The woman hesitated for another breath before she finally took the purse and disappeared in the doorway. Clove climbed the steps, following her inside, and I closed the door behind us.

Immediately, the hum of gemstone woke in the air. The deep reverberation of carnelian and the high-pitched song of amber. The low and steady buzz of onyx. The sounds pressed around me like the pressure of water on a dive.

She led us to a small sitting room lit only by a large window.

“Tea?” The woman pulled the apron over her head and hung it on the wall. “It’s going to be a while.”

Clove answered with a nod and she opened a sliding door, where a man was sitting at a wooden table in the workshop.

“It’s a rush.” She dropped the purse onto the wooden table and he looked up, eyeing us through the open door.

The woman leaned over the table, speaking too low for us to hear, and the man set the piece of quartz he was working on into the box in front of him. The stone in his merchant’s ring flashed. The metal was worn and scraped, which meant he’d been a merchant for some time.

I took the seat beside the cold fireplace so I had a good view of him. It wasn’t unheard of for low-level gem merchants to make swaps here and there when they cleaned and cut hauls. It was one of a few ways fakes made it into the gem trade.

He cleared the table quickly, looking us up and down. “You just come from the Narrows?”

A teapot lid clinked on the other side of the wall.

“We did,” Clove answered, clearly suspicious.

“You better not be bringing any of that trouble here,” he grunted.

“What trouble?” I asked, but Clove gave me a sharp look as if to silence me.

“That business with the burning ships,” the man said. “Was all I heard about yesterday at the merchant’s house.”

Clove’s eyes drifted back to me.

“Some trader in the Narrows is going port to port, setting fire to ships. Looking for a vessel called the Luna.”

I froze, my heart jumping up into my throat.

Saint. Or West. It had to be.

But West and the crew of the Marigold wouldn’t be able to do anything so brazen without catching the Trade Council’s retribution. If they were looking for me, they’d do it quietly. But ships burning at every port in the Narrows … that was something my father would do.

I let out a shaking breath. A timid smile lifted on my trembling lips, and I turned toward the window to brush a tear from the corner of my eye before Clove caught sight of me. He couldn’t be surprised. He knew my father better than even I did.