pouring down his face. The other boy let go of Berren and ran. Berren stood exactly where he was, too amazed to move. Lilissa lifted her piece of wood again and swung it with all her strength into Jerrin’s back. Jerrin screamed and arched and fell over, one hand still plastered to his head, the other now pressing into his ribs.
‘Oh gods! Please! Please don’t kill me!’ He looked up and for a moment his eyes met Berren’s. ‘Mouse! Please! Please don’t let him kill me! I wasn’t really going to…’
He didn’t get any further before Berren kicked him in the face.
‘You…! You…! I…!’ Rage left him incoherent. Dimly, he felt a tugging on his arm.
‘Come on! Let’s go! Before there’s any more of them.’ Lilissa pulled him away, dropping her plank of wood. They ran, feet skittering across the cobbles. Back out in Bottlemaker’s, Sticks was in the middle of the street, dragging himself towards a wall, knees drawn up into his belly. His face was screwed up in pain. When he saw Lilissa, he flinched away, curled up even tighter. They ran past, on up towards the warm food-smells of Market Square.
‘What did you do to him?’ Berren couldn’t remember ever seeing Sticks go down in a fight. Run away maybe, but never left like this.
‘Kicked him.’ Lilissa flashed him a grin. Her eyes were wide with an infectious excitement. ‘Like Master Syannis showed me.’
Berren glanced back. No one was following them. Apart from Sticks, all he could see was Waddler, lurking in the shadows, trying to keep out of sight.
At the top of the hill, The Maze tipped them out into Market Square, right next to Weaver’s Row and the way home. The crowds were suddenly thick. Men and women pushed past each other here, squeezing around the stalls and the rugs spread out on the ground, half of them pointing and shouting. Most people wore plain loose robes in pale brown or off-white, by far the most comfortable clothes for a hot Deephaven summer. Here and there, Berren saw men in breeches, with shirts open to the navel, sweat shining on their pale faces. Men from up the river, from the City of Spires or Varr. There were people painted orange, with black and white stripy hands. Others bald, with hundreds of feathers sticking out of their scalps, tattooed from head to toe. Black-skinned Taiytakei sailors with hair braided down to their knees and tiny blades at the ends. He gasped as half a dozen men wrapped in the robes of the dead walked and laughed across their path, jabbering in some strange language that he thought might be the language of the underworld, until he realised that they were probably just another bunch of foreigners who didn’t know that grey was the death-colour and thought the funny looks they kept getting were because of the spiked bands they wore around their necks and wrists. A dozen different languages washed over him, a mish-mash of words from the empire and across the seas, bundled higgledy-piggledy into something new that only existed within the four corners of the biggest marketplace in the world.
Lilissa tugged his sleeve. ‘I’m hungry.’
Berren’s stomach rumbled in breakfast-less sympathy. A thousand different smells all fought for his attention. Sweet spices, perfumes, scented oils, sizzling skewers of meat, roasting nuts, fruits, all layered on the city’s undertones of sweat and fish. He’d been into the market lots of times, but never in the heat of the day, never when it was busy like this. The Market District had its own gangs who gave short shrift to any intruders from the docks or from the wrong side of Pelean’s Gate. Hatchet’s dung-collectors only got to come and do their work late in the evening, when the crowds were mostly gone and what was left were the wagonners; even then they were watched.
The thought made him uneasy. The market gangs would take it badly if they saw one of Hatchet’s boys in the square. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few pennies.
‘Come on then. We’d best get on.’ There could be snuffers here too, on the lookout. For all Berren knew, every snuffer in the city was looking for him now. It was a chilling thought. He stopped where a man was baking strips of dough stuffed with shredded fish in a sun-oven. While he waited, Lilissa disappeared into the crowd. When she came back, her face was flushed with excitement.
‘Look! Look over here!’ When he offered her a piece of fishbread, she hardly seemed to notice. ‘Come on! You have to see this.’ She pulled him over to a shady corner where the crowd was thinner. Against the pale stone wall stood a single small iron pedestal. In it was a bowl full of earth, from which grew a dark green stalk with a single pure white flower as large as Berren’s hand. A man with dark skin and red cloth wrapped around his head stood next to the pedestal, cradling an ornately decorated wooden box. Inside the box were three glass vials. Two burly snuffers with big curved swords stood guard, one on either side. They had red cloth around their heads too. From the way they stood, it seemed to Berren that they were guarding the flower rather than the man. They looked at Berren and Lilissa and sniffed. Berren knew that look. He was used to it. Not enough money.
Lilissa didn’t seem to notice. She was pointing at the flower. ‘Look!’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a Servin Mountain Lily.’
Berren shrugged. Flowers were for girls. ‘It’s pretty,’ he said.
‘Don’t you know anything?’ Lilissa nudged him hard in the ribs. ‘That makes the most beautiful perfume in the world, that does. They say it was that perfume that started the war.’
Berren didn’t answer. According to Master Sy, the war stemmed from the greed of Khrozus Falandawn. According to Justicar Kol it had been the mudlarks. Now it was a flower. It had all happened before he was born, and he was fairly sure he didn’t care, even if it turned out to have been started by two fishermen having a punch-up outside the whorehouse in Loom Street.
‘It’s very pretty,’ he said again.
‘They call it Lady Ygala’s Vanity. One day, when I’m the richest seamstress in the city, that’s what I’m going to get for my perfume. I’d give anything to smell of that.’
Now that was much more interesting to know. ‘Really?’ asked Berren archly. ‘Anything?’
‘Maybe.’
Berren stepped forward and pointed at one of the vials in the box. ‘How much?’ He had an emperor, after all. An emperor ought to buy almost anything.
Disdain met him. Even dressed up as he was in the finest clothes Master Sy could afford, he obviously wasn’t good enough. The man holding the box sneered and sniffed and then reached into his belt and pulled out a tiny piece of glass not much bigger than a pea.
‘This, sir, is perhaps more where sir’s purse lies. A single pure drop of the essence of the lily.’
Berren glanced at Lilissa. She was still staring, wide-eyed and open-mouthed with hope. His heart pounded.
‘How much?’ he asked.
‘Two emperors,’ said the perfume-seller, with no trace of a smile. Berren’s heart jumped.
‘One.’
The perfume-seller stared at him. ‘Three.’ It took a second for Berren to realise that he wasn’t joking. Cheeks burning furious red with shame, he turned away, pulling Lilissa after him.
‘Come on.’ Two emperors? For what? For a drop of something smaller than a fingernail? How ridiculous was that? It was absurd. It was criminal for anything to be so expensive. For a moment, he wondered about slipping back and somehow stealing a bottle, one of the proper bottles. One of them must cost about as much as the ship that had brought it to Deephaven in the first place. But no. The perfume-seller had snuffers with him, and he’d had enough of those for one day. And besides, he had to think of Lilissa.
Except that was the trouble. He was thinking of Lilissa. He was thinking of how happy he could make her, and for that, two emperors seemed nothing short of a bargain. Right here was something that no fishmonger’s son could ever give her. He could have shown her…
Shown her what? That he was better than whoever this other boy was? Was that it? He growled and surged forward, forcing his way to the edge of the market where it emptied out into Weaver’s Row. Lilissa had to scurry to keep up.
‘Hey! Berren!’ he couldn’t get her face out of his head. The look of hope when she’d thought, for that one instant, that he was somehow rich enough to buy her perfume that was named after an empress. ‘Berren! It doesn’t matter. I really like it that you asked. It’s very sweet.’
Sweet. That cut deeper than One-Thumb’s knife.
‘Is that what you call your fishmonger? Sweet?’
The words came out, bitter and envious. Envious because he’d seen something more in that look of hope she’d
