“I’m not certain,” the witch said, looping a strand of her hair behind her ear. Ramson had already picked this up as a nervous tic of hers—like the way she fidgeted with her hood. “He brewed Deys’voshk and other elixirs.”
Likely an Affinite, then. His mind snagged on another detail, on the Deys’krug and the prayer robes. “Was he a priest—or a devout man? Have you tried starting from there?”
“He wasn’t a devout man,” she said bitterly, and then sighed. “I’ve tried that. I’ve looked all over the Empire for him, but I haven’t found a thing. The bounty hunters I hired never even got close.”
“Amateurs.”
She looked as though she wanted to slap him. “I wouldn’t be so confident. If this man isn’t standing in front of me in three weeks, I’ll bleed you dry.”
“Relax,” he said lazily, waving the sketch in front of her. “I have a plan.”
Ramson tapped his fingers on the sketch. Two sightings, ten years apart—the trail was colder than death by now. But he had two leads: First, this man used to work at the Palace. And that the man was likely an Affinite on the run meant he might’ve had to reinvent his identity and reestablish himself.
But if there was one source that tracked Affinites’ movements as closely as an eagle tracked its quarry, it was Kerlan’s brokers. The thought of strolling into their territory was one he didn’t care for. Ramson glanced at the witch and the child, unease twinging in his stomach. Could it be that they were victims of the very brokers that they needed in order to find this alchemist?
“Good.” Ana launched herself from the table and marched toward the bed, where she retrieved a small satchel from beneath the furs. May glared at Ramson, and then promptly began folding the few items of clothing on the bed and slipping them into the satchel. “We leave in one hour. I assume you’ll have figured out where we’re going by then.”
“I already have.” There was only one city in the vicinity of Ghost Falls that was crawling with ruthless Affinite traffickers hungry for information and bounty. “We’re going to Kyrov.”
The morning air was crisp, the snow glittering and dusted with gold from a distant sun by the time they set out. The quiet was broken only by the huff of their breath, that clouded in the cold air, and the crunch of their boots through snow. The boreal forest stretched from the Krazyast Triangle at the northernmost tip of Cyrilia to the Dzhyvekha Mountains that bordered Nandji in the south. Here, up north, the snow never melted, but farther south, Ana knew, summer saw the tips of green grasses and conifer pines peeking out from beneath a veil of white.
Ana hoisted her rucksack farther up her shoulders, the rustle of her parchments and the clinks of her remaining globefires strangely calming. By her side, May plodded along, turning her head this way and that to whatever sensations she felt coming from the earth buried deep below. She held a freshly lit globefire between her hands, the flames inside crawling along the oil that coated the glass, warming hands and providing light during nights. They’d spent many moons traveling like this, just her and May, a globefire, the compass she held in her hands, and the eternal silence of the forest.
Which, at the moment, was being disrupted in the most irritating way possible.
“So, how did you two beautiful damas end up all the way over here?” Quicktongue’s cheerful voice drifted to them from a dozen paces behind.
Ana gritted her teeth. May shot her a knowing look and rolled her eyes.
“Rather far north for a girl from the Aseatic Isles,” the con man continued. A flock of pine harriers burst into flight from some shrubs ahead.
Ana was about to spin around and snap at him, but the meaning behind his words settled into her with a chill. Everything Ramson Quicktongue said was deliberate, every word carefully chosen—it could hardly be coincidence that he was questioning May’s origin. And the last thing Ana wanted was for the con man to know about May’s status: a lost Affinite with no identity and no protection.
“It’s none of your business,” she replied.
“Oh, but it is,” Quicktongue pressed on in that tone of voice that made Ana want to strangle him. “Seeing as we’re going to be partnering together for six weeks.”
“Let’s keep it at that. A partnership, where we don’t speak to