𝟷 | 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙵𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚢 𝙵𝚒𝚛𝚜𝚝
The silver veins beneath her skin were not supposed to be visible.
Arienne stared at the faint lines winding across the inside of her wrist. They shimmered beneath her skin like light through still water, catching the morning sun.
For a moment, they looked almost beautiful.
But beautiful things were not supposed to make her stomach tighten.
She tugged her sleeve lower and kept walking.
The Meridian Ring smelled of fresh bread and canal water.
At this hour, the two scents always folded into one another — warm yeast drifting from the ovens tucked behind the stall-houses while the cold mineral smell of the canals rose with the morning mist. Arienne had known that combination for most of her life. Somewhere along the way, it had become inseparable from the feeling of the city itself.
Not the palace.
The actual city.
The palace carried the scent of polished silverwood, incense, and freshly pressed linens. Its halls were wrapped in the sort of cultivated stillness maintained by servants who moved through them like ghosts.
The world outside those halls, by contrast, felt alive before one even stepped fully into it.
Flour dust hanging in the air. Wet stone beneath morning dew. Fish scales glimmering inside market buckets. Steam curling upward from tea kettles while overlapping voices drifted between crowded stalls long before the sun had fully cleared the eastern walls.
She preferred it.
Sylvaris itself had been built in descending tiers around the palace at its heart, each ring spilling gradually lower than the last like a staircase built for the sea to climb. Closest to the castle stood the residential quarter reserved for palace staff and royal servants — houses clustered tightly together so messengers, attendants, cooks, and Wardens could reach the palace quickly at any hour. Beyond that sat the Upper Ring, where nobles and wealthy merchants kept elegant homes overlooking the city below.
Then came the middle tier - the loudest part of Sylvaris.
Markets, workshops, trade houses, smithies, bakeries, vendor stalls — the living pulse of the city itself. Along its outer edge stretched the Mireline Gardens, sprawling pale-green terraces threaded with flowering vines and reflective pools overlooking the canal below. Stairways and suspended walkways descended toward the water, where fishing boats and trade barges drifted steadily through the canal routes that curved around the platform districts.
Beyond that, the city lowered once more into the Outer Ring, where most of Sylvaris’s common citizens lived beneath the shadow of the silver walls and great front gates guarding the city beyond.
The Market District was already alive despite the early hour.
Voices drifted upward in overlapping layers — merchants calling morning greetings across crowded stalls, crates scraping against stone, distant laughter breaking somewhere deeper within the market rows.
The air had shifted since dawn: there were roasting nuts from the corner braziers, the sharp green bite of fresh-cut herbs being bundled at the florist stalls, and underneath it all the faint metallic tang of the dye vats already steaming further down the row.
Along the streets, striped awnings stirred softly in the morning breeze while shopkeepers pushed open shutters and arranged goods beneath hanging lanterns not yet extinguished from the night.
The crowd registered her in the way it always did — a brief hush moving outward from her like a ripple, then the familiar sounds of the market resuming around her as people returned to their business. She had learned, early, not to mistake that resumption for ease. They were still watching. They simply had the courtesy to do it sideways.
She had been making this circuit since she was old enough to insist on it. Back then, however, the experience had involved considerably more Wardens.
At one point, they had surrounded her so tightly during a market walk that Arienne had privately compared the formation to being transported through Sylvaris packed inside a defensive wall of armoured sardines.
Beside her, Corina, her youngest handmaiden, struggled to keep pace while carrying a delicate parasol along with an empty woven basket hooked into her elbow. Behind them, two Wardens in silver-trimmed blue cloaks maintained a respectful distance, their hands resting lightly on the pommels of their ceremonial sidearms.
Ahead, the market was waking in earnest.
“Princess Arienne!” a voice called out.
Arienne turned at once, warmth already touching her expression.
A fruit vendor stood several stalls away beneath a striped awning overflowing with sun-heavy citrons and pale orange glowpears. His face settled into place a breath before she could fully name him.
“Marek,” she greeted.
The man bowed quickly enough that he nearly took a basket down with him, though he hadn’t seemed to notice.
“The first of the southern harvest, Princess,” he said proudly, selecting one of the citrons from the display before pressing the cold, fragrant fruit carefully into her hands. “I remembered these were your favourite.”
Arienne didn’t pass it to her maiden; she held it, feeling its texture. “Thank you.” Her gaze lifted back toward him. “And how is your daughter settling into her apprenticeship with the resonance engineers?”
Marek’s entire face brightened at once.
“Oh, she loves it,” he said, visibly trying — and failing — to contain his excitement. “They’ve got her working down near the lower canal chambers already. Says she spends half the day learning conduit maintenance and the other half listening to old engineers complain about pipe pressure.”
A fond smile tugged at Corina’s mouth, amusement flickering through her eyes.
“She still talks about the recommendation you gave her,” Marek continued warmly. “Master Barlowe wouldn’t even have looked at her petition otherwise. She’s determined to prove you right for insisting he should.”
Arienne’s expression softened visibly, quiet pride and fondness warming her features until even her eyes seemed to brighten with it.
“She proved herself,” she said gently. “I only made certain someone noticed.”
Marek lowered his head again, this time with more sincerity than ceremony, his voice roughening slightly at the edges.
“Well,” he said, “my family won’t forget it, Princess.”
Arienne inclined her head in return. “Then make certain she keeps working hard enough that I don’t regret giving her a good word.”
The man barked out a startled laugh, loud enough to turn a few nearby heads. “Oh, she’d sooner collapse into the canal than embarrass herself in front of Master Barlowe.”
“That is both admirable and mildly concerning,” Corina murmured from just behind the Princess, her voice perfectly level.
One of the Warden escorts abruptly became very interested in adjusting the strap around his wrist guard while the other turned his head away entirely, both men failing rather spectacularly at pretending they had not heard the quip.
Marek was still grinning broadly as Arienne turned to continue walking. She lifted one hand toward him in parting, easy and unhurried.
“Enjoy the harvest, Marek.”
“And you enjoy the citron, Princess!” he called after her, waving one sun-darkened arm enthusiastically above the crowd.
Arienne kept hold of the bright orange citron for a few lingering moments as they walked, her thumb brushing absently across the cool, textured peel before finally turning to drop it into Corina’s waiting basket.
At the next crossing, the maiden instinctively angled herself toward the narrower pathway that cut directly through the center vendor rows.
Arienne noticed. “Not that way today,” she said.
Corina glanced sideways at her, stopping in her tracks as she saw Arienne striding straight on without a pivot. “The long route again?”
“The scenic route,” Arienne corrected.
Taking the alternate route would add several unnecessary minutes to the walk.
But Arienne didn’t mind.
The eastern path opened onto something the market rows never could — the city at a distance, laid out in its own logic. Silver bridges arched between tiers in elegant curves, their undersides glowing faintly where resonance veins pulsed beneath the stone. Below, the Mireline Gardens were still half-swallowed by morning mist, pale green bleeding into white at the edges, the root-vines nothing but soft dark shapes threading through it.
Several Verdant Undynes rested throughout the gardens themselves, their moss-dark forms half-hidden amongst the greenery they tended. One lifted its head briefly from a bed of flowering vines as a group of them — a Hunt — waltzed past it. Pale green resonance flickered faintly beneath its antler-like horns, while fresh ivy slowly curled across the stone beneath its paws.
Corina followed, shortening her stride to match the princess’s pace as she fell into step behind her.
From this angle — half-paced and slightly to the left, which was where she had learned to position herself — she had an unobstructed view of Arienne moving through the morning light.
The dawn had turned everything pale gold, and it caught in the princess’s hair first, the way light always seemed to find white things before anything else. Most of it had gone that way.
It was white from the roots down through the greater length of it, the kind of white that was not quite silver and not quite cream but something between the two, cool and clean. Only at the ends, and in a few scattered sections that had not yet followed, did the original colour hold. A warm golden brown that surfaced in strands here and there, like the last of something slowly being replaced. The breeze off the canal had already pulled a few loose pieces free and dangled them across her face in a dance.
Her skin was the cool undertone of someone who spent more time in candlelit rooms than open air, though the morning had already begun warming her cheeks faintly.
She walked with a stride that Corina had spent weeks trying to name before she finally gave up. It wasn’t slowness — Arienne covered ground efficiently, purposefully, without appearing to rush. It was more like every step had been decided in advance. Considered.
When the incline steepened, her gloved hand found the silver railing — light, brief, gone before it could mean anything. As though the choice of this route — longer, elevated, the gradient gentler than the market innards — had been entirely about the view.
Corina had learned not to suggest otherwise.
The season had just turned, and the market was bustling with new stock.
That was what Arienne had come to see.
Whenever the seasons shifted, merchants who had spent months selling the same familiar goods suddenly arrived with fresh inventory and renewed enthusiasm, standing proudly at the fronts of their stalls instead of lingering half-asleep behind them. New shipments from the southern trade routes had begun filtering into Sylvaris over the last week: dried spices Arienne didn’t immediately recognize, bolts of cloth in colours not yet fashionable within the city, and small mechanical curiosities from the city of Morrathis that always seemed to appear several days before the official trade convoys themselves.
And with new stock came new opportunities.
The seasonal changeover was also quietly one of the easiest times for contraband to slip into the city unnoticed — tucked between legitimate cargo by merchants who had learned that familiar faces attracted less suspicion than unfamiliar ones. Especially merchants who had been entering Sylvaris for years.
A trusted trader carrying forty perfectly ordinary goods could often hide a forty-first, surprisingly well.
That was precisely why Arienne liked to walk the markets herself during weeks like this. She was here to look, to remember what she saw, and to note what did not belong.
“The Vethaway spice trader,” Corina murmured close to Arienne’s ear, her voice lowering into a particular alert tone. “Second stall from the left. She’s got something new on the top shelf.”
Arienne let her gaze drift subtly in that direction without turning her head outright.
The trader in question — a spindly woman with tight shoulders and a mouth that hadn’t quite decided whether to smile — had arranged her newest stock with careful hands. Small ceramic jars sealed with dark cloth instead of standard merchant wax. New containers for new goods, which in itself was not unusual.
The placement, however, was.
The jars sat above eye level and angled slightly inward. Not hidden. Not openly displayed either.
Interesting.
Arienne adjusted course fluidly toward the stall. “New season,” she remarked lightly as she stopped before the woman.
The trader straightened immediately and performed a bow that was slightly more elaborate than the occasion required. “Your Highness. Yes — just in from the southern pass. Arrived two days ago.”
Arienne’s gaze lifted toward the jars positioned along the upper shelf. “And those?”
“Medicinal blends,” she replied. “Traveller’s varieties. Not commonly available here, but nothing restricted.”
She said it quickly. Too quickly.
That alone meant very little — people almost always spoke too quickly around her once they became nervous. But the combination of nervous speed and precise legal phrasing was worth remembering.
‘Nothing restricted’.
A very specific reassurance to volunteer before she had accused the trader of anything at all.
Arienne did not respond right away. The silence that followed remained perfectly polite, perfectly composed — and just long enough for the trader’s confidence to begin thinning around the edges. Her expression was wavering faintly at the corners of her mouth.
Finally, at last, the princess smiled pleasantly.
“I’ll have someone from the Sanctum stop by and log them,” she spoke, articulating each word slowly as her fingertips brushed once against the wooden edge of the stall before she stepped back. “Standard procedure for new medicinal stock during the seasonal turnover. You understand, right?”
The trader’s expression held admirably for exactly half a second.
Then something in it gave way.
“Of course, Your Highness,” she replied, drawling out the words slowly as her tone carried careful resignation. Behind the counter, her hands had gone completely motionless.
Arienne inclined her head once in acknowledgment, already turning away before the woman could attempt further explanation or offer a hurried plea.
Corina fell back into step beside her, already pulling the small notebook from the basket and uncapping her pen without breaking stride. She made a quick notation as they walked, the pages already crowded with observations and the assortment of gifts vendors kept pressing upon the princess throughout the morning — folded cloth, jars of honey, wrapped pastries, bundles of herbs.
“The jar blends,” Corina murmured after a moment, glancing up briefly from the notebook.
Arienne adjusted the folded cuff of her sleeve with perfect composure while pretending not to notice the ginger-bearded baker several stalls down who had, within the last thirty seconds alone, repositioned the same tray of pastries three separate times in an increasingly desperate attempt to attract her attention.
The pastries now sat directly beneath a shaft of golden morning light like holy artifacts receiving divine revelation.
Arienne held out admirably for another three seconds. Then a soft, defeated snort escaped her. Her feet were already turning.
“Possibly nothing,” she said serenely. “Note it anyway.”
“Already documented.” Corina tilted the parasol a fraction as the angle of the light shifted, a small adjustment made without ruining their flow.
Arienne had taken perhaps four steps when an ashen colour caught her eye.
A vendor she didn’t recognize had arranged his display with the careful enthusiasm of someone new to the seasonal market. Everything was positioned just so, and a hand-lettered sign propped against the front edge of the counter.
Northern Specialty. Limited Stock.
The produce itself was what intrigued her.
Small fruits, clustered in shallow wooden bowls. The skin was a dull grayish-purple, slightly waxy, nothing like the bright southern stock filling every other display in the row. They didn’t look spoiled — the flesh was firm, the stems still attached — but something about the colour sat wrong in a way she couldn’t immediately articulate. Like a shade that had been correct at some point and had since drifted slightly off.
She slowed. Her gaze settled on the bowls and didn’t shift.
“Veilfigs,” the vendor offered at once, straightening when he registered her attention. Young, eager, with the windburned complexion of someone who had recently travelled a significant distance. “Highland variety, from the upper northern routes. Rare this far south — the vines don’t travel well. These are the first I’ve managed to bring down intact.”
Arienne’s eyes moved over the display without touching anything. “The colouring,” she said.
“Altitude,” he replied, with the practiced ease of someone who had answered the question before. “The lower highland varieties run darker. Different soil composition, shorter growing season. They’re sweeter than they look.”
She leaned slightly closer.
The scent reached her before she expected it — faintly sweet and resinous, the way she imagined highland air might smell. But underneath it, just at the edge of perception, something else. Metallic. Faint enough that she might have invented it.
Might have.
“How long have you been selling these?” she asked.
"First season bringing them south,” he said. “I have documentation from the northern pass traders if you’d like to—”
“That won’t be necessary.” She straightened, her expression pleasant and entirely unreadable. “Note them,” — she didn’t turn her head.
Behind her, she heard the soft scratch of Corina’s pen.
A moment passed. Then Arienne turned and walked.
The vendor watched her go with the relieved expression of someone who had braced for worse. The princess didn’t look back.
She couldn’t confirm anything. The explanation given was reasonable. The documentation was presumably real. The colour could be altitude. The smell could be unfamiliar.
She told herself it was probably nothing, but filed it away anyway.
On to the next.
The baker a few stalls down—whose name was Perren, though Arienne often subbed it out for “Old Tart”—had indeed set out a fresh tray of something suspiciously flaky and glazed. She could see the way his shoulders tensed when he noticed her gaze lingering on the pastries, his hands slowing just slightly as he dusted flour off his apron.
Corina exhaled through her nose beside her. “Once he starts talking, he gains momentum,” she muttered. “You know this,” she warned under her breath, but Arienne was already drifting toward the stall like a ship pulled into harbour by some unseen, bubbling current.
By the time they reached the awning, old Perren was already standing outside waiting for them with a paper-wrapped parcel tucked beneath one arm and an expression of triumph spread across his face.
He had been selling bread from the same corner stall since before Arienne was born. The awning itself had changed three times over the years; Perren had not changed at all.
He still had flour dust on his sleeves before sunrise.
Still complained about his knees while hauling sacks that younger men struggled to lift.
Still insisted the palace kitchens were incapable of feeding the throne adequately.
And every single week, without fail, he handed Arienne the same dark salt-crusted roll with the soft center she enjoyed the most.
She stopped in front of him.
Perren immediately presented the paper-wrapped parcel toward her with both hands and all the solemnity of a man offering tribute to the crown rather than baked bread. For Perren, this was roughly equivalent to a formal bow.
“Salt roll. Still warm,” he announced with obvious satisfaction. “I told my wife you’d be by early, and she said I was imagining things.”
Arienne accepted the wrapped bread with both hands, already feeling the lingering warmth through the paper.
“Tell Lady Yazira that you were right.” She spoke brightly.
“I tell her that every day, believe me,” he replied without missing a beat, wholly unbothered by the possibility that his wife might disagree with him on principle alone.
Perren’s amusement dimmed slightly after those words left him, though it did not disappear entirely.
He picked up a flour cloth from the worn wooden table and turned it over in his hands once. Twice. His gaze then drifted toward the forest road beyond the market, as if he expected something that wouldn’t come. When he looked back at Arienne, the lingering humour in his expression had softened into something quieter.
More solemn.
“Farmers up near the Tanglewood haven’t been writing back,” he said slowly.
The words came out too casually. Too light. The careful sort of lightness people used when they had been carrying a worry around alone for long enough that speaking it aloud suddenly felt foolish.
“Letters used to come twice a week,” he continued, rubbing one flour-streaked hand absently against the side of his apron. “Regular as sunrise.”
His throat bobbed once before he cleared it roughly. “Thought maybe someone ought to know.”
Arienne leaned a hip against the counter, careful not to disturb the trays of honey cakes still cooling. “You think they’re just busy? Harvest season’s rough.”
“Could be.” Perren scratched at his beard, flecked with cinnamon. “Could also be they’re knee-deep in something worse. Just—send a couple morans up that way, would you? Just to check.”
Arienne studied the way Perren’s fingers twitched toward the ledger under his counter—the one she knew tracked every grain, every barrel of cider traded between the city and the forest farms. His knuckles were white.
“I’ll send a patrol up that way,” she said. “They’re due for a Tanglewood circuit anyway.”
Perren exhaled, shoulders dropping half an inch. Then, with a deliberate shift in tone that didn’t quite land as simple, he asked, “Speaking of Cassian—how’s the frontier recruitment looking?”
She smirked. “Like a pack of overeager puppies. Cassian has them drilling till their hands bleed.” A pause. “You’re angling for something, aren’t you? You know you can tell your dearly beloved Princess.”
He grinned, sudden and bright. “My nephew’s in the new cohort. Wants to impress you.” Arienne groaned, but Perren barreled on, undeterred. “Kid’s got hands like a bear trap. You’ll see—he’ll be running patrols by next winter.”
“Tell him to stop aiming at my windows with his sling, then,” Arienne muttered, flicking a crumb off the counter. “Twice last week.”
Perren’s grin widened, but she caught the way his eyes kept darting toward the forest road again. The humour lingering in his expression softened as the shape of the baker’s worry settled more clearly on his face.
Arienne pushed off slowly from the counter, straightening the silhouette of her skirts. “The patrol leaves tomorrow at dawn. If your farmers are just buried under apple harvests, I’m charging you for the wasted trip in Silverfin Cakes.” A weak joke, but Perren huffed a laugh, allowing the tension around his stall to unspool like frayed thread.
“Silverfin Cakes,” he repeated, shaking his head exaggeratedly. “While we’re on the subject — I offered to send a batch over for the new cohort. Do you know what your sentinel said? Said it was bad for discipline.” He pointed at her passionately with the cloth. “Pastries are not a discipline exercise, Princess. They are a morale exercise. There is a difference.”
Perren set the cloth down with more force than was strictly necessary.
“He even had my nephew drilling until his hands were blue. The boy came home last week and couldn’t hold a bloody spoon,” he barked loudly, earning a few turned heads.
Arienne lowered her head slightly, trying her best to suppress the smile threatening at the corners of her mouth. Perren looked far too sincere for her to risk laughing outright.
Behind her, Corina exhaled once through her nose. Quietly. The sound of an attendant who had tried to prevent exactly this and had been overruled.
“I’ll be sure to pass that along to him — he definitely can be a bit harsh sometimes,” she said.
Though she suspected harshness had very little to do with it. Perren and Cassian had been conducting their particular brand of warfare for several seasons. Neither of them would ever acknowledge their pointed remarks as anything other than mild professional disagreement.
Cassian’s choice to wage the latest battle through Perren’s nephew was, if anything, impressively committed.
“Please do.” Perren snorted, flicking the cloth over a tray of almond twists. “And listen — if you need anything for the recruitment feast when the new lot are confirmed, say the word. I’ll do a dozen of those sugar-dusted ones the young ones lose their minds over. No disciplinary action required.”
“I’ll remember that,” Arienne said warmly.
Perren opened his mouth again, drawing in the sort of deep preparatory breath that suggested an entirely new rant was already gathering momentum.
At the same moment, Arienne felt a light but increasingly urgent grip close gently around her elbow.
She glanced sideways.
Corina was looking at her with silent desperation; her wide eyes pleaded for rescue before the conversation expanded into a third inescapable subject.
Arienne turned back to Perren, raising one hand in a parting gesture and inclining her head with a smile that was both genuine and apologetic.
“Forgive me, Perren — Corina has developed an urgent interest in the flower stall at the end of the row. Apparently, the season’s new blooms are not to be missed.”
Beside her, Corina stared straight ahead with adamancy pursed tightly into her lips, already beginning to guide Arienne firmly back toward the flow of the market before Perren could utter another word
Perren blinked as the princess was very suddenly several steps farther away than she had been moments ago. Then he looked between them — the attendant’s determined forward gaze, the princess’s retreating wave — and after a brief moment, he seemed to arrive at the only conclusion available to him.
Never get between women and their flowers.
He shook his head with the fond bewilderment of a man who had long since accepted there were simply certain things in life he was never meant to understand.
“Of course, of course,” he called after them, waving the flour cloth dismissively through the air while already beginning to chuckle to himself again. “You come back when you’ve got more time, Princess. I’ll have something waiting.”
“You always do,” Arienne called back, already being swept farther into the waking current of the market.
Corina didn’t release Arienne’s elbow until they were three stalls down, weaving through the thickened crowd. The heat of the day had begun to settle in — thick between the awnings, close with the smell of bodies and the faint sourness of spilled cider drying on stone.
Warden Lasky — one of the two guards flanking them — cleared his throat. “The textile inspection is next, Your Highness. Unless you’d prefer to—”
Arienne held up a hand, silencing Lasky mid-sentence as her gaze snagged on something beyond the dye stalls. Corina followed her line of sight and saw Warden Orion, the younger of their escorts, leaning close to a breathless messenger boy in travel-stained linens. The boy’s fingers twisted around the strap of his satchel like he was anchoring himself to the spot.
Orion nodded once, sharply, then broke away to stride toward them, his armour catching the sunlight in jagged streaks.
“Your Highness,” Orion murmured, bending close enough that Corina caught the scent of leather and steel. “There’s a situation at the eastern gate. Verdant Undynes.”
He placed an absent hand on the pommel of his sword. “A large hunt of them, wild ones, not city-bonded, moving into the settlement territory out past the northern tree line. Not attacking. Just… encroaching. Closer every day, the people say. They don’t know why.”
He paused. “They want somewhere to wait it out. They think it’s a shift in migration. They’re hoping it resolves on its own.”
Arienne’s smile didn’t falter, but Corina saw the way her fingers clutched the embellishments of her skirts. “How many?” the princess asked, her voice low enough that only Orion and Corina could hear.
“Twenty-three. Mostly families.” Orion shifted his weight, the plates of his armour whispering against each other. “The stationaries at the gate requested that Sentinel Dravik come handle the matter, but he’s been pulled to the Meridian Ring — a disturbance near the third canal bridge. Your presence is requested if available.”
“Then I suppose the market walk will have to wait,” Arienne’s gaze flicked to the young messenger boy, who stood rigid three paces away, pretending not to eavesdrop. “Tell the gate captain to admit them, but keep them in the courtyard until I arrive. And send word to the kitchens — bread and cheese, at least.”
Orion bowed and left at a near-jog, the messenger boy scrambling after him.
This was supposed to be the Captain of the Wall’s responsibility.
Corina knew that much with absolute certainty.
If commotion serious enough to reach the palace had broken out at the gates, then one of the wall captains should have already resolved it long before word ever reached the princess. Having Arienne herself come down to mediate frightened refugees at the entrance to Sylvaris felt, frankly, embarrassing for everyone involved.
But Corina bit her tongue as Arienne swept away from the stall regardless, her skirts snapping behind her like banners caught in a sudden gust of wind. The parasol nearly wrenched from her grip as she hurried after the princess, the basket jostling against her hip with every step.
