The Seven Markets (6 page)

He caught her watching him and blushed, actually blushed. Joshua Bullock blushing! For a moment Ellie could forget her surroundings, forget her excitement, and simply marvel at the flush in his cheeks.

“Don’t,” he said, his voice halting. “I was—I wanted to bring the little one down for you. As . . . a present. I was going to have it set into a necklace so you could wear a tiny sun with you as a—”

“Souvenir?”

He nodded but did not say any more.

Ellie flung her arms around him and, with no thought of her parents or anyone else, kissed him full on the mouth.

“Sweet, wonderful, ridiculous man! What did you think I was doing?”

“The same?”

“The very same,” Ellie said. And then, feeling the need to add a small white lie, added, “Though I hadn’t gotten so far as picking out a setting.”

He leaned down and kissed her forehead. Then he realized where they were, jerked back, and looked at the ground, shuffling his feet. As if pretending he didn’t know her would fool anyone witnessing their horrendous behavior into forgetting what they’d seen.

Glancing around, Ellie saw Papa and Joshua’s father dickering with a young man whose face seemed oddly off—too long in the chin and something disconcerting about his nose—over a pair of sausages. A ways from them, Mama and Joshua’s mother were engrossed in browsing the collection of what she took for a bookseller’s stall. Tables were lined up in the shadow of a high brick building, and the two women, who’d never gotten on so far as Ellie knew, were gabbing and passing books back and forth, acting like the oldest of friends.

“Shall we go?” Joshua said.

“Go?”

“Go. Explore. Just the two of us, I mean.”

“We can’t!”

He slouched his shoulders and opened his eyes wide. This had the effect of turning Joshua into a contrite eight-year-old. “I’m sorry,” he said, making his voice climb several octaves higher than normal. “I thought you were right behind us. We certainly never would have wandered off on our own on purpose.”

“You are a rotten man, Joshua Bullock.”

He shrugged. “An honest mistake. It could happen to anyone.”

As they fled, Ellie marveled at her surroundings. All the times she’d imagined the Market growing up, she’d imagined it as a sort of open-air bazaar. Meeting Mister Beesix and seeing his wagon had only reinforced this notion. She’d traveled with Papa to sell their goods at harvest time and had seen firsthand what a proper market looked like: tables covered in trinkets, racks filled with clothing, steel drums serving as cooking fires for meat and ears of corn.

The Market was a city.

No sign of the Finnegans’ old farm was anywhere in evidence. The shell of their home was gone as surely as if it’d grown legs in the night and wandered off in search of a family to care for it. The familiar dirt path, which they’d strolled together only the day before, was now a paved road wide enough for two carts to pass side by side. It branched off time and again, creating avenues and side streets, alleys and cul-de-sacs.

Close to the entrance, closer to the road into town, the Market had been wagons and tents, vendors perched behind tables peddling their wares. Farther in, these gave way to buildings: first of stone and wood, then of materials neither could name. Joshua made Ellie stop more than once, not to browse a shopkeeper’s wares or consider a pretty trifle, but so he could lay his hand upon the side of a building and feel its skin for himself.

“It could be glass,” he said, pausing before a shop filled with gleaming crystal flowers and flitting, twittering birds crafted seemingly of light. Ellie joined him, laying her own hand upon the outer wall.

“It’s warm,” she said.

“Is it?” He moved his hand to the spot she was touching and held it there a second, considering.

“Here.”

“Oh—ow, that is hot!” He jerked his hand back.

“Oven’s on t’other side,” said the shopkeeper, a young woman with long, plaited golden hair. “Careful not to hurt y’self.”

They walked farther along. Joshua bartered with a stringy green-eyed fellow for a pair of pastry rolls. They were cool to the touch but emitted copious billows of steam when bitten into. Ellie said hers was the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted. Joshua kept his opinion to himself, afraid his mother, who was known for her baking, might be lurking nearby.

As they sampled the Market’s wares, Ellie noticed the buildings, two and three stories where they’d stopped for their breakfast, were now growing taller. More than once Joshua made her wait while he stood staring straight up, searching for a building’s peak.

“Look here,” she said, ducking into a high, slender tower. It climbed into the sky, but inside there was barely enough space for the both of them, and no sign of steps or a trapdoor to the higher floors.

“There are no steps. I can touch the ceiling but there are no steps.”

“Employees only,” the shopkeeper said, glancing up from behind his counter. “No customers allowed.”

Ellie thought of waiting for Mister Tanner to fetch her orders from the stockroom and tried to imagine a shop with so much stock it had to soar up into the sky to hold it all. She pulled Joshua away, leaving without looking back. When he asked her some time later what the “tall, twisting shop” was selling, she had to admit she had no idea. To her memory, the walls had been bare and the shop empty.

Every turn revealed a new surprise. Every breath carried a provocative new aroma and the promise of flavors more tantalizing than the last. Ellie and Joshua alternated between rushing from shop to shop and lingering to savor whatever the moment held. It didn’t matter; fast or slow, the Market was overwhelming. Ellie’s head began spinning, and just as she was about to ask if they could sit a spell, he told her to stay put a moment and dashed off without another word.

Where was he going? She watched him disappear into a shop they had not visited. The exterior was purple, the walls round. It reminded her of nothing in all the world so much as an eggplant. What had drawn him there? People flowed past her, neighbors and strangers and vendors alike, their voices melting together until she couldn’t make out a single individual word. She was caught in a cacophony of noise, a symphony of musicians playing their instruments with no conductor to guide them.

Noticing tables nearby, Ellie navigated the throng and found a place to sit. A serving girl, younger than her and wearing clothes so indecent Ellie couldn’t help blushing, approached and offered her something to drink. A cup of tea, a beer or perhaps a pint of ale?

“Ale?”

“Aye, and good too. Tempt you?” The serving girl shifted from foot to foot, constantly in motion. Watching her made Ellie’s eyes hurt.

“Yes, two please,” she said, sure Joshua would not demur at the prospect of a drink when he returned.

She sat observing the crowd, waiting for her man. It began to dawn on her where he’d vanished to. Papa’s words came to her then,
I’d be surprised if your Joshua didn’t have a question for you,
and Ellie knew she had the right of it. There was no money for an engagement ring or a fancy necklace, but he obviously had something in mind. Joshua was not a complicated man. The way he’d rushed off, Ellie knew he’d found whatever he was after.

“Joshua,” she said, feeling the need to speak his name aloud. A personal sort of charm. Not for protection or for raising bread, as Mama tended to do. Not for discouraging pests or keeping the horses healthy, as was Papa’s wont. Just the one word, just his name. A wish, almost. The happiest of wishes.

Ellie didn’t notice when the stranger sat down. She didn’t notice when the inappropriate serving girl returned with their drinks. Nor did she notice when the stranger thanked the serving girl, tossing a coin Ellie would have found unfamiliar onto the circular serving tray.

“It was good of you to order,” the stranger said, sipping the ale she’d ordered for her fiancé-to-be. “Thank you ever so much.”

His voice snapped her out of her daydream, out of the house she shared with Joshua, away from the children they would have, the animals they would keep. She turned and saw him raising Joshua’s glass to his lips.

“How dare you!” she said. Or started to say. She got out the first two words, “how dare,” but not the third.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, cutting her off. “Sometimes I do forget my manners. But you are waiting for me, aren’t you? You were holding this seat for me, weren’t you?”

She tried to say no but . . . couldn’t. And Ellie was surprised to discover she
was
waiting for him. She
had
been holding the seat for him.

“Ah, there we go then. Perfect, perfect.” He lifted the glass a third time. “Excellent choice, by the way. Always come here, always drop in, every time. Best ale in seven realms. Almost as good as Trafalgia, but don’t tell anyone I said so, will you?”

Ellie nodded. She’d never breathe a word of it. The mere thought!

The stranger leaned back in his chair—
his
chair—opening his hands as if to say the entire world was his but he was only too happy to share. He smiled, and Ellie felt herself sinking into him.

“You shouldn’t leave it sit too long, really you shouldn’t. Here.”

He gestured for her to find her own glass and Ellie did. Her throat was dry as dust. She drained it in three giant, thirsty gulps.

“My goodness,” he said. “Don’t overdo it now. People will think I’m taking advantage of you.” His eyes were the red-gold of summer sunsets when she was a girl.

He finished his own and held a hand up for the serving girl.
If you please,
he mouthed, once he had her attention. From the way she hurried off, a casual observer might have thought him royalty.

But the thing was, there were no casual observers in that part of the Market. Not right then. Everyone was watching their table from the sides of their eyes or from beneath the wide brims of their hats. A woman wearing yellow from head to toe, resembling an enormous canary, right down to the tail feathers, hid behind a yellow fan, hanging on the stranger’s every word.

“Remind me, remind me,” he said, gesticulating richly. “Your name. I’m afraid I’ve lost it. Terribly sorry.”

“Ellie,” she said, the word escaping more than being spoken.

He smiled again. Her heart slowed to a crawl at the sight of him.

“No no no. Your
true
name. It’s right on the tip of my tongue. How could I have forgotten?”

She knew better, but Ellie could no more have held back than she could have spread her arms and taken flight. “Eliwys Aithnea Lily MacReady. Aithnea is for my father’s mother. Lily is for my mother’s. Eliwys is for me and me alone.”

“Lovely, lovely,” he said. And then, as if pulling on a shirt or fastening a band around his wrist, he tried her name on for size. “Eliwys Aithnea Lily MacReady. Lovely, just lovely.”

The serving girl arrived with a fresh round of drinks. Her hands shook as she set them down, and she left without collecting another of the stranger’s coins. “On the house, sir,” she said, and scurried away, her shoulders hunched, her head down.

He savored his ale, sniffing the mouth of the glass in between languid sips, which he sloshed around before swallowing. His hair gleamed like spun gold and his skin bore the deep, handsome color of one who spends all his time lounging in the sun.

“You haven’t touched yours,” he said, indicating Ellie’s drink. “Aren’t you thirsty?”

She was! She was parched! But she also sensed she
wasn’t
thirsty. In fact, the mere notion of even another drop of ale made her stomach shudder.

“I fear I may be sated,” she said. “Would you like it?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, chuckling as if at a private joke. He leaned across the table and fetched her glass. Some part of Ellie judged the table too wide for such a move but he managed it just the same. Managed it with elegance and a certain amount of finesse. His every movement was refined and calculated. Even his laughter had an air of nobility about it, as if only someone who’d done the things he’d done and seen the things he’d seen could ever laugh in such a fashion.

There was movement in the crowd, and in short order, the spectators parted to allow someone through. It was a young man, tall with stormy eyes and a dark complexion. He carried a bouquet of wildflowers in one hand and a box the size and shape of a small eggplant in his other.

The stranger looked up and Ellie, sensing there would be nothing amiss in such an action, mirrored him. She recognized the young man the same way she might have recognized a place she’d only seen in a book or in a painting, but never in real life. When he knelt and set his hand on her shoulder, Ellie recoiled.

“Good sir!” said the stranger, flying out of his chair. “Such cheek!”

The young man looked up at the stranger, his eyes full of desperate confusion. He stood, taking his time, weighing options. “May I help you?” he said, at long last.

The stranger laughed again and then he thanked the young man for fetching the bouquet of wildflowers. He popped the lid off the purple box, peered inside, and returned it. “A fine gesture, sir, and I thank you, but I believe I can do better.”

The stranger glanced up at the triple suns, downed the last mouthful from her glass, and offered the wildflowers to Ellie. “My dear,” he said.

She accepted the flowers and stood. She liked flowers, enjoyed having them by her bedside or on the table during breakfast. These were lovely and had obviously been picked with care. He was so thoughtful.

“Eliwys,” the stranger said. “We really must be going. Darling?”

He offered his arm and she took it without a moment’s hesitation. She shifted the flowers to her free hand and was about to leave when the other man, the tall man with the gray eyes and dark complexion, grabbed at her.

“Ellie!”

“Do something with the boy, would you?” the stranger said. And as they left together, the assembled crowd pulled the young man back, away from the happy couple. They held him and kept him from following even as he, himself, was unsure of who he was trying to pursue, or why.

Ellie and the stranger walked together to the center of the Market, pausing here and there so he could point out an interesting sight or converse briefly with an acquaintance.