drums echoed loudly over the lane.

Bright chatter competed with the distant sound of the ocean and the drumming that drifted from Penth. A steady stream of would-be revelers surged up the sloped path to the temple of Malhayar. It made for a saccharinely idyllic scene. He held his hands up, thumb and forefingers making a frame. Buckley would have made a lovely painting of it.

Leith walked alongside a group. It was only by chance that their pace matched his. While those in the group spoke to one another, his silence seemed louder than anything else, even as some Kvash girls screamed and screeched in joy somewhere further along his path.

He didn’t have much longer to go, spotting a path that sloped downward back toward sea level. There was a vague suggestion of a trail where foot and animal traffic discouraged the growth of sunglows and prickly burr-grass, but the persistent wind coming off the Sahran erased any prints that might have been left behind.

Leith was the only one to break from the river of people. Immediately, the quiet and solitude settled over him like a soothing balm. Even the drumming was but a distant thrum, threatening to fade away completely.

Here the palms added a chorus of rustling leaves as they brushed against each other. Their large trunks made a forest of pillars, rising from a thick carpet of vegetation. It was as if Leith had entered some hidden palace. The canopies, high and clustered together in a thick green ceiling, glowed from the light of the sun. Occasionally they shifted in the wind and beams of light sliced through the quiet shade, bringing with them the distant call of seagulls.

He walked down a narrow trail through the brush. It was so quiet that his heart felt like a banging drum. The plants were large and leafy and the flowers even larger. The blooms commanded attention in their vibrant colors—mostly warm with their yellows, reds, and even their vibrant pinks held a heat to them that he’d never seen in the Midlands.

Leith brushed the back of his knuckles across a velvet petal, its color blazing beneath his touch. Knowing that Valeria would appreciate them in her greenhouse, he took a small cutting of the plant.

When he broke the treeline, the bay shone like a sheet of glass. The sound of the ocean was distant as if the peninsula and the temple that crowned it made the bay hallowed ground. Leith could just vaguely hear the drums drifting in on the breeze. The tempo was still off.

The barge before him rose and fell in the water. It leaned to one side and then the other, groaning slightly as the weight inside shifted abruptly. Voices drifted out through a window that had been tilted open, some seemed childish, one among them masculine and monotonous.

The second barge, bound to the first by a thick cord of rope, sat still. Leith quickly made his way across the sandy shore, sneaking through the shadows of the barges to climb up onto the deck.

Baskets hung from the roof of the barge, overfilled with trailing vines. Flowers jut out over the sides and resembled wicked beaks, their tips a bright arterial red. Large clay pots and troughs lined the deck, bursting with soil and plants. As he walked a circuit around the barge, Leith caught the scent of rosemary and dill.

Curious tall clay urns, the top third of their walls melded with glass, revealed vibrant veil-tailed fish that darted up and down between the lit water and the dark depths of the clay. When he passed them, the fish would gather along the surface, their mouths opening and closing rapidly as if gasping for air.

He had to be in the right place. Where else to find his sister’s troublesome flower if not some botanical garden? The plants here competed with their fragrances, so different from the musty salt air of Penth.

Instead of an enclosed cabin like the other one, this barge was open to the elements. Just four wooden walls with long window frames bereft of glass, flooding the center with warm sunlight.

Inside, where the air was cooler and the sun more forgiving, Leith found the flora from his country. Long stalks of lavender and clusters of fragile poppies. Vines spilled over hanging troughs and onto the floor, and large yellow melons sat upon ridiculous small pillows. In a corner, a lone sunflower stooped beneath the supportive beams of the barge.

Leith turned about, taking in the small circle of comforts from home.

He moved across the barge to descend down a short flight of steps, feeling the vessel shift. It was larger than it looked from the outside, and the wood beneath his feet felt thinner. Slivers of light crept through narrow slits in the ceiling and shadows danced across the old timber.

Plants dominated the space below deck as well, scattered in little pots across sagging workbenches. A large raised planter filled with soil sat in the middle of the hold, forcing a narrow square path around it. Strange fungi grew in little clusters, some that glowed luminescent in the dark, promising to be brilliant if not for the ill light that flickered throughout the room.

Here. What he wanted should be here—where the dark dominated and the flower he sought could catch the slightest of light.

Leith drew on lambskin gloves, and tugged the collar of his cape over his face. He rummaged over the scattered tables that lined the walls of the hold. Flowers in all stages of deconstruction littered the tables. Anything that came remotely close to what Leith searched for were some petunias. Their petals scattered across parchment, bleeding the colors of dusk. Leith continued his hunt.

He crouched low to peer into various containers stowed beneath the tables. Frustration mounted in him as he sifted through chests and crates and lidded pottery. Finally, throwing his hands up in exasperation at the fourth crockery of what might have been a steamy container of fertilizer, he forced himself to his feet and admitted defeat. However long he’d been in the hold, the room seemed even darker for it to match his mood.

Leith took a deep breath as he considered his options. He could climb into the next boat, kill whoever was in it, and search there. But it could leave him with just as little options as killing the spellknife had. He climbed the stairs to where the sun lit the calm bay waters like fire.

He had spent longer in the hold than he thought.

A smooth feminine voice called out from the shore, and almost immediately after, the door across the short expanse of water between his boat and the other flew open with an excited crash.

Two short flurries of red hair burst open from the doorway and Leith ducked behind a basket of trailing sunglows. He slinked his way beneath the shadow of potted plants until he was out of sight of any wandering eyes.

“Ezza!” one of them brayed and continued to rattle on, voice muffled as they made their way down the barge’s ramp.

Leith dela Monroe should have been above skulking about little greenhouse barges in some backwater village. He pressed his back against the weathered frame of the barge, peering out at the two rocky outcroppings that extended into the sea. They formed a little gate to the bay, the sun just peeking up from the fiery horizon. From this vantage point, Leith could see the land on which the temple sat, overlooking the bay and sea like a watchtower. The water carved the peninsula’s base into dark little coves.

Something dark drifted over the rocks where the waves broke, frothing over a sodden lump. Something limp and waterlogged, long and stringy on one end, black tendrils reaching out over the still surface like ghostly fingers.

The spellknife.

Eventually someone would find the body.

“Can’t we take the shortcut?” a softer voice asked, drifting from the other side of the greenhouse.

“No. Not after the rain,” the eldest ward said. Leith could almost smell that orange blossom perfume. “Are you joining the village on the beach tonight, Weaver Callum?”

Leith couldn’t hear the man’s response to the question over the hammering in his chest. In the distance, the loudest of the drums drifted in, alternating beats with his heart.

Night had fallen when Leith finally left Tualakh bay. The sky was a deep shade of pink, fading into a dark violet that reflected in the strange eyes of the Kvash people. Small fires lit the entirety of the beach. The smell of roasting meats on iron spits filled the air.

The same joyfulness that permeated the day extended into the evening as well. With the sun down, the clothing bared shoulders and midriffs, skirts hiked up to show a sea-toned leg.

Water and wine passed between hands, some even making it to Leith. Though he had a suspicion that it might have been the baker at some point that shoved a clay cup of cactuswine into his hand. He discreetly poured it out of course.

The large bonfire was lit. The ground around it vibrated as the drums circling it boomed thunderously with every beat. The drummers shook sweat from their bodies with every swing of the clubs in their fists. It was as if keeping in time with one another didn’t matter, only the force in which they pounded their drum, louder than the shouts of their voices.

As expected, he found Weaver Callum in attendance with the wards, hovering over the red-haired Victon children as they sat before the large fire, nibbling on skewers of charred meat. They had an unhindered view of the dancers who spun and twirled in circles.

Leith had waited for the weaver to grab his bag and leave with the girls. And as the sun set, he’d gone through the man’s houseboat. The main thing of interest he’d found was a mask. Not the dead spellknife’s mask, of course. That one was floating in the sea somewhere. The intersecting lines on the one in the house had been different. They were always different.

He became curious of the spellknife that lived so far away from the Conduit and its influence. And why the one he'd been hunting had traveled so far to involve the man. And after a thorough search, the item that Leith had been seeking was still lost to him.

Leith had spent the better part of the afternoon, dragging the spellknife's bedraggled body from the rocks. He buried the man in the sand beneath one of the coves where a high tide would deter anyone from wandering near it.

And he'd hope that it wasn't one of the few places that children liked to venture, although Leith most likely would have when he was younger. But it was likely that the body was deep enough under that any child would quickly grow bored before they reached it. He found a sort of meditation in the depths of that dark cove, using Callum's spade and his bloodlust to dig a hole to the beat of the practicing drums. No child, or even one of those barrel-chested dock workers, could reach that body.

The drums were steady now, beating in perfect harmony to lift the spirits of the people that congregated on the beach. From the large bonfire, an effigy of a great bird spread its wings wide as the fire licked up its wooden legs towards its puffed up chest of hay. Something moved inside, embers spitting and crackling, emitting shrill chirps.

Around the effigy, the Kvash dancers moved in a steady rhythm. Their heads rose and fell, beaded braids and long ponytails whipping wildly.

They'd been dancing for a while. Sweat dripped from their bodies. Sand clung to their legs and arms where their feet kicked it up every time they bound from one place to the other in time with the drums, skirts spinning to expand around their hips. As their dark faces spun by, violet eyes met Leith's, their cheeks unmarked. Bright white smiles whirling by in all different shapes like a Victon zoetrope.

And then there she was. Her long legs carrying her gracefully across the sand. Her braid bounced behind her, whipping around her body as her feet pumped beneath her, a wide smile as she faced her sisters and the Weaver Callum, and then again as she moved across the bonfire to see the Protectorate and his partner—where they sat among their people like mere commoners, sharing the same food and the same drink. And if it weren't for Berand's white cape, orange in the light of the fire, Leith would have missed him entirely.

He didn't know how long they had been dancing, but slowly the revelers fell out one by one, gasping for breath and clutching their chests. The villagers cheered and cried out in jest, jabbing one another and sloshing drinks around in their hands. Leith ducked a flying skewer, juicy meat still attached, as it slipped out of someone’s hand.

There were five left. And then four. And then three. Then it was the two wards—the girl and the boy. The black moon and the sun, orbiting this large fire. A flaming bird that slowly descended into the roaring pit.

She came around towards him again, her feet lifting her higher and higher off the sands. Sweat shone on her body, running down her fingertips, glistening on the sharp protrusion of her bare hips.

Leith watched.

And their eyes met across the empty space.

The expanse growing smaller and smaller.

Around her everything and everyone stilled—like a painting, their features reduced to mere strokes of a brush, the fire a red and yellow blur. She moved in front of it, all sharp and keen edges.

A large cracking sound split the air. The effigy collapsed into the bonfire and the chirping morphed into a high-pitched shriek. Sparking embers flew from the fire and the two wards ducked and weaved beneath the fiery debris. A velix, a live and fiery bird the size of a small cottage, soared out of the burning wreckage beneath it. Sleek like an arrow, its wicked beak a narrow point that pierced the dark sky above it. It left a blazing trail that left spots in Leith’s vision.

And in the distance, Leith could hear others like it. He looked west in the direction of Thelos and there above the city’s skyline—another bright point rising faster and faster into the night. And across the dark velvet horizon, more bright orange dots rose. Their ear-piercing screams echoed over the dunes of the sahran.

Then Leith realized that up and down Kvashine’s long coast and stretches of barren desert, the country and its people had been waiting on a small backwards fishing village called Penth.