Protect the Prince (Crown of Shards #2)(127)

Ever since Xenia had told me that one of my cousins might be alive, I had been racking my mind, trying to figure out who it could be, but I hadn’t come up with any possibilities. So I stared out into the plaza, peering at everyone who walked by.

I was so busy studying the faces of the adults that I almost missed the girl.

She was young, sixteen or so, and dressed in several layers of thin, grubby rags. Her clothes might have been dark blue at one time but were now almost black with grime. Her face wasn’t much better. Dirt streaked across her cheeks, and her nose was red from the cold. A pale gray winter hat covered her head, although her dark brown hair stuck up at crazy angles through the gaping holes in the knit fabric.

The girl stopped about twenty feet away from us, standing in the shadows next to a bakery cart. Her head snapped back and forth, as though she was looking for someone, although she seemed to be focusing on the area around the fountain. She tapped her hand on her thigh in a nervous rhythm, even as she shifted back and forth on her feet, like she was ready to run away at any moment. A few red-hot sparks flashed on her fingertips, flickering in time to her uneasy motions, although she quickly curled her hand into a fist, snuffing out the telltale signs of magic.

I drew in a breath, letting the air roll in over my tongue and tasting all the scents in it again. The breads, the cookies, the bloody cuts of meat, the fluorestone dust. I pushed aside all those scents and concentrated on the girl. My nose twitched, and I finally got a whiff of her scent—the hot, caustic stench of magic mixed with a sweet, rosy note.

“There,” I whispered, discreetly pointing the girl out to Paloma. “I think it might be her.”

Paloma peered in that direction. “Who is she? Do you recognize her?”

I shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen that girl before, but I can smell her magic. She’s definitely a fire magier, and a fairly strong one at that.” I hesitated, trying to push down my treacherous hope yet again. “She could be a Summer queen. Lots of them had fire magic.”

“Then what is she waiting for?” Paloma asked. “Serilda is still throwing pennies into the fountain. That’s the signal.”

It had been Xenia’s idea to say that any Blair seeking asylum at Seven Spire should approach the blond woman tossing pennies into the fountain. The girl had come to the right plaza at the right time, so she must have heard the information, but she still didn’t approach Serilda.

Instead, she stared at Serilda a moment longer, then turned around and ran away.

For a moment, I stood there, stunned. My friends and I had been plotting this for days, and everything had been going according to plan. But now, instead of talking to Serilda like she was supposed to, the girl was heading deeper into the crowd and getting farther away with each passing second.

Desperation rushed through me, propelling me forward, and I charged out of the alley.

“Evie!” Paloma hissed. “Evie, wait for me!”

But I couldn’t wait, not without losing sight of the girl. So I plunged into the crowd and chased after her.

*

The girl must have had some practice picking her way through crowds because she slipped through the throngs of people as easily as one of the Black Swan acrobats could tumble across the arena floor.

Several times, I lost sight of her, only to push past someone and see her gray hat bobbing along in the distance. I felt like a fisherman trying to reel in a particularly difficult catch. Every time I almost got close enough to latch onto her shoulder, she sped up and put three more people in between us. She never looked back, but I wasn’t exactly being subtle with all my shoving and pushing, and she must have realized that someone was following her, given the annoyed shouts that sprang up in my wake.

“Evie!” Paloma hissed again from somewhere behind me. “Slow down! You’re going to get your fool self killed!”

She was probably right, but I couldn’t slow down. Not until I knew whether this girl was actually a Blair. The burning need to know—and the rising hope that I wasn’t the only one left—drove me onward.

The girl broke free of the plaza and darted onto one of the side streets. I glanced back over my shoulder. Paloma was still pushing through the crowd behind me, but Serilda, Cho, and Sullivan were nowhere in sight. Not surprising, given how much farther across the plaza they’d been. Well, my friends would just have to catch up. I wasn’t losing the girl. Not now.

I rushed down the side street, racing around the people ambling along and window-shopping. My boots clattered on the cobblestones, my hood slipped off my head, and my cloak streamed out behind me like a dark blue ribbon, but I hurried on.

I reached the end of the street. Just when I thought I’d lost her completely, I spotted her gray hat disappearing into an alley. I hurried up to the entrance and stopped, peering down the dark corridor.

The alley ran for about thirty feet before opening up into another, much smaller plaza, but no carts and merchants were set up here, and no pretty stone fountain bubbled in the center. Instead, cracked wooden boards, broken bottles, busted bricks, and other trash littered this area.

Buildings ringed the plaza, with another alley leading out the far side, and debris was piled in heaps along the walls, as though the people living and working in the rooms above simply opened their windows and tossed their garbage outside, not caring where it landed below. The stench of sour milk, rotten meat, and other spoiled food almost knocked me down, and I had to pinch the bridge of my nose to hold back a sneeze.