Would they?

I chewed on my lip and took the blue vial from Iltani’s bag. As I did so, I felt unease flowing through me. “Iltani, getting into the Palace will be difficult and dangerous. It will mean risking all of our lives. Besides, Dagan will be looking for us at Assata’s soon.”

“We can get in and out of the Palace in an hour. Easy,” she said.

“We don’t even have food to deliver it in.”

“What about those grapes the fishmongers are eating?” Nanaea eyeballed the women, who were glancing at us out of the corners of their eyes.

Gods of the skies.

But…they did have a point.

I rubbed my forehead and sighed.

We had to do it. For the sake of the rest of our lives. For the sake of all of their lives here in this city.

I held the bottle up to the sunlight and shook the serum. “Fine. But we’ll need different disguises.”

“Haha!” Iltani rubbed her hands together. “I knew you’d come to your senses.”

“I can take care of that. Hand me your beard, Kammani.” Nanaea stowed her own beard in her pocket. “You’ll be dressed as a noblewoman. You’ll wipe all of that off your face, but walk with a straight back and keep your chin up. As if you’re truly wealthy.”

“Without any disguise at all? They’ll know who I am!”

Iltani snorted. “Oh please. You are not as remarkable-looking as you believe, as much as Dagan thinks otherwise.”

I bristled. “Iltani, I’ve had about enough—”

“Shh!” Nanaea whispered, looking at the fishmongers. Bikku was openly staring at us. “You will blend in, and that is an extreme virtue. Now hand over your beard if you want to live. We must walk out of here different than we came in.”

Begrudgingly, my pride stinging from Iltani’s bluntness, I peeled the beard off, and Nanaea picked the bitumen off my cheeks as I winced.

Nanaea attached my beard to her face, and stuck a bit of the black goo onto her front tooth to make it look as if it were gone. She let her long black curls go free, tied a scrap of linen over her forehead, and flipped her vest inside out. Suddenly, she was a different person.

“And I’ll deliver our gift as plain old me.” Iltani pulled the beard off, stepped out of her long cloak, took off the trader scarf, and wiped off the heavy lines that Nanaea had painted on her forehead and around her eyes. “I’ve a better shot at going unnoticed as a poor girl than a trader in the Palace.”

Nanaea looked her up and down. “You’re right. It’ll work.”

Iltani eyeballed me speculatively as I tried to make myself appear to be a wealthy noblewoman, smoothing down my hair and shrugging out of the trader cloak to reveal my plain linen tunic.

“It isn’t enough.” She shook her head. “Nanaea, look at her.”

Nanaea fussed with my hair and belted up my tunic to expose more of my knobby knees, but neither appeared satisfied with the results. Annoyed, I yanked my tunic back down. “There’s nothing else to do.”