Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 13, in which Faanshi and some of the rest of the cast are infiltrating the city of Shalridan–and Faanshi is full of consternation for reasons that will be self-evident for those who choose to look behind the fold!
(Though you may not want to unless you’ve already read Valor of the Healer! Muahaha.)
Fog blanketed much of everything in sight, letting Faanshi glimpse only the passing dark shapes of people of whose function and place she had no real surety. They could been dockhands or sailors, watchmen or priests; in the darkness and fog she did well to glimpse them at all, much less any detail of frame or clothing that might have told her more. But she heard them, constant footsteps and lowly calling voices echoing back and forth through the night. The foghorn sang its periodic single note, and beyond all else, the ceaseless rush of the ocean moved in and out of her hearing, never quite letting it go.
All of this in the middle of the night, she thought, dazed by everything she heard around her. How much louder does it get in daylight?
She wanted to ask, but Gerren and Alarrah kept them moving, and Julian’s teachings of keep quiet when I tell you and run when I tell you were too heavily ingrained for questions to seem wise now.
All thoughts of the Rook, too, she had to keep to herself. But that didn’t stop her from wondering if he and Rab had come to the city, and how they could find them if they had. Or from worrying that he hadn’t been truly strong enough to abandon his recovery. Or from wanting to shout at him, or shake him in her frustration, or find the words to persuade him to kiss her again.
Or from doing the same to him, herself.
That notion, so alien to any thought she’d ever had before, scalded her cheeks even as she hurried through the foggy night with the others. Their need for speed and stealth was surely, therefore, a blessing of Djashtet–for if any of the others had required her to speak, Faanshi wasn’t at all sure that she could have uttered a syllable.
