Such were the wonders of Bannisferre’s goods that Gaborn hadn’t even noticed the young woman sidle up to him until he smelled the scent of rose petals. (The woman who stands next to me wears a dress that is kept in a drawer filled with rose petals, he’d realized, on some subconscious level.) Even then, he’d been so absorbed in studying the wine chillers that he imagined she was only a stranger, awed by the same marvelous bowls and pitchers. He didn’t glance her way until she took his hand, seizing his attention.

She grasped his left hand in her right, lightly clasping his fingers, then squeezed.

Her soft touch electrified him. He did not pull away.

Perhaps, he thought, she mistakes me for another. He glanced sidelong at her. She was tall and beautiful, perhaps nineteen, her dark-brown hair adorned with mother-of-pearl combs. Her eyes were black, and even the whites of her eyes were so dark as to be a pale blue. She wore a simple, cloud-colored silk gown with flowing sleeves—an elegant style lately making its way among the wealthy ladies of Lysle. She wore a belt of ermine, clasped with a silver flower, high above the navel, just beneath her firm breasts. The neckline was high, modest. Over her shoulders hung a silk scarf of deepest crimson, so long that its fringes swept the ground.

She was not merely beautiful, he decided. She was astonishing.

She smiled at him secretively, shyly, and Gaborn smiled back, tight-lipped—hopeful and troubled all at once. Her actions reminded him of the endless tests that one of his hearthmasters might have devised for him in the House of Understanding—yet this was no test.

Gaborn did not know the young woman. He knew no one in all the vast city of Bannisferre—which seemed odd, that he should not have one acquaintance from a city this large, with its towering gray stone songhouses with their exotic arches, the white pigeons wheeling through the blue sunlit sky above the chestnut trees. Yet Gaborn knew no one here, not even a minor merchant. He was that far from home.

He stood near the edge of a market, not far from the docks on the broad banks of the south fork of River Dwindell—a stone’s throw from Smiths’ Row, where the open-air hearths gave rise to the rhythmic ring of hammers, the creaking of bellows, and plumes of smoke.

He felt troubled that he’d been so lulled by the peacefulness of Bannisferre. He’d not even bothered to glance at this woman when she had stood next to him for a moment. Twice in his life, he’d been the target of assassins. They’d taken his mother, his grandmother, his brother, and two sisters. Yet Gaborn stood here now as carefree as a peasant with a stomach full of ale.