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“Wait, where are you going?” He sounded a little sharp.

“Out,” she said. “I need to stretch my legs. I’ve been sitting here all day.”

“Bett has made pies for dinner,” he said, a touch of relief in his voice. “Don’t be late.”

She looked at him in silence again, and then walked out, into the narrow passage that split the house between the business and their living quarters.

The door to the shop, which sat next to her studio, was closed, and she ignored it as she headed into the hall, lifting her bag from its hook by the door, and setting it across her chest.

She caught sight of herself in the mirror that hung to one side, and straightened her shirt and tucked stray strands of hair that had come undone from her braid behind her ears.

“Melodie.”

She paused with the front door partly open and looked back down the dim passage, saw the hulking outline of Vinest standing by the shop door.

She waited.

“What made you bring the matter of money up now? I thought we were family.”

She studied the dark outline of him, and the ring on her finger suddenly heated up.

She clenched her hand into a fist in surprise.

Then she turned thoughtfully away and stepped outside, stretching out her fingers and looking down at her middle finger as she headed for the town square.

The ring was a working of rose gold, which held what looked like a piece of rose quartz in the middle. It had the ability to sense danger and deception.

And Vinest had just lied.

He didn’t see her as family at all.

CHAPTER 4

Melodie loved the market square.

It was surrounded on three sides by buildings, and the fourth side was open, a promenade along the river bank. Midway along the promenade was the bridge which joined the Grimwalt side to the Kassian side. It was wide enough to accommodate generous traffic in either direction, and there was a similar market square on the Kassian side, a mirror image to the one she stood in now.

Both sides were always busy, and there was a constant stream of bridge traffic, a consistent hum of voices and the clatter of hooves and cart wheels over cobbles. The traders liked to tease each other over which market was better, but the rivalry was friendly.

It hadn’t always been this way.

Illoa used to be smaller.

Melodie had come through it as a child, although she barely remembered the village as it had been. When she and her father had returned when she was sixteen, he had commented often on how much it had grown since Kassia became Kassia and Cervantes, and formed a strong alliance with Grimwalt.

It was an interesting place to live—a border town that was a conduit for most of the trade between Kassia and Cervantes and Grimwalt, as well as Skäddar to the north.

It was easier for the Skäddar merchants to cut through Grimwalt than to go around through Jatan, and everyone benefited from the arrangement.

She certainly loved the ebb and flow of merchant caravans and lone traders that came through. They often set up stalls for a few days on either the Kassian or Grimwalt side of the bridge, bringing interesting items with them.

And sometimes they brought things she had spent her life pretending not to see.

The merchant carts usually set up around the square early in the day, and as it was late afternoon now, they were winding down. Some were closing up, some were content to sit and watch the sun set over the Malin River and wait for customers to wander by.

Hunger from a day spent bent over her work led Melodie straight to a food stall, where she threw caution—and the thought of supper—to the wind, and bought a funnel cake. She ate it slowly as she wandered past the stalls, enjoying the crispy crunch of the dough and the cool, cinnamon whipped cream in the center.

There were usually many months between her special finds, and she had last found something magically interesting only three weeks before, so she didn’t expect much, but she liked to browse anyway, pausing at the overcrowded tables to look at the wares.