28. A dead man's dance

The night was prowling shadows and distant starlight. Ada had not been given a candle for her room, and the darkness seemed to press past the window and draw each breath from her lungs with mist-touched fingertips.

The nightmares had come before sleep had the chance, but Ada focused on the green ribbon still tied tightly to her bedpost and imagined home. She thought she may have woken once in the early tides of morning, drawn not by the wispy streams of sunlight, but rather from a shadow that crept beneath her doorframe.

Footsteps faltered behind her unlocked door, gossamer threads of darkness filtering through the cracks and weaving around her bed slats. But through the peppered fog that clung to her consciousness, Ada heard the door next to her own softly closing. Though that, too, may have sprung from a realm of dreams as she slipped back to sleep.

Morning came in lazy ebbs, and it was not the sunlight that woke Ada, but Solen's calls from the landing. She rose from bed with stiff limbs and bleary eyes, the starched blankets folding around her legs as she shuffled towards the dresser.

The sun was a buttery wash across her skin, half blinding even when it struggled through the dust-coated window. It skittered across the building opposite her window, thick mortar hardened into bulbous beads between its bricks as if still wet. Ada brushed her hand across the grimy glass, squinting through the window and down between the houses.

A vast jasmine vine ran up the adjacent building, dappled here and there with tiny flowers that caught the sunbeams with pearlescent petals. It grew from a small courtyard that was arranged between the two houses, a makeshift allotment squared off inside it with vegetables jostling for space and overflowing onto worn-down cobbles.

The back door leading out from the taproom was ajar and swinging, but slate steps also led down to another hidden entrance. Ada guessed it to be a cellar door, perhaps leading to a pantry sheltered from each summer's warmth.

She dressed quickly, then draped her cloak around her shoulders before peering out onto the empty landing. She half expected a shadow to still be strung around her doorframe, but there was no sign that anyone had lingered by her room the night before. She cast the thought aside, running fingers through her hair and then heading to the staircase.

Solen sat alone by the bar, the room silent apart from the clinking of the woman's silver spoon against a jar brimming with honey, and she kicked a stool out for Ada as she entered. Solen's clothes looked identical to the day before, but now the bandolier of knives was tightened around her waist.

Offering Ada a plate of half-stale bread, Solen pushed her jar across the bartop and motioned for her to dip a slice into the syrupy honey. Ada eyed Solen's spoon as she chewed, a globule trailing down its stem and pooling between her slim fingers.

"Don't you want any?" Ada asked, waving at the stack of bread.

But Solen shook her head, licking her honeyed fingertips as she replied, "I don't want to waste the taste."

Ada hummed through a mouthful of bread crust and relished the honey's taste that was so much more decadent than marmalade. "Honey's a bit of a luxury in my town. We only tend to get any around autumn time."

Solen leant across the bar, lowering her voice as if she were about to share some intimate secret. Her lips were laced with sugar as she breathed, "I wouldn't say it's exactly common around here either. But when the world turns rotten, you've got to at least savour its sweetness."

"How dramatic," drawled a man from across the room, and Ada had to grasp at the bar to keep from toppling backwards.

Raeph lounged by the back door, dressed entirely in black like a figure carved from coal. The hollows of his cheeks were half hidden by his wild hair, and violet shadows shaded his face as if framed against a twilight sky. "Shouldn't you both be gone by now?"

Solen rolled her eyes towards Ada, smiling as if they shared some inside joke between them. Raeph stiffened slightly and she replied, "I changed my meeting point a fortnight ago, it won't take us ten minutes to get there."

"If you wait until noon the streets with be overrun. Better to leave now, especially as you have," he cast his eyes to Ada, lingering for only a matter of seconds, "dead weight with you."

Ada glared up at him, opening her mouth to shoot back a retort. But Solen got there first, spoon clattering to the bartop as she said sweetly, "I'd like to see you saying that when you've got an iron knife burning a hole through your hand."

With no more than a bat of her eyelashes, she drifted past him and through the back door. Ada hurried to catch up, laces snagging on loose floorboards and sending up spells of dust. She kept her eyes averted from the man still leaning against the door, but held her breath as she stepped over his blackened boots.

Still, Ada felt Raeph's gaze fixed upon her back as the door swung shut behind her. His footsteps faded as he walked back into the house, though his voice remained, low and lilting, when he called, "I'll be waiting."

Solen ignored him and strode over a pile of browning carrot tops. "Don't mind Raeph. He's always a grouch after being up all night."

But her voice was whisked away with the breeze as Ada stepped out into the courtyard. The naked sky bore no clouds to catch upon the sun as it bathed Ada in warmth. She hadn't realised how she had begun to crave it; the clear air, steady ground, and vaulted open. It was a shackled freedom, but one that rustled through her hair and murmured of promise.

"Ok, do you see this here?" Solen was crouching by a brick wall that ran between the houses and separated the courtyard off from the city beyond with its grey and grimy stones. It had been difficult to see the brickwork from her room above, but now that Ada stood before the wall, it towered over her head in mossy stretches of crumbling rock.

Solen was sticking the toe of her boot into a jagged crack that ran just above the ground, marking similarly sized fissures that scarred up the stonework with both hands.

"You'll need to climb the wall using the cracks when I tell you to." Solen watched as Ada's brows dipped together and she winked, already shoving her boot into the lowest crevice. "It's easier than it looks."

Ada huffed. Easy, perhaps, for the woman who managed to scale up the stones in a matter of seconds and was already pressing her body against the nearby building. They remained still for a heartbeat, and then Solen hissed down, "Now. Quickly."

Gravelled fragments tumbled across her boots as Ada scrambled up the first two footholds. She felt a sliver of rock cut across a finger as she pulled her body up, and cursed when her cloak began to tangle around her feet and she had to scramble for purchase. But then a warm hand encircled her wrist, and Solen was tugging her up. Ada grabbed ahold of the upper bricks and hauled herself onto the ledge, knees trembling.

"Thanks," she gasped. But Solen only tightened her grip on her wrist, sliding down and over the stone, taking Ada with her through the air. Ada hardly had time to gasp as the breath lurched from her lungs. Her cloak billowed up and around the pair of them as they landed, Ada stumbling into Solen while she wheezed, "Nevermind, I take it back."

The woman chuckled, but her body was tense as she glanced around them. They stood within a narrow alleyway, which was paved in grey and starkly bare aside from the odd puddle sheened with an oily spill.

Solen was already moving, beckoning Ada with a hand behind her back as they headed towards a hum of nearby noise. Ahead, chatter and children's laughter rose in and out around the stirring of water and the tapping of shoes across cobbles.

They emerged onto a wide street of whirling bodies, all dressed in bright linens trimmed with silks and polished leathers. Soot did not stain the cobblestones beneath Ada's feet, and the scent of sweetly spiced ale wafted on a breeze over the canal.

It had seemed useless to dwell upon the position of the bandit's home before. After all, Raeph had found Ada within the depths of the city's outer circle, and she had assumed they must have been living nearby. Now Ada realised how wrong she had been as she stared at the people bustling through the street, some holding tightly onto the hands of giggling children, while others crowed to each other from across the pavements.

But discovering just how closely she had been living to the centre of Wysthaven was not the shock that stole Ada's breath and staggered her heartbeat. Nor was it the colourful costume of the fae that reeled past her like shoals of gilded fish jumped straight from the canal.

What shocked her was that nobody was looking up. Up at the tower with its empty windows, short stretch of wood, and rusted chain. And the body, which swung by the neck from its iron necklace with tattered clothes and gaunt skin.

Solen tugged at Ada's sleeve, but it was too late. The breeze waltzed through the air and caught the body's loose limbs, a deathly dance slowly spinning it around to reveal a face suspended in barren agony. A face that Ada recognised.