Rain Summoner Act 2

Paralyzed by the fear Zoff’s helpfulness had been but a façade, Yanna remained still. If she had to run, she had to think about where it was she would go. She had to pick just the right moment, as she had in the cave. The trouble was she didn’t have the sea to assist her, this time.

Perhaps she ought to wait it out, to appear content and listen quietly.

He tapped the side panel again. “Have you gone to sleep?”

Before she could answer, the door opened to the house, and a warm light spilled into the tiny yard.

Yanna peered out as a woman emerged from the house. She was tall and perhaps thirty, dressed in plain clothes similar to some of the merchants Yanna had seen in the capital market. “Both of them?” she asked, reaching out. “Was there any conflict?”

A red and black lemur hopped from her shoulder to greet Zoff before it leapt into the trees. Yanna hadn’t expected to see a creature so prevalent to her homeland in brisk Mardesal.

“No. No, just one.” Zoff went to the woman quickly and spoke quietly in Aglian. “That farmer who owns the land here,” he started.

She made a face as if even the mention of the farmer irritated her. “What’s he done now? Did he trouble you on the road?”

Zoff set his lantern on the cart. “He’s becoming… what was the word here?”

“A jackass?”

He stifled a laugh and removed the tarp over his hat. Turned as he was from the light, Yanna was still unable to decipher much of his appearance, other than he kept his hair untied and wore a thick scarf, both of which seemed strange for summer. “Yes. But no. He asks too many questions, like he must know what you’re doing at all hours of the day.”

“If he’s that nosy,” the woman said, with ‘nosy’ alone in Mardesalian, “you’d better stay away a while. He may be compromised. The last thing you need is to get apprehended.”

“But there was only one of them at the beach, and no sign of their ship,” said Zoff. He gestured to the cart. “What’s to be done when the older sister arrives? We can’t leave her to the dogs.”

Yanna was endlessly grateful she had studied the languages she had. She had misgivings about this conversation. What sort of people had rescued her? Were they smugglers? Were they really interested in helping her and Sadira?

The noise of birdsong and insects chirping in the leaves pressed around her. The pain in her neck and her legs from spending so long curled up began to drive her mad. She pushed down the anxieties rising in her chest and slid open the small door to the compartment to get some air.

The woman startled at the noise and approached the cart, extending her hand in front of her and moving slowly as though she had trouble seeing. “Are you alive in there?” she asked, wincing in the sharp light of the lantern.

Close up, the direct stare from her long eyes made Yanna shier than before.

She couldn’t bring herself to speak. She extended her hand, and the woman helped her crawl out of the cramped compartment. Pink burn scars, fresher in appearance than the one crawling across her nose and cheek, lay in ridges across the dark taupe of the woman’s hands. They looked excruciating, but she didn’t so much as flinch when making contact. They must not have been as raw as they seemed.

She was Niloufarian, as her landlord had said, but when she knelt down, she spoke to Yanna in Mardesalian. “Have you have any idea where your sister is?”

Yanna shook her head and fought back tears. “No.”

“I see,” the woman said, sounding awkward. She wrapped an arm around Yanna and patted her on the shoulder.

“Esolie. You may not want to stand so close,” Zoff said, still in Aglian. “She’s got the rose throat fever. For a week, perhaps.”

Esolie removed her arm from around Yanna. “I see,” she said again.

He moved his cart into the dense foliage to hide it. “What should I do? Her sister may show up at any time.”

Yanna’s attention piqued at the mention of Sadira. She watched them carefully.

Esolie chewed on her bottom lip. “Go back to the capital when you’re able and listen out. Someone's certain to notice her. Her likeness is known in every principal city on the continent.”

“What of this girl? How will she get anywhere?”

“Dol’s errand girl will doubtless be here every day this week wondering if I’ve found her new work yet. Dol’s always sending her to the capital. I’ll have her fetch you when it’s time.”

“I don’t like it.”

Yanna’s focus strayed now that they were no longer speaking of Sadira, and she could stand to be on her feet no longer. Weariness guided her through a low doorway with glass chimes that jangled around her ears. The sound poured fuel onto her headache. She covered her ears with a groan.

Esolie caught up to Yanna and led her to a small mound of blankets by a low burning fire.

Yanna sank onto the impromptu mattress and folded her hands on her lap. “Thank you,” she mumbled shyly.

More questions than she could possibly ask clogged her throat, begging her to speak them aloud. But she couldn’t. Not yet. She was so close to feeling safe for the first time in weeks. What if asking the wrong question or appearing too clever made her hosts turn on her the same way the sailors had?

Fatigue pulled her down and made her eyelids heavy. She shuddered in her huddle of blankets and wished with an ache spanning her entire body that she would wake up in the morning and find herself in her own bedroom. Sadira would be there, as serious and overbearing as she had always been, and Yanna's biggest concern would be hiding the books she had taken from the restricted section of the library.

She fell asleep knowing her wish was impossible, but hoping she would at least dream about it.

It was days before Yanna awoke with a clear head. Her memory of the days before was fuzzy, and she could barely recall her escape from the sailors. It all felt like a terrible dream.

She lie alone in Esolie’s back room, which she’d gathered was the bedroom. During her convalescence, the house’s usual occupants had largely left the room to Yanna, either for comfort or ensuring her illness wouldn’t spread.

Firelight danced across the creatures woven into the scratchy blanket. One beast in particular caught her eye.

Amid waving stripes of blue and white, a massive creature rose from the water. Yanna had seen illustrations of bears before, but never one like this. Still, its image was familiar to her.

The sailors told many tales on their long voyage to pass the time. One night, they had gathered to compare legends and rumors from their hometowns. Some spoke of spirits who demanded a sacrifice to appease them. Another told of horses made of fire that thundered down from the heavens long ago and burned a beautiful city to the ground.

A sailor with silver teeth spoke of a spirit who lived in the cold rivers of his homeland in the far North of Isulfr. “Great bears made of ice,” he had said. He waved his hands with wild eyes as he described beasts of impossible size. “Everyone knows not to travel the rivers when there’s snow on the ground, lest them bears feast on your body and soul. But you hear tales. A hunter who faces the River Bear and lives is granted a great gift.”

The sailors from Mardesal and Niloufar had laughed, but the Isulfrite sailor crossed his arms.

“It’s true,” he told them, looking wounded. He picked at his beard. “Stryn told us he bested one some years ago. And he's no liar.”

Yanna shivered remembering the name. The last time she had heard of Once King Olstryn, he and his rogue army had been plundering villages near the Dalachite border on the other side of Mardesal. That had been two years ago. It was the last thing her mother had argued about with Queen Giuliana before –

Yanna folded the blankets so the bear was hidden. She didn’t want to think about Stryn, Giuliana, or anything else that reminded her of that awful evening.

A steady ticking noise filled the room. It was faint, but it had plagued Yanna’s dreams the whole time she slept. She had chased it through nightmare after nightmare, hoping to silence it and find peace. Now that she was awake, she was no closer to determining its source. The sound echoed all over the room.

She sat up slowly from her bed of folded blankets. Her cheeks burned from the rash, which had finally started to peel. She was more alert than before, and her eyes felt less swollen. Dizziness made her pause to collect her bearings before she climbed out of bed.

Esolie’s voice traveled from the other room. “How old were you when you began running errands for Dol?”

Late afternoon sunlight softened the curtain separating Yanna from the rest of the small house. She peeked through the weave of the curtain. Zoff had departed for the capital already, so Esolie couldn’t be speaking to him.

A pretty, plainly-dressed Mardesalian girl a few years younger than Akeem sat at a desk across from Esolie. Strands of her wheat-gold hair floated loose from its pinned arrangement at the front of her cap. She drummed her plump fingers on the desk as if waiting to speak about something specific. “Seven,” she drawled. “Or may it be I was nine?”

“And what have you most longed to say to him?”

The girl pursed her lips in thought before her round eyes lit up with an answer. “I'd tell him to stop talking when his mouth's full. He’s always spitting crumbs at me, you know.”

Esolie snorted. “That might be too ambitious. I meant something you might be able to tell him in this lifetime.”

“Oh! I’d like to tell him I’ve been offered work somewhere else. I’ll be an old lady by then, though.”

“You might tell him sooner than that. There's a winery owner who needs someone accustomed to bargaining. He's got a shipment heading South in a week, and he wants you to get the best price you can as a trial.”

The girl clasped her hands together. “You’ve found me a new employer?”

Their conversation went on with no sign of stopping. Yanna crept back from the doorway.

For the first time, she had a chance to examine the room around her without fear of being caught. Perhaps she could find out more about the people who had rescued her.

Most of the space was occupied by piles of crates full of the goods Zoff sold in his cart. Yanna’s new clothes had come from one such crate. She didn’t suppose anything of interest was tucked away in one of those.

At the back of the room, nestled in shadow, stood a tall dresser with broken drawers. A small cushion at the top littered with jar lids and other paraphernalia served as a bed for the lemur that came and went as it pleased.

She pulled open a few drawers, but there were only old cold-weather clothes and things in need of mending. In the last drawer on the bottom of the dresser, she moved aside an old vest and discovered an unfinished letter. The penmanship was so poor that it almost appeared to be written in code, but Yanna deciphered a handful of words.

“My skies,” it began in Aglian. It read as a casual letter between parted loved ones. Yanna scanned the page, but she found no mention of herself or Sadira, no hint to the sailors or anyone else she knew. Each word was aligned perfectly, as if with the help of measuring sticks, but the letters were crowded together and sometimes overlapped.

It was likely Esolie’s writing. The scars over her eyes gave her trouble seeing, and she often squinted at things even when she held them close to her face.

Yanna folded the letter and carefully laid it back under the vest. Before she sealed it away again, her gaze fell upon a package wrapped in linen stuffed in the back of the drawer.

She glanced toward the curtain.

“I think I know who you might suggest as your replacement,” Esolie was saying. “Didn’t you say old Gren has a little son who just started working? I’m sure he’d like a softer role than picking weeds all day.”

“You think he's cut out for it?” the girl asked. “Han’s a sharp enough lad, I suppose. He's good for gossip, anyway.”

Satisfied Esolie was busy, Yanna reached to the back of the drawer. She retrieved the package with a deft hand and unfolded the edges of the linen. Dark powder trickled from the ends of a bamboo cylinder. It had a faint sulfuric scent.

Was this gunpowder?

A thud on the roof made Yanna jump. She rewrapped the package and returned it to its hiding place with her heart hammering in her chest.

The lemur squeezed through a hole in the ceiling and deposited an empty bottle in one of the crates. When it caught sight of her, it froze and stared as if afraid of being noticed.

Yanna slid the drawer closed as quietly as possible and backed away from the dresser. She pretended to look at the floor.

The lemur flashed a cautious look to her before it skulked to a small table by the hearth. The table was set like an altar, with dried flowers surrounding a humble collection of coloring pastels and a toy wagon wheel. Yanna got an uncomfortable feeling looking at it, as if it were something she wasn’t meant to see.

The lemur stole a pastel from the table and dropped it in the same crate it had dropped the bottle. It spared a last, curious glance to Yanna before it left through the hole in the ceiling.

She was too nervous to sift through the room after that.

She followed the ticking noise as it pinged off corners. It had been loudest near the curtain. Yanna tiptoed to the doorway to the front room, listening through the drone of voices. She almost supposed there was a timepiece in the other room when she looked up and saw it.

A heavy silver pendant hung on a chain over the door, marking each second as it passed with a tiny click.

The pendant had the shape of a pansy shell. It would have been an ordinary piece of jewelry were it not for the constant, mechanical ticks emanating from its center. And there was the fact it had been hung on the wall instead of lain safely in a dresser drawer.

She knew then that there was no way to stop the noise. She would simply have to get accustomed to it. Still, the mechanism held new interest for her. She stretched higher to get a closer look at its tarnished silver shell.

In her pursuits, Yanna forgot to pay attention to the conversation in the other room. She listened again.

Polite farewells were said, and a chair scraped across the floor as it slid away from the desk. Yanna hopped away from the curtain and waited with her hands folded in front of her.

The front door closed as the errand girl left, and Esolie wandered through the curtain, untying a bandanna from around her mouth and nose. She startled when she almost ran into Yanna.

“You're awake,” she said. She squinted around the room as if trying to spot something. “I thought it was Jon making all that noise.”

“Your lemur?” Yanna stammered and stepped out of the way, grateful to have a scapegoat. “Should I have stopped him?”

Not that she would have relished making that attempt; the lemur she had once tried to keep as a pet took poorly to reprimand, and she feared drawing the ire of another animal capable of putting up so strong a fight.

“That’s thoughtful,” Esolie said, waving an errant hand, “but don’t trouble yourself. He’s always bringing in salvage and reorganizing. That used to be his job, but he’s getting confused in his old age, and he moves things he shouldn’t.”

“He was that well-trained?”

“He’s a bit special. Before the damage to my eyes, I had a knack for persuading others, and he developed a loyalty to me after I saved him from getting resold at a market. It still hasn’t stopped him from getting into mischief with the jam jars now and then.” She cast a concerned gaze to Yanna. “You’ve barely had anything to eat since you arrived. You must be starving.”

Yanna shook her head. She was faint, but her dull hunger pangs drowned in an overlying malaise that kept her stomach on edge. Perhaps that, too, was hunger, but she didn’t know; rarely had she ever been so ill, and never had she subsisted on portions so few for so long.

“No?” Esolie asked, sounding as if it were the silence that tipped her off rather than the headshake. “It would still do you well to eat. Your recovery will stagnate if you don’t.”

Yanna stifled her annoyance that she didn’t know the word ‘stagnate’ until just then. She folded her hands in her lap uncertainly and cast another glance to the pendant swinging over the door. “I don’t wish to impose,” she said quietly.

Esolie huffed. “Impose? My fool landlord brings me so many apples that I don’t know what to do with them all. You’d be doing me a service by getting rid of some.”

Yanna didn’t know how much of that was true, but there certainly was an odd collection of cider and jam jars lining the walls. “Pardon me,” she started, her interest outweighing a sense of intrusion. She wrung her hands and looked again to the pendant hanging in the doorway. “Is that not a relic from the Southern Continent?”

Esolie paused before she continued on her way to a shelf of food over the hearth. “Don’t worry; so long as you don’t wear it, it won’t bring you any harm.”

Yanna had read plenty about the cryptic machines from the lost Southern Continent and their infamous curses. In spite of their reputation, some people still sought after the devices. Many were said to house unique power. Merchants sometimes claimed to have one for sale, but Akeem said he had never come across anything greater than a music box in person.

Yanna had long found them fascinating. “What does it do?”

“What it always does,” Esolie said, not bothering to give the machine a backwards glance. She felt along the shelf until she found a loaf of bread. “It threatens to drive me to madness whenever I think about it.”

Her face, shaped like a diamond, was every bit as inscrutable as the rock it resembled. Her expression was frank, but guarded. It was almost as if she were wearing a mask. She offered Yanna a piece of bread with a swatch of apple preserve. “You have questions,” she said, without bothering to frame it as an uncertainty. “I figure it’s only fair to answer some of them.”

Some of them?

At least this saved Yanna the distress of figuring out how to broach the subject. She wondered if there was any way to disrupt the mask-like expression on Esolie’s face. If she meant to lie as the sailors had, perhaps Yanna could discern the truth by provoking small reactions from her.

The question that figured most prominently in her mind involved Ghost-Hand. The image of his ghoulishly gray, long-drowned face watching her as he disappeared in the water had surfaced many times in her nightmares.

He was equally impossible to read, perhaps more so. Why had he spent so much energy protecting her and Sadira from the other sailors only to decide against rescuing Yanna when she nearly drowned? And even after that, he refused to let the others turn her in for their reward. What if he was a contact of Zoff's or Esolie’s? It would explain how a common vendor knew exactly who Yanna was and where to find her.

“Are you acquainted with a man named Ghost-Hand?” she asked.

“I can’t say that I am.” Esolie paused with a curious frown before gulping down a spoonful of vinegar. She took a wide array of remedies every day to ward off the rose throat fever Yanna had brought from the sea. “Ghost-Hand, you say? Could you describe him?”

Yanna lifted a hand to the top of her head, uncertain how much this would help. “He stood as tall as I do,” she said. She stared at the floor, trying to remember him as faithfully as she could. “He was an older man from Dalach who always frowned, with a round white face and a thin scar over one eye. His eyes and hair were gray like steel, and he was missing one of his hands.”

Esolie wrinkled her nose. “Do you mean to tell me that sour-faced old man is still alive?”

Yanna looked up in cautious surprise. She didn’t want to let it slip that he had drowned. “How do you know him?”

“I met him once at an ill-fated card game, years ago.” Esolie closed her eyes and waved her hand as if their acquaintance hardly mattered. “He's such a terrible liar that I thought his employer would have done away with him by now.”

Yanna bit her lip. What did that mean?

Esolie shook her head, looking as though she wished to dispel the memory. “But you call him Ghost-Hand,” she said, still sounding somewhat dazed to hear of him again. “I suppose you don’t know who he once was.”

“He was once someone else?”

“You must have heard of him, before all this. He was a famous mercenary. He even visited your country once, to help your family subdue a force of brigands on the coastline.”

Yanna thought long and hard. She searched through all the portraits in her memory to find a face that matched Ghost-Hand’s. “Niall Miann?” she asked. The man her mother had joked about returning the same night everyone was murmuring about Stryn and his marauders pillaging the countryside? “But he was killed in battle.”

A strange thrill ran through Yanna as she pieced together what must have happened. The famed Niall Miann had fallen in battle just after she was born. He had been fighting Stryn in the mountains somewhere east of Dalach when his band was slaughtered. A funeral was held, but Yanna didn’t recall ever reading about Niall’s remains returning to his homeland. He must have been taken prisoner.

But then why did no one announce his return? When did he return to the service of Queen Giuliana? Why would Stryn have released such a valuable prisoner?

Yanna’s stomach twisted in knots. “It makes no sense.” She glanced to Esolie, hoping to connect the threads on her own. “How did you become a foe to the Queen of Mardesal?”

Esolie raised her eyebrows. “She mentioned me?”

“No. I've never heard of you,” Yanna said, thoroughly confused. “But your husband told me you and I share an enemy."

“Oh, is that what he said?” Esolie asked, sounding amused. “I've had my troubles with the Mardesalian court, but you have entirely the wrong idea. If Giuliana had any interest in you, it would be to wed you to some disliked courtier of hers once the war between your countries is over, or have you executed right out. I expect she would have had you imprisoned somewhere in Niloufar in the meantime.”

Yanna got a sinking feeling, as if she was being gripped once more by that whirlpool in the cave. She recalled the brand on the sailors’ arms, how strange it was for an entourage of the Mardesalian Queen's. And why would a man like Niall Miann, a mercenary famous for his loyalty to Dalach and its long ties to Mardesal, work in secret if he had escaped Stryn's capture?

Yanna knew little of Stryn’s marauders. She knew he was once King of Isulfr, that his moniker Once King Olstryn was a jab at his supposed incompetence. Isulfr had lain under a new ruler for some time, but secrecy shrouded the coup. For decades, information from the region trickled slowly.

She thought back to the morning of the invasion. The ships that sailed into the harbor and the soldiers who laid waste to Niloufar’s capitol were Mardesalian. There was no doubt about that. But as for the crew who abducted Yanna and Sadira? These sailors acted separately, impersonating Niloufarian Royal guards, commandeering a naval ship, acting like common pirates rather than trained naval officers.

Why hadn’t it occurred to Yanna sooner? She had supposed until then that Queen Giuliana had sent a covert team to retrieve her and Sadira. It was the only way she could rationalize the crew's unusual behavior. But what if they were the pawns of someone else, instead?

Yanna felt flushed with fever. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why?”

“Perhaps you should lie down. We can speak more when you’re feeling well.”

Akeem and Sadira might have argued, but Yanna couldn’t bring herself to gainsay people she didn’t know well.

The questions burned in her the whole time she lie in the blankets, trying to find sleep. Who was behind it all? How had they fooled the other Mardesalian officers? And what did they want with her and Sadira?

Over the next days, Yanna got her answers. The first thing she asked was what she considered most important. She opened and shut her mouth several times before she got the nerve to ask.

“Who ordered our capture?”

“He travels with Stryn,” Esolie said. She spoke slowly as if to make sure Yanna retained this information. “And he reports to the new emperor of Isulfr.”

After considering Ghost-Hand’s history, this news at least made sense. Yanna took a deep breath as she considered the implications.

“You must be awfully tired or terribly clever because that doesn’t seem to surprise you.”

“Thank you,” Yanna mumbled, not sure whether she should take that as a compliment. “But why has the emperor of Isulfr taken interest in us?”

For the first time, Esolie’s mask-like expression faltered. She was quiet for a long moment before she drank from a chipped teacup. “He's been taking an interest in everyone whose bloodline was gifted by the gods. You might say he’s begun a collection.”

This was not among the conclusions Yanna was prepared to hear. Confusion and fear bubbled in the pit of her stomach. She twisted her fingers together and struggled to find her voice. “Why?”

“You’ll sleep better not knowing.”

Yanna disagreed, but she couldn’t bring herself to argue. And perhaps it was true.

Esolie closed her eyes as if to erase unpleasant memories. She put her hands on her hips as if anticipating an arduous task. “It’s time we got you clean. You've been caked in filth from the sea for so long it may become permanent.”

After Yanna's voyage clothes, which were burned as soon as she was strong enough to change out of them, her hair was the next to draw criticism.

“I don’t think there’s any way to untangle this,” Esolie said, letting the large mat drop from her fingers. She set the comb on a table and wiped her hands on a cloth. “You’ve got dried kelp caught all over.”

“I’ll have to cut it?” Yanna’s hands went instinctively to her matted hair in a futile effort to protect it. No one in her family had their hair cut unless they were removed from power. Akeem had left his braid behind when he abdicated.

“It won’t trouble you long,” Esolie said. She gestured to the dark curls tied in a messy knot at the side of her head. “Mine grew back in a year or so.”

Yanna was unsure how much she trusted the precision of a blind woman. But she didn’t have much choice.

The first snips were the hardest to bear. Yanna stared at the severed tangles as they piled up on the floor. “When might I return home?” she asked in a small voice.

“That depends on how the war ends.”

That could take years.

The more questions Yanna asked, the more she felt like she was reaching for something that slipped farther out of her reach. She gulped down a wave of sadness. “I'll have to stay here for that long?”

The shears stilled in Esolie’s hand. “I happen to know an old smuggler who lives in the South of Mardesal. He might be willing to place you on a trade ship returning to Niloufar, but once you’re across the channel, you’d be on your own. I don’t have any contacts overseas.”

“You don’t wish to journey there?” Yanna asked, wondering if perhaps Esolie would play entourage to her and Sadira.

“I do not. I care neither for boats, nor the ocean. And I have too much business that needs tending on this side of the sea to leave now.”

Yanna let out the breath she had been holding in a disappointed sigh.

“There’s still the other problem,” Esolie said, “of where you should stay until it’s safe for you to return to Niloufar.”

Yanna went cold. “I can’t remain here?”

“It’s been risky to keep you here with me for this long. I draw too much attention from my neighbors, and some of the merchants I trade with will be less than discreet if their life is on the line.” Esolie gestured to the crumbling stone walls of her cabin and the holes in the roof. “Stryn’s Riders get closer every day. When his right hand man and his spies come searching for you, you'll wish you were somewhere better protected.”

Yanna's heartbeat fluttered in a panic. She followed the directions of her old physician and imagined putting a puzzle together in her head to keep from hyperventilating.

Esolie seemed to realize Yanna was struggling and offered her some tea.

Yanna held the steam under her nose and inhaled slowly. She couldn’t stand the thought of being captured again, of being led back to that uncertainty.

A while later, once her hands had stopped shaking so terribly, she faced another fear. “What about my sister?” she asked. “What will happen to Sadira?”

“I'm sure she’ll turn up soon,” Esolie said, sounding somewhat less than sure. She returned to cutting the last tangles out of Yanna’s hair. “But I’m afraid it’s best that you don’t see each other for a while. You can blend in with a crowd. She doesn’t have that luxury.”

Yanna’s throat tightened at the thought of being separated for that long. The last time she remembered seeing Sadira was lost in a haze of fever.

Esolie set the shears on the table and produced an old copper platter from a crate. She held the shiny surface in front of Yanna so she could see the results.

The blurry image didn’t reveal much. Yanna ran her fingers through her now chin-length waves with a sober feeling.

With her plain smock and short hair, she looked like any number of peasants she had seen milling through the Mardesalian capital.

She understood then. If she traveled with Sadira, whose likeness was printed on coins and had portraits of her circulating in recent texts, Yanna would lose her anonymity as well.

Yanna gathered her resolve and forced herself to beg a favor on behalf of her sister. “Please help her. She doesn’t know how to leave things alone, and she always rushes into trouble.”

Esolie spared a troubled look to the ticking pendant hanging in the doorway. “I’ll do what I’m able for you both. Unfortunately, it won’t be much.”

Yanna would have dearly liked to ask why Esolie reached out to them at all, but it was foolish to look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead, she had to settle for asking about other details.

Yanna sipped from another cup of strong tea to calm her nerves. “You mentioned finding another place for me to stay.”

“It won’t please you. There is only one place nearby where I can guarantee you’ll have no trouble from Stryn's Riders.”

Yanna considered Esolie’s earlier observation about blending into a crowd. “Inside the capital?”

“Quite snugly in the capitol, yes. Do you know much about Prince Cail?”

Cail? Yanna’s old penpal from Dalach spoke of her companionship with the young prince every now and then. Prince Cail was, judging from the letters, a reclusive boy who was happier studying music than governance or going exploring.

Esolie continued without waiting for Yanna to answer. “From what I hear, he's rather shy and good-natured. And with all the talk of his mother's madness and the servants she has reporting his every move, he’s in desperate need of a confidant. He’s likely to seek you out as a friend if you take up residence in the castle.”

Yanna swallowed a lump of anxiety. “How would I do that?”

“My husband and I have the acquaintance of a number of people. We can secure your transport into the castle and have someone looking out for you while you work there. It won’t be easy for you, but you’ll be safe so long as you don’t tell anyone who you are.”

Yanna wasn’t sure what sort of work she was suited for. She could dress herself, but she hardly had the skill to be a lady’s maid; nor did she possess the strength of a laboring servant. She stared at her knees. “I don’t have the training to be a servant,” she said, hot with embarrassment.

“My friend in the castle is the head cook. You’ll either be sending her orders to the errand runners or cleaning pots.”

“Sending messages?”

“It’s not as simple as it sounds.”

Yanna had in no way perceived it as a simple task. The idea filled her with particular horror. But past the anxiety of constantly speaking to strangers and figuring out how to instruct them with any confidence, another thought took root.

If Yanna was a message bearer to the other servants, she might encounter other message bearers. Messages from overseas might find their way into her hands. In her own small way, she could help disrupt Mardesal's power in Niloufar.

Her jaw clenched when she thought of the danger. But Sadira would undoubtedly enact her own reckless plans to change the tide of the war. If Yanna had the chance to help her, she had to take it. They might never see each other or be truly safe again otherwise.

She took a deep breath. “When will I leave for the castle?”