Chương 120: Chapter 117: A Clouded Glass.

I had read the agreements four times by now, and what unsettled me was that I had found absolutely nothing. I sat behind a desk in our rented manor with the trade agreements spread before me, and I kept waiting to find something that exposed the scheme. A clause buried in the fiftieth page. A figure that meant one thing in Aelheim and something else in Myrrheim. There was nothing. The terms were exactly what we had agreed to and better than I'd hoped.

Grain, in the volume we needed, for the years we needed it, against the Merchant's Balance and a fair sum of coin besides. Anias stood at my shoulder, another stack of documents drifting in the air beside her in a faint purple glow. She set the topmost sheet down in front of me as I finished with the last.

"The Duke moves fast," I muttered, "when he is motivated."

"House Solair is known for its competence, My Lady," Anias said.

"The speed does not surprise me. Doubtless it's a slightly modified template they use for their dealings with other parties."

"I still don't get it." I turned the page over and found the back of it blank, which I had also already known.

"I don't understand why he changed his tune so quickly."

"Does it matter, My Lady?" It was a fair question. I had what I had crossed a Province to get. The reason behind it was, in the strictest sense, none of my concern.

"Perhaps not," I admitted.

"Or perhaps he's tucked something in here I haven't found yet, and I'll be paying tenfold for it a year from now." I tapped the stack.

"Though I'll be honest, I don't think there is anything." Anias was quiet for a moment.

"My Lady, perhaps he simply values something you did. Something that was more important to him than the coin or the Artifact."

"And just what could that have been?" I said.

"I suppose my table manners were good. Though, not good enough for this." I almost thought I heard Anias sigh behind me. For a woman as composed as her, that was surprising.

"My Lady, you are brilliant at a great many things." She paused.

"You're also…less brilliant at others." This made me smile, and more confused all the same.

"And since when have you started to talk like-" The door burst open, and I knew who it was before I saw her. The footsteps gave it away. Violet had a way of almost stomping wherever she went. The fact that I could hear her at all right now meant that it was Violet. I couldn't see her over the stacks of paper until she rounded the desk and planted herself in front of me with her arms folded.

"There's no way," she announced, "you're staying in here all day." I yawned. That wasn't on purpose.

"Violet, I have to. You don't put your name on something like this without reading every word of it first."

"I know you. Bet you've read it like ten times."

"Four."

"Feels like ten." She turned to Anias, jerking her chin at the documents.

"Well? Is he shady or what?"

"We believe he is trustworthy," Anias said.

"For now."

"Why are you so lo- Anyway, whatever. There you have it." Violet spread her hands.

"Even Anias says he's fine."

"That…isn't really what she said."

"It's basically what she said." Violet leaned over the desk.

"Come on. There's no way I'm letting you miss the festival tonight. Let's go out."

"Miss what?" I asked.

"What festival?" Violet stared at me as though I had asked what the sun was.

"The harvest festival," she said.

"How do you not know there's a festival? You can hear it from here."

"Ah," I said.

"So that's what all the noise was." I had been hearing it all day, in fact. A swell of sound rising up from the streets, music and voices and something that might have been bells. It had made it impossible to concentrate, so I had simply turned my hearing down until the city went quiet. I had not given it a second thought. Click. Click. The world came rushing back in. The sounds of the festival flooded my ears, a hundred overlapping sounds pressing through the walls. I almost turned my hearing back down.

"There's probably a festival every other day in a place like this," I said.

"I doubt this one is anything special."

"My Lady," Anias said, "the harvest festival in Myrrheim is perhaps not its grandest. But it is one of its most welcoming." I frowned at her. Violet was beaming at me.

"Where's Sere and Damian?" I asked.

"They've been gone for a couple hours. Come on, you didn't even notice?" Violet said it a touch too quickly, and a touch too lightly.

"They went to see the festival unlike someone lame." That was rude, I wasn't lame. Sere had left without asking? She could go wherever she liked, of course. It was only that she usually asked. Or showed me a drawing of where she was going.

"So," Violet went on, and her face had gone faintly red, "that leaves just the two of us." I looked back down at the stack of paper. The decision had to be made in the morning so that we could be back in Aelheim by tomorrow, and every day I spent out here was a day Julian Greenward spent doing whatever it was that snakes did when nobody was watching them. I would be an idiot not to go over everything a fifth time.

"My Lady," Anias said gently, "I will go over the rest." I sighed. Then I sighed again.

"Fine," I said.

"I guess an hour or two can't hu-" Violet had me up and out of the chair before I finished the word. The crowd outside was enough to choke even Myrrheim's absurd streets. Those wide roads, the ones built so four carriages could pass abreast, had vanished entirely beneath people. They spilled from every doorway and packed every corner. Someone had strung vases of those same local flowers between the lampposts, so that the whole street ran beneath a ceiling of color.

There were musicians everywhere, playing string instruments I had only ever read about. Most of them were even good. The poor and the wealthy mingled freely and openly. Men in expensive clothing mingled with people who were obviously laborers, and neither party seemed to care. There really were a lot of people. It was, in short, exactly the kind of place I did not like. I pulled my cloak lower and was just about to say so when Violet grabbed my hand and dragged me into the middle of the crowd.

She beamed back at me, and I supposed a few hours of discomfort were not long at all. Besides, maybe Violet had a plan of things she wanted to do. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. We ate. A lot. That was, it turned out, Violet's entire plan. The first stall sold skewers of something dark and glazed that Violet declared the best thing she had ever tasted.

The second sold a pastry folded around a filling that was somehow sweet and sharp at once. By the third I was full to bursting and had told her so. Violet had answered by towing me toward a fourth with grease on her fingers and a grin on her face.

"If I eat one more thing," I said, "I really am going to explode you know."

"Nah, just reinforce your stomach. You'll be fine. Gotta do something with all that mana." She handed me half of whatever she was eating.

"Come on. Just try it." Was… was reinforcing her stomach something she was actually doing? I honestly did not know, and by now, I was too afraid to ask. Violet dragged me again, and as always, I let her. We passed the stall by accident. It sat tucked between a baker and a place selling ribbons, a small dark booth with a crystal ball on a stand and a hand-painted sign that read Fortune Reading. An old woman sat behind it, wrapped in shawls that made her look much wider than she probably was.

Something about the whole arrangement tugged at the back of my mind though I could not have said why. Before I could steer us past it, Violet had stopped.

"Ooh. Think she really can? Read our fortune and shit?"

"It's a scam," I said.

"It's the most obvious scam in the history of scams." The old woman smiled at me. Apparently we had both been too loud.

"Yes, child. I can read your fate. Your past, your present, and your future. That which is apparent, and that which is hidden." She gestured at the ball.

"Simply place your hand here and channel the barest breath of mana. I will read the light, and tell you what waits for you." I rolled my eyes. I had read about a great many Gifts since coming to this world, and I was fairly certain none of them did anything remotely like this. Come to think of it, the woman hadn't even said this was her Gift. It was an obvious and lazy scam. I opened my mouth to drag Violet away. Violet stepped forward, slapped her hand flat on the ball, and said, "Alright then.

You better not be lying! Read this." She channeled mana, and the ball lit up from within, a soft blue glow pooling under her palm. The woman peered into it and nodded slowly. Sagely. As if she were seeing things with her third eye.

"Ah, I see, I see. You have quite the future ahead of you, girl. One day you will ride atop rivers of blood. One day you will stand among the greatest warriors in all the land." Violet beamed like a child handed a sweet.

"You were right. You really can read the future." I tried very hard not to groan. Violet was carrying a warhammer nearly as tall as she was, slung across her back, and we had been collecting stares over it since we'd left the manor. You did not need to gaze into a crystal ball to tell that the girl wanted to be a warrior. You needed only eyes. I just hoped this was not going to be expensive. The woman turned to me.

"Come now, child. Your turn."

"That's alright-" Violet was beaming at me again. I sighed.

"Fine," I said, and stepped forward, and laid my hand on the ball. I let the barest thread of mana slip into it. The ball lit up. I waited. The woman leaned in, and her smile faltered.

"Hmm. This isn't how it usually goes." She tilted her head.

"Why is it so clouded?" I frowned. The ball looked no different to me than it had under Violet's hand. She was probably just buying time, trying to figure out what to say to me in particular. Rather boring theatrics but- Then I saw it. It crawled across the glass from beneath my palm. A thin black thread, blacker than black, branching as it went, splitting and splitting again. A second line followed, then a third. I recognized the color. Or I thought I did.

The black climbed, and where it climbed the glass went lightless. The black streaks spread, and within seconds, the whole thing was nothing but black. I felt Vaelin stir. Void. My free hand twitched and jerked violently. I almost pulled out the Godblade right here, in the middle of the street, before I forced myself still. Vaelin's anger flooded through me. My hand twitched again. I really was going to- The ball shuddered.

It hummed and then it shattered, collapsing into glittering dust that scattered across the dark cloth of the table. The old woman was on her feet. Her shawls had fallen from one shoulder and she did not seem to notice. Her face had gone grey, and she was staring at me with both hands raised as though to ward something off.

"Get away from me," she whispered.

"Get away from me." Violet stepped in front of me, her hand already drifting toward the warhammer.

"So you were a fraud the whole time. Broke your own stupid ball and now you're trying to spook us. Get lost."

"Shoo," the woman said, to both of us, to neither of us. Her voice cracked.

"Shoo, children. Shoo!" Violet stepped forward again. I put a hand on her shoulder.

"Let's leave." Violet looked back at me. Whatever she saw on my face made her pause. She nodded, I and let her lead me away. We walked in silence for a while. The festival went on around us, bright and loud. I did recognize those black lines. I had seen them crawling across Vyranthos' blue scales in a crater of steaming blood. I had seen them inside of him when I had used mana sight. I had seen them spreading over the skin of a Goddess as she lay dying in a cave.

They had been on Sere, before I had used Vaelin to sever them from her. I didn't know what this meant. I didn't know why I had seen them here. Was that some kind of trick? That seemed unlikely, especially given Vaelin's reaction. The blade still felt vaguely angry. I just hoped that whatever problem this was, it was one that could wait.

"Hey." Violet's voice intruded on my thoughts.

"Sorry. For dragging you out here."

"Hmm?" I turned to her.

"You don't need to say-""I know you don't like this kind of crap." She had her braid in one hand and was tugging at it.

"I dragged you out here anyway, and then that old bat did…whatever the hell that was." She shook her head.

"Should've just let you read your boring papers." I smiled and smacked her shoulder.

"Don't worry about it," I said.

"If I'd read those pages one more time I think my head would have come clean off my neck. You did me a favor." She huffed, but some of the tightness went out of her shoulders. We walked on. There was silence for a time. There was less of a crowd here, enough that we didn't have to yell.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Why did you want to come out here? With me, I mean. If you just wanted to see the festival, you could have gone with Sere and Damian. I mean, they left hours before you came to me." Violet was quiet for several steps. When I looked over again, she was staring very hard at the ground and her face had gone red to the tips of her ears.

"It's been a while," she said.

"Since it's just… been us. Like this." She tugged the braid again.

"You had that whole tea party. With the doll. Without me."

"Cordelia."

"Whatever." Her ears went redder.

"And now then there's- though I don't think she's-" Violet finished neither sentence. She just shook her head.

"I figured it'd be nice to do something. You know, just the two of us." It should not have been possible, but somehow her face had gone even redder. I felt my own face warming. She wasn't wrong. It had been a while. There's been one crisis after the next. The last time it'd been just the two of us had been us throwing snowballs at each other. That almost felt a lifetime ago now, after everything that had happened.

"Well," Violet muttered, before I could find anything to say.

"It was fun but you probably want to head back, don't you? Let's go." She had already half-turned around when I heard it. The sound came from a café across the way, where a knot of rowdy men sat hunched over a table, throwing down cards and shouting over one another.

"Well, Molc! Looks like you've lost your shirt this time!" one of them bellowed, to a roar of laughter. Click. Click. I recognized the cards. They were playing Rogue's Hand. I had played it once, on a freezing night on watch in the Wastes, with a girl who could not shuffle to save her life. I caught Violet's hand and started pulling her the other way, toward the café rather than away from it.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"We don't have to go back just yet," I said. In the morning, I handed the last of the signed documents across the table to Seras, House Solair's steward. The steward took them, checked them with a glance, and gave a short bow. He apologized that the Duke could not be present to receive them himself. Apparently there had been some incident on the night of the festival that required his personal supervision. What the incident was, he was not at liberty to say.

"It's fine," I said.

"He has been a more than gracious host already." Seras inclined his head once more and withdrew, and then it was only us. I let myself sag back into the couch. It was over. The one thing I had come all the way here to do, was done. The relief of it was almost dizzying. Sere laid her head across my lap, and went back to her notepad. I started working my fingers through her hair, which was tangled, because it was always tangled. She tilted the notepad up so I could see it. She had drawn the two of us on the couch.

She had given me an enormous head, which was an improvement from when she'd drawn me wearing the cloak.

"Well," Damian said from across the room. He had his arms folded.

"Guess it's really done then."

"It is." I leaned my head back against the couch.

"I can't wait to see Julian's face when the Farstep Circles start glowing day and night, and not one grain of it is his."

"The snake's going to try something," Violet said. She had claimed the armrest beside me.

"Bet he already has."

"Of course he has." I sighed. That was a problem for the Esra of tom- of a few hours in the future to deal with. For now, I just wanted to close my eyes and rest. Actually, why shouldn't I do just- The door opened. I saw Anias step in, and she was moving quickly, which Anias never did. There was a letter in her hand. I sat up straight, disturbing Sere.

"What's wrong?" She looked at me, and her face was grave. She looked down at the letter, and then back up at me.

"My Lady," she said.

"It seems we have a problem back home."