Bastiaan and Runt waited the appropriate half bell until court was at a pause, then made their way toward the exit of the schloss. Bastiaan didn’t even have to prompt him before Runt spoke up. “She’s trying to find some canal rat kid named Cairden. Said he’d be about six years old. The boy probably froze to death the first week he was abandoned. Told her I’d keep an ear to the ice, though.”

“Did she say why she was seeking him?”

“Something about the bread booth at markt and wanting to get food to him and the other crats. I recognize her from there, you know. They gave us free bread. Any crat would be willing to help her. I’ll spread the name around at least.”

“You’re a good lad.”

“I do it for the reward that’s bound to come.”

Bastiaan stepped out from the shadows of the schloss and into sunlight. Only then did he unroll the parchment Mattias had given him. At the top was a scribbled address, not far from the schloss and on the banks of a main channel of Canal Vier.

Underneath was a sketch of a face. The supposed Wishtress. Smooth lines, soft eyes . . . Bastiaan almost dropped the parchment. He’d seen that face before.

It belonged to the girl who’d given him bread.

Chapter 12
Myrthe

How could the most powerful Talented in Fairhoven break a curse that was trying to kill her? So far Oma’s Wishtress book held nothing about curses. But it had a lot of details about how to write a proper contract. How to store tears. How to force out a wish in a moment of need—I’d mastered that.

The Wishtress didn’t cry until between the ages of twelve and fourteen.

A Wishtress’s tear could be bottled for up to seventy years before it lost its power to grant a wish, as long as it was corked securely.

Details on how to use a wish and how not to use a wish that didn’t matter to me anymore. I had one wish left, and if I released it, I would die.

It took me hours to decipher the different handwritings in the book, which infuriated me because I wanted to read through its entirety as soon as possible, but some scribblings seemed to be in other languages. One page in particular had several notes that other Wishtresses had apparently taken offense to. At least two other writers had left notes in the margins in my own language.

This is disputed and has never been proven.

And, This is heresy against the Well of Talents.

They made me want to translate this page all the more. Anouk was the only person I knew who’d studied a language other than that of Fairhoven. She wasn’t fluent by any means, but she’d been able to hold an entire conversation with a foreign canal rat once.