Crush the King (Crown of Shards #3)(7)

I drew in a breath, letting the air roll over my tongue and tasting all the scents in it again. The warm bread, the sweet cookies, the bloody cuts of meat, the chalky fluorestone dust. I pushed aside all those aromas 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, pointing out the girl to Paloma. “I think it might be her.”

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

“No. I’ve never seen her before, but I can smell her magic. She’s definitely a fire magier.” 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 refuge 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 the fountain.

Instead, she stared at Serilda a second 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 propelled 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 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 on to her shoulder, the girl sped up and put three more people between us. She never looked back, but I wasn’t exactly being subtle with all my pushing and shoving, 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 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 quickly followed the girl, 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 the girl’s gray hat disappearing into an alley. I hurried to the entrance and stopped, peering into the dark corridor.

The alley ran for about fifty feet before opening 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 flanked 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 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.

In just a few streets, I had gone from one of the most affluent parts of Svalin to the beginning of the slums. Sadness filled me, the way it always did at the thought that people—my people—lived like this, but I shoved the emotion aside.

I held my position at the alley entrance, looking and listening, but I didn’t see the girl running out the far side, which was clogged with trash, and I didn’t hear any footsteps. She must still be in the plaza somewhere. Maybe she thought I was a threat. Maybe she was hiding until I left. Or maybe this was her home.

I peered at the piles of debris lining the walls, but there was no pattern to them, and I didn’t see any makeshift shacks made of scraps of wood, metal, or stone. Still, as nimbly as the girl had slipped through the crowd, she could easily slither behind a stack of boards or hunker down behind one of the overflowing trash bins.

I glanced back over my shoulder, but I didn’t see Paloma. Despite her dire warning that I was going to get myself killed, I wasn’t a complete reckless idiot, and I realized that this would be the perfect place for assassins to ambush me. But I also couldn’t afford to lose the girl, so I drew my sword and cautiously crept down the alley, peering into the shadows. I also tasted the air again, trying to pick up the scent of the girl’s magic, although all the rotting garbage made it difficult—