The Salt King's Innocent Bride

Chapter Two Part 2: "Don't you dare stop."

The market quarter ran along the city's lower eastern ward, three long avenues of red-canopied stalls and white-fronted shops pressed close together, the buildings leaning slightly toward each other overhead as if sharing a confidence. Red flowering vines climbed every wall. The cobblestones were pale as bone and worn smooth by centuries of feet that had walked them with purpose. Everything in Redspire was done with purpose. It was practically written into the city's founding charter.

The people in it moved the same way. You could read the whole social architecture of Redspire just by standing still and watching the market for ten minutes, which Sanna had done often enough that she no longer needed to stand still to do it. The old blood families moved through the avenues in deliberate unhurried lines, their clothing the white of old money, not the stark clean white of new wealth trying too hard but the soft ivory and cream of fabric that had been made by known hands for known people and had never needed to advertise itself. Silver accessories. Subdued embroidery. Nothing loud. Loudness was for people who needed to be noticed.

Below them on the social scale came the upper merchant class, the Ashcrofts and their kind, who wore white too but with more red in it, deeper crimson details at the collar and cuff and hem that announced their prosperity without quite claiming the restraint of true nobility. They moved a little faster. Smiled a little more openly. Spoke to shopkeepers directly rather than through their attendants. Sanna had always privately thought they looked more comfortable than anyone in her own circle, which was not an observation she had ever shared with anyone.

Below them came the trade workers and skilled craftspeople in their working reds and burnt oranges, the colors of labor, moving through the market with the efficiency of people who had things to do and a limited amount of time to do them in. They stepped aside for the white clothing without appearing to notice they were doing it, the choreography so deeply ingrained that it had ceased to be anything as deliberate as deference and had simply become the way things moved.

And below all of them, at the edges of the market where the canopies ran out and the stalls became more makeshift and the cobblestones gave way to packed earth, were the day workers and the servants and the people whose clothing ran to grey and brown and the dull utility of lives that didn't have room for color. They did not move through the market so much as work the perimeter of it, heads down, baskets in hand, doing what they had come to do and leaving without lingering.

Sanna noticed all of it. She always had. She had never been entirely sure what she was supposed to do with the noticing, so she filed it away with everything else she was not supposed to think too hard about and kept her face pleasantly composed and her pace half a step behind Meeka.

She wore white, naturally. A light day dress with silver threading at the collar, her hair pinned under a small decorative cap that she found deeply unnecessary and her mother considered essential. Meeka wore the same, as they always did in public, two Von Vellacourt daughters presenting a unified front to a city that would notice and comment if they didn't. Their mother had sent them out with one instruction and a list. The instruction was to be back before the second afternoon bell. The list was three items long and had ribbons at the top of it, the shade of deep crimson their mother used to trim the household linens, available only from the Calloway stall at the far end of the eastern avenue.

This was the errand. This was why they were here. Everything else was architecture.

Behind them their two household guards maintained a respectful distance, close enough to intervene if anything happened, far enough that the sisters could speak without being overheard.

This was, Sanna had found, the best available version of privacy in Redspire.

"We need to do the ribbons first," Sanna said. "If we come back without them mother will know we didn't go to Calloway's and Calloway's is in the wrong direction for anywhere we might otherwise have been."

"I know."

"I'm just saying. The ribbons establish the route."

"Sanna." Meeka's voice was the patient tone of a woman who loved her sister and occasionally found her exhausting. "I have done this before."

"I know you have. I'm the one who helped you do it." Sanna paused at a stall selling pressed flower cards, picked one up and examined it without seeing it. "Four times. By my count."

"Three."

"The apothecary visit in the spring was yours."

Meeka was quiet for a moment. "Fine. Four times."

They moved on down the avenue, stopping at intervals the way they were supposed to. Their mother had taught them to move through a market this way, never rushing, always appearing exactly as interested in everything as a Von Vellacourt daughter ought to be. Sanna picked up a length of embroidered trim and put it down. Meeka asked about the price of a small glass bottle and didn't buy it. They were very good at this. They had been trained from childhood to occupy public spaces gracefully, and they had both, in their different ways, found uses for that training their mother had not intended.

They passed a group of upper merchant women at a fabric stall, the women in their deeper whites and crimson-trimmed sleeves. They nodded at Meeka and Sanna with the careful deference of people who knew exactly where they sat in relation to the Von Vellacourts. Meeka returned the acknowledgment with a smile that cost her nothing. Sanna did the same. This was also something they had been trained in, the precise calibration of warmth and distance that kept everyone in the correct relationship to each other without anything so gauche as actually discussing it.

"Mother's ribbon color this season is different," Sanna said, at the next stall. She lifted a spool of crimson and compared it to a deeper burgundy beside it. "She said deep crimson but last season's deep crimson is a different shade than this year's."

"Calloway will know. She always does."

"Calloway is going to try to sell us the burgundy and claim it's the same and we'll get home and mother will spend twenty minutes explaining why it isn't."

"Then we'll tell Calloway specifically it's for the household linens and she'll find the right one." Meeka glanced at her. "You've been fretting about the ribbons since we left."

"I'm not fretting. I'm being practical."

"You made a list of the list."

Sanna had, in fact, made a supplementary list clarifying theations of each item on their mother's list. She felt this was reasonable and said so.

Meeka looked at her the way she had been looking at her since they were children, the expression that meant she found Sanna both deeply familiar and occasionally baffling. "You wrote down the thread count of the ribbons."

"It matters."

"It matters to mother. You're not mother."

"Someone has to remember these things or we'll come back with the wrong shade and spend the rest of the afternoon listening to a detailed explanation of why crimson and burgundy are categorically different colors used for categorically different purposes and I would like," Sanna said, with feeling, "to avoid that."

Meeka laughed. A real one, quickly suppressed, her hand coming up to cover her mouth in the gesture she had used since childhood whenever something genuinely delighted her in public. It was the kind of laugh that changed her face entirely, that made her look like someone who was not managing anything at all, and Sanna felt the familiar complicated warmth of it, the love and the something underneath the love that she was less comfortable examining.

She had known about Dorvan Ashcroft for eight months. Three months longer than Meeka knew she knew, because Meeka had told her in the fifth month and by then Sanna had already been keeping the secret on her behalf without being asked to.

She had noticed first. That was the part she didn't talk about. She had noticed the difference in Meeka before Meeka said a word, had catalogued the small tells with the same precision she catalogued everything, and had spent two months understanding what they meant before her sister finally told her over breakfast one morning in a voice that tried to be casual and wasn't. There's someone, Meeka had said, and Sanna had nodded and said tell me, and kept her own face exactly as it should be.

"Stop looking behind you," Meeka said, without turning her head.

"I'm not looking behind me."

"You've looked behind you four times since we left the east gate."

"I'm being observant."

"You're being obvious." Meeka set down the fabric and moved to the next stall, her posture flawless, her expression pleasantly interested in everything and nothing. She was taller than Sanna by two inches and had their mother's cheekbones and the quality of beauty that made people step aside in hallways without quite knowing why they'd done it. She was also, Sanna knew, the most accomplished liar in the Von Vellacourt household, which was a significant achievement in a family of accomplished liars.

"Dorvan is already there," Meeka said quietly, lifting a small ceramic pot to examine the base. "He arrived an hour ago."

Dorvan.