with a voice coarsened by too much wine and too little fresh air.
“You need to ask?” Yohan gestured toward the fortune-telling cards.
Akashia recognized the ritualized rudeness that passed for civility in the city. She used the style herself with the yellow-robes. It didn’t bother her, or it hadn’t until Just-Plain Pavek became a man in her mind, not a templar. And it bothered her even more with this woman who, on second glance, was only a few years older than she was herself. But the shop was filled with magic-laced things she could not name and the air itself was thick with Unseen inquiries; she held her peace, staying close by Yohan.
The proprietor lifted her shoulders in a worn-out shrug: “A love philter?”
“Ral’s Breath.” Yohan’s arm dropped quickly from hers; the old dwarf was embarrassed.
“You’ve come to the wrong place, then. Never sold the baby powders; never will.” And staring bluntly at Akashia’s belly, the woman let out a snorting, bitter and private chuckle. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”
“Why?” Akashia asked, disregarding Yohan’s admonition that she be quiet while they were in the shops.
“You won’t find any, that’s why. It’s gone. Old Breath, new Breath, good and bad: it’s all gone. Sold or confiscated by the yellow-robes.”
“Confiscated?”
“Where’ve you been, girl? S’been weeks since the orators harangued that the stuff’d been tampered with.” She swore and wiped a weepy nose against a dirty sleeve. “Never worked much anyway, ’cept with babies and old men. But it’s gone now.”
“Would you like some?” she asked gently.
Yohan’s fist clamped over her elbow like a vise.
“S’all been confiscated. Ain’t none left in the city. You got some, you keep it far and away from me. Don’t carry no stuff from the rotted-yellow customhouse. Don’t want no rotted yellow-robes bustin’ in here, roustin’ me outta house and home.”
The woman took a deep breath, staring at the single roof-beam of her establishment. Aware of her own foolishness—treating a vendor of the elven market as if she were a woman of Quraite—Akashia tightened her mind-bending defenses. But the woman was no master of the Unseen Way; her vacant expression was the product of a Tyr-storm of wildly suspicious thoughts whipping through her mind.
“You bringin’ me trouble?” she shouted. Her eyes were sharp-focused now, and filled with rage and madness. “You settin’ the yellow-robes on me? You wantin’ my place, my trade?” She swore and stalked forward, head down and shoulders raised. “I’ll give you trouble. I’ll give you more trouble than you dreamed—”
The hysterical woman came toward Akashia, Yohan sidestepped between them before harm was done.
“No trouble,” he insisted, retreating with cautious, well-balanced strides, pushing her back toward the curtain door.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized as soon as they were both in the alley.
The red-dressed woman’s shouts quieted to inarticulate muttering, but they could still hear her moving through her shop. Fingers with ragged nails appeared at the edges of the curtain, pulling it taut, lashing it to the flimsy frame.
“Go away! Go away, you hear! Take your trouble somewhere else!”
The Quraiters were eager to obey. Yohan grabbed the cart traces and, without saying a word, started for the street. Once they were milling through the crowds, Akashia insisted softly, “It was my fault,”
Yohan pursed his lips together and adjusted his grip on the traces. He was as angry as she’d ever seen him, and angry at her as well—which, she knew, was an anger he found difficult to express.
“I’m ashamed of myself.” She said the things she thought he’d want to say, that she needed to hear. “I was wrong. I made a terrible mistake, thinking because she was my age, she was like me—”
“Don’t talk, that’s all,” Yohan grumbled. “Let me do the talking. All the talking.”
“I won’t forget again,” she assured him. “We learned something, though. The Lion-King’s confiscated the remaining Ral’s Breath. He must know it’s been tampered with. Pavek’s—”
“There’s no ‘must’ with Urik or the lion. We don’t know anything, yet.”
They went along in stony silence awhile, until she spotted the distinctive signboard slung out over a cross street.
“Do we try there?” she asked. “I’ll be quiet, I swear it.”
“See to it,” Yohan replied with the same sternness he’d used in the earlier street confrontation.
Then, after rolling the cart from the street to a less-trafficked alley and leaving the two farmers to stand guard beside it, he led her into the apothecary’s shop.
This second proprietor was an elf, lean and shifty as any lifelong desert nomad, and clear-headed, as the red-dressed woman had not