MONTH OF PLANTER, DAY 6

Rain drenched the city, cold and relentless. It leached all color from the medieval-looking buildings, turning the world gray and soaking through the filthy rag in which I had swaddled myself. The sour stench rising from the grimy folds was truly epic. I couldn’t feel my toes, and my fingers were going numb.

The three-story buildings towered over the alley like the walls of a stone canyon, boxing me in. Sometime between yesterday evening and this morning, my stomach had turned into a painful bottomless pit. I hadn’t eaten in three days. I wasn’t even shivering anymore. My body didn’t have the energy.

I checked on my rock again. It lay in a puddle by my feet, a cream-colored chunk of building stone about the size of a large grapefruit. Any bigger, and it would be too hard to grip with one hand. I had found it this morning and carried it through the rain for two hours until I found the right bridge.

The rock was still there. I touched it with my foot to make sure. It felt solid and real.

I peeled myself from the wall and leaned a little to glance out of the alley. In front of me a narrow stone bridge spanned the width of a rain-swollen river. Another wall of medieval buildings loomed on the other side. Behind them, a tower soared, a spire rising at least six hundred feet, silhouetted against the storm-choked sky and topped by a huge flower of translucent, milky glass. The flower’s petals were shut into a bud, guarding the observation deck in its center from the storm. Every few seconds, bright gold sparks dashed through the enchanted glass.

A dozen dark shapes circled the flower, surfing the wild air currents. My brain expected them to be birds, but birds had only one pair of wings, not two. The feeling of wrongness was overwhelming.

Yep, the Mage Tower and the strange bird-things were still there, too.

I huddled against the wall.

I couldn’t touch the Mage Tower, but I knew it was real. For one, I had pictured it differently. In my head it was a flawless pale needle, elegant and almost dainty. If this had been a hallucination, what I saw would’ve matched the vision in my head, but the reality was nothing like that. This tower jutted up, defiant, its walls worn but strong, as if it had grown from bedrock. And it felt old. Like it had stood there for thousands of years and would stand just like that for another millennium, timeless and indifferent, while the city around it crumbled into dust, rebuilt, and crumbled again.

No, it was real, like this endless rain, like the pain in my freezing bare feet, and like the gnawing ache in my stomach.

In the distance, a bell tolled four times. Four pm.

It wouldn’t be too long now.

To say that this was not the way I envisioned spending my Sunday would be a criminal understatement. Today would’ve been my one day off. I should’ve spent it watching Netflix, nibbling on a pizza, and reading while lounging on my couch in my tiny apartment, in my soft sweatpants, warm and dry. Not wrapped in a dirty rag, shivering in a grimy alley, while the sky dumped gallons of cold rain on my head.

I wasn’t a big reader through most of my childhood, but when I was sixteen, my first serious boyfriend broke up with me, and it was hell. My brain kept rehashing every moment of the relationship in excruciating detail. One afternoon, as I lay on my bed, wallowing in self-pity, my mom handed me a thick fantasy book, and when I turned my nose up at it, she told me, “Maggie, you need to live in someone else’s head for a bit.”

I’d thought I would read a few pages. When I came up for air, five hours later, my breakup was an afterthought. Some seriously messed-up stuff happened on the first page, and I had to find out how it turned out. Somehow by the end of those five hours, the book had wrung me dry. I could deal with life again.

I’d tried every genre under the sun since, but fantasy was my vice of choice. There was something about blades and magic that did it for me. Deadly sword-masters, thieves prowling through moonlit streets, dark magicians, warrior princesses, ruthless nobles, majestic dragons, hideous monsters, I loved it all. Put a hot dude in armor with a sword on the cover, and my eyes glazed over while my hand crept to the buy button, budget be damned.

I had read enough fantasy books to fill a library, but that very first series was my special treasure. Set in the city of Kair Toren, capital of the kingdom of Rellas, the story revolved around the power struggles of eight noble families, and it was so full of fantasy tropes, it would be clichéd except that the superb writing moved it right past stereotypical into classic. The characters felt so real, they practically jumped off the page.

The series had two books, The Thieves of the North and The Lords of the East. The third one had never come out.

I had been rereading those two books for the last ten years. Whenever life got to be too harsh, I would grab them off my bookshelf, and they never failed to pull me out of whatever funk I had going on at the time. I could quote passages from memory. I had stalked the author’s abandoned website religiously for any hint of a release date. I haunted the fan groups looking for rumors and stewing in collective frustration. Adrian Latour, the author of the series, was always an enigma. He didn’t do social media or appearances, and his bio, with a blank square where the author photo should have been, consisted of a single sentence: Adrian Latour, man of dreams and chronicler of stories. After the second book came out, he seemed to vanish. He never wrote anything else, and nobody offered an explanation as to why he stopped working. The story just cut off. One of my favorite characters was left standing on a box with a noose around his neck for a decade.

Three nights ago, after a long day of delivering groceries, I went to sleep in my apartment south of Austin and woke up in Kair Toren.

A hint of movement on my left made me turn. Something small padded through the rain toward me. I brushed the water off my face.

A red furry creature padded out from the rain-soaked alley and stared at me with unblinking dark eyes. Its head was round, with curved marten ears that stood straight up, a button nose, and very long whiskers. It didn’t walk, it slunk, its longish body sitting low on four short legs that ended in webbed hand-paws armed with sharp retractable claws. It was as if an otter and a Ragdoll cat had a baby and dyed it red.

A stelka. A female one. Males had tufts on their ears.

Stelkas infested Kair Toren and its five rivers, catching fish and rats, eating garbage, raiding cellars, stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, and generally being a nuisance. Like overly smart foxes, except that normal foxes at least hesitated before they scurried over to take a bite out of someone five times their size. Last night, exhausted and desperate, I’d fallen asleep under some busted crates, and this morning I woke up because one of these red assholes decided to chew on my leg.

The stelka opened her mouth and showed me sharp white teeth.

It couldn’t be.

I crouched and tilted my head, trying to get a better look.

There it was, a white patch on the stelka’s chest that looked like a lopsided half-moon. I had seen a dozen stelkas in my three days of stumbling around the city, and only one of them had a white patch like that. I must’ve been really delicious.

“You followed me.” My voice creaked like I had crawled out of the grave.

The stelka eyed me.

“Nope. Not happening.”

The little creature took a step forward.

I showed her my rock.

Another step.

I gripped the rock and hit the cobblestones with it.

The beast shied back and hissed.

A piercing screech tore through the air above us. I glanced up. One of the weird birds swooped at the tower in a suicidal dive and rammed the petals.

For a moment, the entire flower went dark, barely visible in the rain.

Oh crap.

The bud pulsed with pale light. Tongues of golden lightning erupted from the petals, snaking toward the birds. They tried to flee in a panic, but the lightning chased them, stabbing at their wings.

One of the bird-things cried out, plunged from the sky, and smashed onto the paver stones between me and the stelka with a wet thud. It was about the size of an eagle, with a long whip-like tail tipped with a fan of dark feathers. Its wings were wide, its long hind legs were sheathed in contour feathers, and all four of its appendages ended in paws armed with sharp talons.

A lorsse. Those long dinosaur-looking jaws were a dead giveaway. So that’s what they looked like. In the books, they came out during storms and were attracted to magic.

The bird-thing clicked its needle teeth and tried to rise.

The stelka lunged forward. Her mouth closed on the creature’s neck and bit down. Blood drenched the feathers. The lorsse went limp. The stelka growled at me, clamping the neck in her teeth, slung the dead lorsse over her back—it was bigger than she was—and took off deeper into the alley, back the way she had come.

That’s right. And don’t come back.

I slumped against the wall. Kair Toren in a nutshell. One moment you are flying high and screaming at the world, the next someone bites your throat and drags you off into a dark alley. It was unhinged, but I was almost sorry to see the stelka go. In the past three days, that little beast was the only living creature that had acknowledged my existence.

I’d read this type of story before. It was a portal fantasy, a subgenre that had grown really popular in fantasy romance lately. It seemed in every other book some poor office worker woman about my age got hit by a bus or collapsed from overworking and ended up in a fictional world.

I knew exactly how things were supposed to go. I was meant to appear in this new world as a woman of prophecy with magic holy powers so I could assist the kingdom with their blight or curse problem. I would be met by a prince or some high-ranking and stunning noble, and upon heroically demonstrating my abilities, I would become the center of attention, while a gaggle of ridiculously handsome men followed me around, pledged their swords to me, and pleaded with me not to overexert myself.

Failing that, I could wake up in the body of the female lead, usually a daughter of a prominent noble house, after she flung herself into a lake in despair over being shunned by a villainous prince and died, conveniently vacating her body for my soul to take it over. I would pretend to suffer from amnesia, while an army of maids waited on me hand and foot, and plot my revenge, during which I would be fawned on by a dangerous and ice-cold male lead, who would turn into a devoted puppy in my vicinity.

Alternatively, I could come to in the body of the villainess, usually another daughter of a prominent noble house, after she flung herself into a lake, etc., etc., despair, death, maids, hand and foot, and then I would convince everyone that I was just misunderstood and win over the dangerous and ice-cold male lead, who would abandon the heroine for me.

If not the heroine or the villainess, I could be their best friend. Their younger sister. A lesser noble. A chamber maid. I would’ve happily taken the fucking chamber maid.

That’s not what I got.

I woke up choking on rainwater in a muddy ditch. Naked. Without any magic powers.

When I’d finally coughed all the sludge out of my mouth, crawled out, and saw the Mage Tower rising above the city with its magical glass petals, I thought I had lost my mind.

The Rise of Kair Toren was not a pretty-princess-rides-a-unicorn kind of fantasy. I’d stumbled on a ragged blanket someone had forgotten in the rain, dug it out of the mud, and wrapped it around me, stench of urine and all. Because if I didn’t, I would be assaulted, murdered, sold, or forced to suffer any of the other tragic things that happened to women running around alone and naked in this city. I needed to look like a beggar, and the less attention I drew to myself, the better.

In our world, there were homeless shelters, police stations, and emergency rooms. I could’ve walked into any one of those and said, “I have amnesia, help me.” And I would have been helped.

Kair Toren had none of that. If I were to stumble into a Guard station as I was, wrapped in my nasty rag, they would throw me back out on the street and tell me to thank my lucky stars they hadn’t done anything worse.

The city was huge, filled with tall stone buildings that had sturdy doors and barred windows. The pouring rain had chased everyone indoors, and the stores were shuttered. Theft wasn’t an option. I couldn’t even panhandle, and if I tried, I’d be beaten up. The beggars of Kair Toren were brutal and notoriously territorial. My first evening here, I’d had the bright idea to try one of the temples for charity and ran into a pack of them fighting in front of the entrance. I had never in my life seen people ripping into each other out in the open like that. The last time I’d watched someone fight was in high school and that was mostly two guys rolling around on the ground. These people were literally beating each other to death with rocks and stomping on prone bodies, and nobody was doing anything about it. I got out of there as fast as I could.

I drank rainwater when I was thirsty and prayed I wouldn’t get dysentery. I squatted in alleys when I had to pee. I’d torn two armholes in my blanket and tied it around myself so I could run away fast if I had to. I hid wherever I could to sleep and had only managed a few hours in the last three nights. I had to fight off ravenous magic otter-foxes. The first day I was in denial and expecting the nightmare to end, the second, I was desperate and scared, and now only a grim determination remained. I’d invested weeks of my life into those cursed books. I knew them cover to cover. I would survive. Kair Toren wouldn’t kill me. I wouldn’t give it the satisfaction.

Last night, I stumbled onto a large plaza with a blue obelisk in the center. In the books it was called Bluestone Square, and there was a signboard by the obelisk where the government posted announcements. When I found it, I learned two things: I could read Rellasian and yesterday was the fifth of Planter, the last month of spring, of the year 3044.

I was at the end of chapter one of the first book. Today after four pm a man called Lecke would cross the Estret Bridge. He was a scummy, sniveling prick, the kind of character that makes you wait an entire book for a rock to fall on his head and crush his skull.

When Lecke was eighteen years old, his parents died in a mill fire. He didn’t set it, but it had served his purposes beautifully. He had wanted to get out of the countryside for a while, and now he could sell everything they owned and take off for greener pastures. Unfortunately for him, his two younger brothers, one ten and the other seven, didn’t perish with his parents; so Lecke strangled them in their sleep, threw their bodies into the nearest ravine, and told the village that they had gone to live with his nonexistent aunt and uncle. That was only the beginning of his career, and it had gone from bad to worse. Now he made his money as a fence, buying and selling bloodstained jewelry and other valuables brought to his door late at night by people with vicious eyes.

Today, Lecke would be carrying a bag of money from a particularly good haul. I had to get that bag.

I studied my rock. Normally, a man in Lecke’s profession would have a bodyguard, but he didn’t trust anyone. Instead, he carried a knife and was very good with it. Trying to attack him, with my head swimming from hunger and only a rock as my weapon, was suicide. But I was out of options.

As if on cue, someone walked out from the mouth of the street at the other side of the river and stepped onto the bridge. The Estret was one of the city’s narrower bridges, about a hundred feet long but only fifteen feet wide, guarded by a hip-high stone rail. Surprise was my best bet. I had to snatch the bag and run, because if he caught me, it would all be over.

I scooped up a handful of mud that had accumulated by the wall of the building next to me and smeared it on my face. If I did manage to get away, no need to be recognized later.

The figure kept walking, unhurried despite the rain.

I grabbed my rock, tugged the ragged blanket into place, and ventured out into the open. My bare toes had turned into icicles long ago. I didn’t walk, I lurched like some zombie.

Get the bag. Get the bag. Get the bag . . .

The distance between us shrank, the curtain of rain thinning as we came closer to each other. I could see his cloak now, a deep hunter green. Yes, this was my man.

If worse came to worst, I could grab the bag and jump into the river. I swam in the ocean every summer vacation since I was little.

I glanced over the rail. The waters of the Koreg River churned below, dark brown from silt.

I would probably survive it. Probably.

I stumbled to the other side of the bridge, as if avoiding Lecke. He showed no sign of noticing me.

Twenty feet. Ten. Five.

The world snapped into terrifying clarity.

We passed each other on the opposite sides of the bridge like two ships in the night.

I spun around and charged at him, swinging my rock.

He must’ve sensed me coming because he turned, but not fast enough. My rock connected with his skull. Lecke stumbled. I leaped at him and thrust my hands under his cloak. My fingers clutched thick canvas, and something inside it made a metallic clink.

I yanked the bag away from him with all my strength, throwing the weight of my body into it. It came free.

I did it!

Lecke lunged at me. Something sharp and cold bit into my side, and I saw him up close, deep-set piggish eyes staring at me from a face twisted with rage.

He’d stabbed me.

The cold blade bit into me again and again, slicing through my insides. I tried to back away, but the stone rail of the bridge dug into my butt, and he was so fast.

Lecke grabbed the bag and jerked back. I clung to it.

“Let go!” he snarled.

I had a death grip on that damn bag. No force in the universe could make me let go.

The bloody knife slashed in front of me, drawing an icy line across my neck. Heat wet my skin. Bright, shocking red sprayed Lecke’s face and cloak.

He’d cut my throat. He’d killed me. No more curling up in my apartment with a book. No more Netflix. I would never see my parents and my brother again. All my dreams and hopes, all the things I didn’t get to do, it was all over. My small comfortable life ended right here.

He wouldn’t take this bag even if keeping it was the final thing I did in my short life. I gripped the canvas sack and, with the last of my strength, hurled myself backward over the rail into the river. The gray stormy sky yawned at me, tilted, and then cold dark water fell on my face and swallowed me whole.

I choked on muddy water. Before my brain could process the situation, my body took over. I flipped onto my stomach and retched.

I was still alive and drowning again.

How was I alive?

Every spasm hurt like hell. I felt the pain all the way in my toes.

The last of the water spilled out of me. I coughed, my throat raw, and opened my eyes, half expecting to be back in the same ditch somehow.

No, not a ditch. Above me, high up, was some sort of dark roof or ceiling. I was on my hands and knees in about six inches of water. My left hand was squishing slimy mud. My right was still clutching the money bag, its cord wrapped in a tangle around my wrist.

How . . . ?

I untied the cord and pulled the bag open with shaking fingers. Coins. Handfuls of them.

I hugged the bag to my naked chest and sobbed. For a few moments nothing existed except the bag and overwhelming relief.

Gradually it dawned on me that I was naked again and that what I could see of myself looked unwounded. Lecke had stabbed me. I was sure of it. I closed my eyes, and my memory served up the knife slicing into me in a flash of pain. Yes, he’d definitely stabbed me. And then cut my throat. I checked my neck. No blood. No wound. No scar that I could feel. Nothing on my stomach either.

Even if he hadn’t stabbed me, the river should’ve killed me. I should’ve drowned.

Where the hell was I?

I looked around. The rain still sifted from the sky, but it was no longer a drenching shower. I had attacked Lecke about thirty minutes after four pm. Now dusk was creeping in. Dark water stretched in front of me and to the sides, flowing around a narrow strip of muddy ground choked with weeds and low bushes wrapped in a thorny vine. A stone column rose behind me, supporting the roof above my head. Far in the distance, the top of the Mage Tower fluoresced weakly against the encroaching darkness. When I’d waited by the bridge, it had jutted almost directly across from me, and now it was much farther away, which meant the river had carried me downstream.

I had washed up on Ogden Island, a small, marshy chunk of solid ground at the junction of the Koreg and another small river. Ogden was the only island downstream of the Estret Bridge that would still let me view almost all of the Mage Tower. I knew this because one of the characters chose this spot for an ambush and had a whole page of inner monologue about the beauty of the Mage Tower and how this was the only island where so much of it could be seen. On other islands the trees or buildings blocked the view.

I was sitting under Ogden Bridge right by a busy neighborhood. I needed to get the hell out of here before someone noticed me or Lecke came looking for his blood money.

Getting up proved to be a heroic challenge. My stomach didn’t have a gash, but my whole body hurt as if someone had pummeled me with a baseball bat. After three tries, I stood and leaned against the column, which was likely a bridge pier, took a short breather, and stumbled forward, keeping my left hand on the stones and my right cradling the money. Every step hurt, but I was losing light and fast.

I rounded the pier and squinted at the narrow stretch of shrub-covered ground. Something rested on the muddy shore, halfway in the water. The air reeked of an unmistakable, slightly sweet stench.

A dead body. I waded through the ankle-deep water toward it.

It was blue-black and bloated. I couldn’t even tell if it was a woman or a man. It looked like it would fall apart at any moment.

I retched, but there was nothing in my stomach, so I just dry heaved until I peed myself. I would’ve cried, but I didn’t have the energy for it.

The body wore a cloak and some sort of tunic and pants, ripped and stained. A rope with torn ends wrapped around the corpse’s waist. There must’ve been a weight attached to it. This was a planned drowning, never meant to be discovered. The floodwaters had dislodged the corpse from the riverbed and carried it to the island.

I waited until my eyes stopped watering from the stink, walked over to the body, crouched, and unhooked its cloak. Getting it off the corpse proved a lot easier than expected. I pulled, and it came free.

I had to wash it. The river was cold, muddy, and dark. I gritted my teeth, dragged the cloak into the water, and sloshed it around.

A small shape slunk out of the twilight to the right of me. I turned my head.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

The little stelka hugged the ground and showed me her teeth.

My voice came out ragged, like a growl. “I will end you. I mean it.”

The stelka hesitated, unsure.

If I ever went back to my world, I would burn every copy of The Thieves of the North I could find. I would build a Viking funeral pyre out of them on a raft, push it into Lake Travis, and howl like a wolf while flames consumed it.

The cloak stank, but not as bad as I expected, so I put it on and staggered around the shore of the small island. The fabric was wool but soaking wet and cold. I could really use some shoes . . . No. Stuffing my feet into boots filled with human sludge was beyond me. Barefoot it was.

The stelka watched me, wary.

The assassin who hid on this island, waiting for his victim to cross the bridge, mentioned that one of the piers had metal handholds for maintenance. I scanned the three piers. The middle pier offered a row of rusty metal brackets. My way out. I tied the bag of money around my neck and took one last look around.

Something was wrong with the river’s current ahead. Something odd . . .

There it was, about fifty yards away, a section of the river that seemed unnaturally free of ripples. It was the same color as the rest of the water, a muddy brown, but it was moving at a different speed, slower, as if it were fighting the rushing current.

I had no idea what the hell it was. It wasn’t in the books. I was absolutely sure it wasn’t. I would’ve remembered that. Every instinct in me screamed that it was bad and I had to avoid it at all costs.

The translucent mass cut across the current to the left, heading straight for the island.

Fear shot through me like an electric shock. I spun around and sprinted to the pier with the handholds, stumbling over fallen branches and weeds. The shrubs caught my cloak. I ripped it free and kept going, jerking my feet out of the mud.

Behind me something let out a desperate shriek. I looked over my shoulder. The little stelka was flailing in a clump of thorny shrubs, stuck up to her chest in mud.

The dark thing sped toward us. An eerie feeling squirmed along my back, like a clammy, wet hand brushing my skin. The stelka screamed, a pitiful frantic cry.

Damn it.

I reversed, tore back through the shrubs, yanked the little beast free, and heaved her onto my shoulder. She sank her claws into the cloak and my skin, clinging to me for dear life.

I crashed through the bushes, heading for the pier. Mud squelched under my feet. I slid on the sludge, caught myself, slid again, and skidded into stone. My fingers caught the first metal handhold, and I scrambled up. Three breaths, and I had climbed onto the bridge and whipped around.

Below me, a translucent body slid out of the river. It was formless and stretchy, like a ten-foot-wide amoeba swirling with terrifying darkness. It licked the shore of the tiny island, slid over the corpse, and slipped back into the water.

The corpse was gone as if it had never been there.

What the actual fuck . . .

The terrible creature lingered by the edge of the island, waiting, its surface rippling like some horrible oil slick. It couldn’t climb up the pier, could it? Surely it couldn’t.

I held my breath. On my shoulder the stelka froze, completely still.

The monstrous thing sank below the surface.

A moment . . .

Another . . .

The dark thing floated back up, pushed away from the shore, and the river took it, pulling it under the bridge.

I exhaled.

And realized I had a wild animal clawing into my shoulder. At that exact moment, the stelka realized she was clinging to a weird human. I jerked, she squeaked, I stumbled back, and she leaped off my shoulder and raced off into the night, vanishing between the houses at the other end of the bridge.

Okay then. So that happened.

I slumped against the bridge’s rail. The dark water rushed below me. I was definitely in Kair Toren. The Mage Tower was where it was supposed to be, the Bluestone Square was as described, Ogden Island, the bridge I was on, Lecke walking across Estret right on schedule—all of that matched. But there was also the body on the shore and then there was that thing, whatever the hell it was. That thing shouldn’t have been here. It shouldn’t have even existed. It wasn’t in the books.

Maybe this wasn’t just a book.

I should’ve realized this sooner, but I had been too caught up in trying to survive. Dying must’ve given me some clarity. Wherever I had ended up, this world wasn’t limited by the pages of the books I knew. This place was something else, something much bigger. Something alive and very dangerous.

I swallowed, hid my money under the cloak, pulled the hood over my head, and forced myself to turn away from the river toward the city.

The rain had eased but the streets were still deserted. Night had pounced, drowning Kair Toren, the outlines of tall buildings charcoal sketches against a deeper gloom. Darkness pooled in the mouths of alleys and stretched onto the roads. Here and there a few windows were lit from within, taunting me with warmth.

I had to get off the streets.

Kair Toren had several licensed inns but to stay in one of those, I wouldn’t just need money, I would need identification papers or the crest of a prominent family. Licensed inns were required to keep records of their guests and they screened their patrons. I wouldn’t even get through the door in my corpse cloak and bare feet.

There were unlicensed, illegal inns. I knew of a couple, but I would have to find them in the dark, and walking into those and flashing my ill-gotten gains would get my throat slit again. The people who ran those places had no problem killing their patrons for a few coins and dumping them into the nearest river. Been there, done that, no thanks.

My toes started their transformation into icicles again. The adrenaline rush was wearing off. A gnawing ache spread through my body. I was sore everywhere.

I had to find shelter, clean up, and get a change of clothes. Food. I needed food. My stomach actually hurt, as if the hunger had become an open wound.

There was one place where I could get all those things. They wouldn’t care about my cloak, they wouldn’t ask any questions, and they wouldn’t murder me as long as I paid my way. It would be expensive as hell, but I had no choice. Yes, that could work.

I looked up, trying to get my bearings. I was on Ogden Bridge, and the Mage Tower was in front of me and to my left, which meant north was to my left as well. Kair Toren was a huge city, and I’d have to get almost all the way to the Bull Gate. At least an hour of fast walking, maybe longer. The rain had finally stopped, which meant the human predators would soon emerge. I had to hurry.

I turned, crossed the bridge, and started down the cobblestone street, hugging myself against the cold.

The city crawled by, the dark alleys and side streets yawning at me as I passed. I kept moving, listening for every noise, alert to every flicker on the edge of my vision.

My feet ached. My shoulder burned where the stelka had clawed me. My stomach hurt, begging for food. The wet cloak refused to dry. I was freezing. A sob broke free, and I bit down on it. Survive first, cry later. I just had to make it to my destination and not get jumped along the way.

There had to be shorter routes, but I only knew how to get there from the Bull Gate, because one of the characters took that path in the books.

It felt like I had been walking forever. I couldn’t even think anymore. I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

The street narrowed, its houses three or four stories high and built without any spaces between them. Lanterns lit the way, attached to the buildings every thirty yards. I was almost to the outer wall. The roads here were meant to channel the flood of invaders into a narrow kill space if the gates were breached. The city paid to have them well lit in case the city watch had to chase a criminal trying to enter or exit.

The street ended, as if cut off with a knife, and the Bull Gate rose ahead, the empty space in front of it lit by torches and braziers, their light playing on the massive bronze doors shut tight. High above, the city guards prowled the wall.

I stopped. I needed to take the third street from the gate on my left. There should have been a house with a blue door on the corner . . .

The huge city gates opened with a loud clang.

It was after sunset. Only someone in a very high position could force the guards to let them in.

Three riders entered the city, followed by a cart. All three rode Andikan warhorses, big, quick-footed, and mean, with grullo coats that looked like gray smoke. The leading rider’s horse had a bald face—a white marking that covered the entire front of his head. It looked like he had killed another horse and wore its skull as a helmet.

Everard. The Sleepless Duke, riding Villain, his war stallion. Crap.

They called him the Sleepless Duke because he ruled over a vast stretch of territory on the northern border and that territory was continuously raided by the aggressive nations from the northwest and the Crimson Empire from the east. The Selva Dukedom was always at war. Ramond vi Everard had no time to sleep. He had picked up a sword at the age of three and never put it down, just like his father and mother before him. He was a violent isolationist, who responded to threats with overwhelming force and shocking brutality.

And he was not supposed to be here. Something monumental must’ve happened because Everard wasn’t allowed in the city without a royal invitation. Sauven Savaric, the current king of Rellas, feared him so much, it was almost a phobia. This wasn’t in the book either. Why? This seemed like a pretty major development.

If he was sneaking into the city, he wouldn’t want witnesses. Of all the people to run into . . .

There was no place to hide. I flattened myself against the nearest house and looked down.

The riders bore down the street, their dark cloaks swallowing the light as if they had cut out pieces of midnight sky and wrapped them around their bodies.

Don’t notice me. Don’t see me.

Villain reached me. The size of this horse was truly shocking. I raised my head a fraction of an inch. The stallion glared at me with a bright blue eye, and I caught a glimpse of the rider, broad shoulders stretching his cloak, his hood hiding everything except for his clean-shaven square jaw.

I held my breath.

The stallion stopped.

Crap. Crap, crap, crap.

I was right by a lantern. He could see me in excruciating detail, everything from my bare feet to the hood of my wet cloak. I didn’t even want to imagine what I smelled like.

“Hold out your hand.”

That voice raised every hair on the back of my neck. He sounded like he ordered people to their death in battle.

Not holding out my hand wasn’t an option. If he cut it off, would it regenerate, or would I have to kill myself to regrow it? Would it regrow at all? If I died again, would I come back to life or was it a limited-number-of-times kind of thing . . .

“Your hand.”

Damn it.

A hard clump blocked my throat. I swallowed and raised my right hand.

I don’t want to die again. Please no.

A cold weight fell into my fingers. He’d dropped a handful of coins into my palm.

“Get off the street and buy some shoes.”

What?

Villain started forward. The riders passed me. The cart rolled by into the night. The hoofbeats scattered down the street, receding.

I stared at the money in my hand. A large silver coin, about the size of a silver dollar—a noma—and two copper coins that had to be dens. My memory informed me in a detached mechanical way that each noma equaled one hundred copper dens, and each den equaled four quarters. A quarter would buy me a pint of cheap ale, a den would buy me a young chicken, and a noma would buy me a weaned calf. Thank you, numerous rereads.

The fear slowly melted away. The last echoes of it drained out of me into the night.

The Sleepless Duke had given me money. The actual, in the flesh, Ramond vi Everard had handed me coins.

Oh my god.

Okay, that was cool beyond all reason. Entirely too much excitement, very scary, but so freaking cool. I shivered. Wow. Okay, I needed to get where I was going now before anything else happened.

I backtracked, counting the side streets. One. Two.

Here it was, a house with a blue door on the corner of a side street, marked by twin lanterns with a small red flower painted on the glass. Squire Way. Found it.

I ducked into the side street. It wound, twisting left, then right, then left again. I followed it. As long as I didn’t take any turns, it would get me to my destination.

I would need to pay an entrance fee. The question was, how much? The door charge wasn’t a means of making money, it was proof of one’s ability to pay. The real fees would be spent inside. For prominent people, the door charge would be nothing. For me, it would be a serious amount of money, and the prices in Rellas didn’t always make sense by modern standards. In this world, cows and fish were relatively cheap, and books and soap were hellishly expensive. Offering too little would be insulting, offering too much would brand me a sucker. I had to find the middle ground.

I didn’t even know how much money I had.

I crossed a street.

Another.

Average daily wages for an unskilled laborer were about two dens. An experienced mercenary made five or six. Would ten dens be enough?

I squeezed Everard’s coins in my hand. He’d given me a whole noma. It wasn’t much money for him, but for a woman without shoes or underwear, it was a huge amount. It would have been better to put it into my bag, but then I wouldn’t know which money was his. I wanted to wait until I could look at it. Kair Toren had beaten me down, but the coins in my hand were proof that kindness existed. Someone in this awful city had been nice to me, and good things did happen here. It was hope in my fingers.

That was so random. If you had asked me which of the characters in the novel were the most likely to hand a coin to a beggar, Everard would be near the bottom of that list. In the books he was a rare presence, an ominous power that both fueled Sauven’s mental illness and held it in check from afar. Whenever he appeared, someone was going to die.

Something rounded the corner behind me. I turned my head just enough to catch it in my peripheral vision. A man, wearing a dark half cloak, heading in the same direction as me.

He crossed the street to my side.

It could’ve been a coincidence, but it probably wasn’t.

I picked up the pace.

He did, too.

Anxiety splashed me in an ice-cold rush.

Ahead, the alley bent to the left. I turned the corner, clenched Everard’s money in my fist, and sprinted, squeezing every drop of speed out of my body. The money bag slapped against my chest as I ran. Houses flew by.

Behind me heavy boots pounded the cobblestones.

The street spat me out into a large plaza. In the back of it, a big stone building stood, four floors high and lit up like a Christmas tree against the dark backdrop of the city. There was no time to take it in. I saw rows of windows with ornate bars glowing with a welcoming yellow light, two solid rectangular towers in front connected by a third-floor loggia, and between them arched doors standing wide open, leading inside. Two men guarded the doors. They carried maces on their hips, and they looked like they would brain you with them if you glanced at them the wrong way.

I ran to the doors.

Behind me the man burst out of the alley.

I braked in front of the guard on my left. He held out his hand. I dropped Everard’s silver noma into his palm.

The guard bowed and indicated the open door with his hand. The entrance waited in front of me, a long narrow hallway lit up by lanterns.

My lungs burned. I sucked in a breath and glanced over my shoulder. The asshole who’d chased me had turned around and was walking away, back toward the alley.

A swarm of glowing golden butterflies flowed out of the entrance, as if the building had exhaled light and beauty into the night. The butterflies bounced on the draft, trailing tiny gold sparks, swirled toward me, and melted into the night air. Like magic.

No, not like. It was magic, not distant like the Mage Tower zapping the lorsses, but right there in front of me. A wonder. It was impossible back home, but here it was real. It existed and it was beautiful.

I caught my breath, swallowed, and walked unsteadily into the Garden of Soft Blossoms.