Who lived here, she wondered, among this most ancient of roads, with stone watering troughs for horses still standing, and tiny narrow passageways and mysterious staircases disappearing hither and thither? And did you feel it every day, that it was magical?

Then a busker loudly set up with a drum and a penny whistle close by, and the spell was broken, and she realized the shop in the building was selling something called Ye Olde Tartan Fudge and she sighed. Work, after all, was still work, and she was running late.

She had one more set of steps to go, thankfully downward, to take her onto Victoria Street.

As soon as she got there, she checked again: this was definitely the right place and she almost sent a message thanking Sofia. Because Victoria Street was about the most irritatingly pretty place she’d ever seen.

The street was a row of curved buildings underneath some kind of balcony arrangement—whether Edinburgh was up or down was incredibly peculiar, like the area called the New Town being really, really super old—and winded down toward a large open space at the bottom called the Grassmarket. This must be, Carmen realized, what Sofia meant by an upper and a lower section.

There were little shops lining the length of the street, each painted a different, cheerful color—pink, green, blue. There was a hardware shop, a French restaurant, a magic shop with a wide array of herbs and broomsticks, expensive-looking shops for hunting and fishing and tweed, chichi little restaurants—and a bookshop.

It was green with a beautiful display of bicycling frogs towing books wrapped in Christmas paper. It was adorable and perfect, and for a second Carmen genuinely felt quite excited.

Then she saw it was the wrong number and, in fact, a books and antiques shop, not what she was looking for at all. The McCredie shop, it turned out, was two doors down.

This shop was also green, but in this case a pale olive color. And, in fact, it didn’t really look like a shop at all. The dusty window was crammed with maps, folders, and big old reference books, but not in an enticing, imaginative way like the other bookshop. Instead they were simply piled up haphazardly against the glass, so it was impossible to read what they actually were.

The place looked less like a shop of any kind and more like a two-story fire hazard. She checked her phone again. Yup. This was definitely the place. But what on earth could she do here? Who would ever even come here? She couldn’t imagine any customer being enticed through its doors.

She frowned. Maybe it was one of these scams and actually fronted a massive drug-running business. Sofia wouldn’t have put her up to that, though. But otherwise how could anyone who ran a place like this afford to use Sofia’s services? That made the most sense so far.