[ Marten ]
I stepped in horse dung within five minutes of entering the market.
Not just any horse dung. The specific, fresh, violently green horse dung that could only have been produced by a horse that had been eating the irrigated grass of Alden's Cross rather than the dried scrub that the garrison horses subsisted on. This was PREMIUM horse dung. The horse that produced this was eating better than I was.
"Marten." Dek, behind me. "Your boot."
"I know."
"It's—"
"I KNOW, Dek."
"It's really—"
"DEK."
"My grandmother says stepping in dung with your left foot is good luck."
"This is my RIGHT foot."
"Then she says nothing. My grandmother did not have a position on right-foot dung. You're on your own."
I wiped my boot on a stone and entered the market with diminished dignity and one shoe that smelled like a well-fed horse's digestive output.
The market didn't care about my boot. The market was too busy being alive.
I had forgotten what this was like. Or maybe I'd never known — Eden's markets were bigger but they were also Eden's, which meant they operated under the castle's shadow and the Twenty-One Houses' influence and the specific, invisible gravity of a city that existed primarily as the seat of imperial power. Alden's Cross market existed for no reason except that people wanted to buy things and other people wanted to sell things and the transaction between them was, at its core, two humans agreeing that something was worth something.
Torvald found fried bread within thirty seconds. The boy had a SYSTEM. He entered the market, stopped, turned slowly in a full circle, sniffed twice, and walked directly to the stall with the best bread. No hesitation. No comparison shopping. Pure instinct. My father could find a loose horseshoe by sound. Torvald could find the best bread by smell. Everyone had a gift.
"Try this," he said, shoving bread at me.
I tried it. The sound I made was not dignified.
"RIGHT?" Torvald grinned. The pure, uncomplicated, food-based joy of a boy who had been eating Brask's cooking for eight months and who had just been reminded that bread was supposed to taste like bread and not like a small, personal defeat.
Dek found a spice stall. He stood in front of it for a long time, picking up bags and smelling them with the careful, critical attention of a boy conducting research.
"That one's wrong," he said, putting down a bag of something red.
"Wrong how?" the merchant asked.
"Too much coriander. My grandmother's blend uses half that. You're overloading the front note."
The merchant — a man of fifty who had been selling spices for thirty years — looked at this fourteen-year-old boy who had just critiqued his product with the authority of a master chef, and did the only reasonable thing.
"You want to show me?" he said.
Dek showed him. He adjusted the blend, right there at the stall, pinching from different bags with his fingers, mixing with the unconscious precision of a boy who had spent his childhood in a kitchen where spices were treated with the respect that other families reserved for scripture.
The merchant tasted the result. His eyebrows rose.
"Where'd you learn that?" he asked.
"My grandmother."
"She a cook?"
"She was everything."
The merchant gave him the bag for free. Dek refused. They argued about it. The argument was conducted in the specific, good-natured, entirely serious register of two people who respected each other's position and intended to win anyway. Dek won. He paid. The merchant shook his hand.
"Come back tomorrow," the merchant said. "I'll show you my tea blends."
Dek nodded. His face — the sharp, guarded, perpetually ready-to-argue face — did something that I'd never seen it do in eight months at the garrison. It softened. Just for a second. The face of a boy who had found, in a market stall three months from home, a small piece of the kitchen he'd left behind.
Kess bought a knife. She examined it for thirty seconds, paid, and walked away. The entire transaction took less time than Torvald's first bite of bread. When asked about it later, she said: "It was a good knife."
No further details were provided. No further details were expected. This was Kess.
I walked the river. Ate a plum. Got juice on my chin. Didn't care. Watched the boats and the fishermen and the old man on the bridge feeding pigeons and talking to them with the earnest dedication of a man who had decided that pigeons were the best conversationalists in the city and, honestly, he might have been right.
The afternoon passed. The market wound down. We walked back to the garrison with full stomachs and lighter steps and the specific, temporary, borrowed joy of four kids in a city that wasn't theirs but that had welcomed them anyway.
My boot still smelled.
Torvald suggested I "lean into it."
I suggested Torvald lean into a river.
We were fine.