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The narrow buildings of Amsterdam glowed golden in the late autumn evening. Clara hurried from the pigment shop, taking the

long way so that she would not have to cross one more canal than was absolutely necessary. Avoiding canals in Amsterdam was

as fruitless an endeavor as trying to avoid eels in eel soup. If Wierenslot had been a testament to her father’s planning

and tight-fisted control of nature, then Amsterdam was a rambling, untamable testament to the nebulous interests of man’s

mind. Crooked alleys and twisting footpaths wound about in an endless tangle, circling art guilds and luthiers, banks and

exchanges. Clara could walk to the same shop every day for a week, and find herself on a different path back each time. The

novelty of the city should have amused her, given her something to preoccupy her mind with, but as she hurried across uneven

cobbles— baby’s heads , the citizens of Amsterdam called them—her shawl tight against the October chill, all she felt was a heavy sense of loneliness,

of homesickness. All the roses and tulips in her father’s garden, regardless of how tame and meek they had been, were mere

smudges of memory here in this gray and unfamiliar city.

Clara cut through a narrow alley, then zigzagged behind a bakery, nearly upsetting a cart loaded with flour.

If she was careful, she could at least time her errands so that she was back at the studio before it grew dark.

But today there had been a customer in the shop who had monopolized the shopkeeper’s time, and by the time she was helped she had found herself leaving late enough that the sun was sinking fast, the lengthening shadows bidding her to make haste.

Her breath came in cold puffs, her arms hugging the precious pigments to her chest. It felt good to have a purpose, even if

it was a small thing. Her new life was not without brightness. Clara ground cobalt pigment, as blue as the water that flowed

through the city. She fetched parchment and canvas from the little shop with the rickety sign on the Singel canal. She dreamed

and remembered and tried not to dwell on all that had come before. Her life working for a painter of some small renown was

not unpleasant, but neither was it the satisfying work that she had done at the farm, where her mind and body were so busy

that she never had time to ruminate on anything other than her next meal. She felt as if she was a docked ship, simply waiting

for its anchor to be pulled up before she could set sail again. And Clara van Wieren had never been one who was content with

waiting.

News of the floods in Friesland had reached the city not long before she had, but most people here didn’t seem terribly concerned.

Friesland was a long way from Amsterdam, and the city was like a world unto itself. Maurits and Pim, Helma and all the rest

of the faces that had peopled her world in Wierenslot... They all seemed so far away, like a dream that had long since

faded. And Fenna—where was she? Did her restless spirit still haunt the ground where Wierenslot had stood? There was so little

anchoring Clara to her old life, and even less from her years before the flood.

A few other people nodded their greeting to her as she wove down the street, but for the most part, she was invisible to the

grinding cogs of the city. She passed by taverns, the interiors boisterous like the paintings on her father’s walls come to

life.

The sun was sinking fast in the inhospitable slate sky, and Clara hurried her step.

There was no real reason she couldn’t be out past dark, but she would be a fool if she believed that the water held no danger for her anymore.

Who knew what Maurits was doing right now?

Who knew what his mother, the water queen, was capable of?

It still seemed too fantastic to believe.

She was in a city, and so long as it was bright and she was surrounded by people, she doubted that any creature of the water would try to abduct her. In the cover of night, however...

She was nearly running by the time she saw the small sign with the red tulip. Panting, she fell inside and bolted the door

behind her, her legs going weak.

“I thought you had gotten lost,” came a woman’s familiar voice.

Straightening, Clara set the pigments on the old wooden table that dominated the small room. “Mr. van Horne was trying to

charge double for the cobalt,” she told her mistress, her breath slowly beginning to even again.

“Old miser,” the woman commiserated, stepping into the light of the rushes. She was dark-haired and petite with freckled skin

the color of fresh milk, and carried herself with the poise of a queen. “He only charges so much because he knows that no

one else can get their hands on that blue. Never mind him, did you put it on credit, or do you have any change left for me?”

Clara dutifully deposited the extra coins into her mistress’s hand.

Sometimes it prickled her that she was expected to defer to a mistress now, that no one here knew that she had once lived in a castle and eaten off plates from China.

But she could not complain when she had a roof over her head, food in her belly, and a degree of freedom she had only ever dreamed about.

Securing a position with one of the city’s finest painters was no small feat, and she knew that she had been lucky to be accepted for the post. It wasn’t the life she would have hoped for in a city as grand as Amsterdam, but neither was it a life of poverty and insecurity.

“Perhaps I should pay you back the coins in exchange for your thoughts?”

Clara flushed at being caught drifting at sea by Alida. “Nothing of import,” she said with a strained smile.

Her mistress gave her the smallest raise of her brow. Alida was sharp-witted and canny, with an eye for detail and an ear

for gossip. “You needn’t look so nervous,” Alida told her with a smile that touched her knowing green eyes. “You’ve been here

nearly a month, and I have yet to see you breathe freely, let your shoulders down. If it’s me you’re afraid of, you’ve no

need to be. I don’t care what my maid gets up to outside these walls, so long as your work is good and you do not give me

trouble in the studio.”

Clara nodded as her mistress went off, humming, to attend to her evening toilet. Alida was nothing if not kind, but she didn’t

know that Clara was a fugitive from a deep and drowning magic. Perhaps if she had, she would not have opened her home and

her life to her so quickly.