The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter (Riyria Chronicles #4)

Mercator put the kettle on, stoked the fire, and then checked her work. Popping the lid on a clay pot marked with the blue handprint, she fished out the cloth, held it up, and let it drip while she studied the shade. It looked perfect, which meant it would be too light when dry—once the excess dye was removed.

With a disappointed sigh, Mercator submerged the cloth in the pot again. She had close to a dozen of the old clay vessels, which were found in the belly of the ruined church. At least she thought it was a church, but from the outside it was hard to tell it was even a building. Tall grass and bushes grew all around. If not for the arched doorway, the place could easily be mistaken for a stony hill.

The pots were huge old urns, a good three feet in height and beautifully crafted. Mercator almost hated employing them. Still, she had to use something, and these were ideal for her purposes. Mercator spent the late summer and fall gathering woad. She fermented the leaves in a tub of water mixed with a bit of lime. In the spring, she planted seeds that she’d meticulously salvaged, only a fraction of which would take root.

In winter, she spent most of her days dunking cloth in the blue dye just as she would do that day. She wrung out her soaked dress as best she could, dressed, and went back to work. Crossing to the last pot, the one she’d been working on the longest, she submerged her arms up to her elbows. Mercator held the wool under as if drowning a small animal, squeezing the material as hard as she could, wringing the cloth below the surface to help infuse the dye more completely into the material.

Dye! Dye, you miserable woolly lamb! She tried to smile, amazed at the insanity she indulged in to keep from going mad.

It wasn’t working.

Not-thinking was her best hope. Work kept her mind occupied, but she was running out of cloth, and after speaking to Erasmus Nym, it was becoming impossible not to—

“Any chance you’re thinking of feeding me in the near future?” The duchess’s voice came from the other room. Even muffled by the only door in the ruin, the duchess was loud. And she talked a lot. “I know I could stand to eat a bit less, but there is a difference between a diet and starvation.”

Mercator pulled up the cloth, let it drip, and studied it carefully.

Good enough.

Once upon a time, good enough was never acceptable. Mercator used to fuss about such things, but once upon a time she’d been younger. Age, she realized with some regret, had diluted her need for perfection. Passion, they called it. Everyone placed such high value on an intensity of spirit, but it was like the dye: valuable when focused, limited, and used properly. She looked down at herself—but what good is anything when randomly splattered? The young were fountains of energy and vigor, running blind sprints into imagined lands. Mercator was done with races.

I’m also done with this cloth.

She dropped it into a vinegar bath.

One more thing that makes this place smell so grand.

“In case you forgot, food is a plant or animal that can be consumed,” the woman bellowed through the locked door. “It’s required to live. Did you know that? Some people even enjoy the process of eating. They do it every day. More than once, even.”

“Salt,” Mercator said.

“What? What did you say? Did you say salt?”

“Yes, salt. It’s a rock, a mineral. Neither plant nor animal and it must be consumed to live. It’s the only rock you can eat, and you have to consume it in order to survive.”

“True enough, but it doesn’t quite fill the belly like a good roasted leg of lamb, now does it? People eat all kinds of things that aren’t filling. You can eat gold, too.”

“Gold is a metal and definitely not required to sustain life. No one would ever eat that.”

“I have.”

Mercator was wiping her hands and arms on the blue-stained towel she kept near the pots. She stopped and stared at the closed door that separated the outer room from the little chamber where they kept the woman. She had tried to refrain from speaking to the prisoner. At first, it was important that the duchess know as little about them as possible. As the days dragged into weeks, trying to avoid the woman was just pointless. “You’re joking, right?”

“No, I’m not. Chefs make it very thin and lay it on top of chocolate cakes.”

“You disgust me.”

“Well, I can’t say it’s my favorite, but when it’s served at the dinner of an important potential partner, one shouldn’t insult the host by turning up one’s nose, now should one?”

“People are starving all over the world, and rich people eat gold?”

“I know, I know! It’s a ridiculous thing to do. I can assure you it wouldn’t be my first choice. I’d much rather dine on a fine steak or perhaps a goose. Oh yes, what I wouldn’t give for a roasted goose, one where the skin has been crisped to a caramel brown. Perhaps some oysters and mussels in a butter-wine sauce. You know, there are easier ways to kill me than starvation.”

“You’re not starving. It takes more than a month to die from lack of food. Being a person who consumes gold, I would expect you to be more learned.”

Mercator took the cloth out of the vinegar rinse and hung it up on the line that ran the length of the area under the dome. A curious choice for a roof, it was the dome that made Mercator assume the little ruin had once been a church because the only other dome she’d seen was the one over the altar of the grand cathedral of Rochelle. This little dome above Mercator’s dye industry was made of crude interlocking stones the same as the walls. While the ruins were ideal as a hidden workshop, the site also dripped with ancient mystery. All of Alburn was that way, and Rochelle was its graveyard of inconvenient secrets.

The duchess was one of those, and becoming more inconvenient by the minute. “And why do such a thing?” Mercator asked. “Why eat gold at all? What’s the point? It doesn’t benefit you, and it can’t taste good. So why?”

“Same reason people live in houses with too many rooms, have more clothes than they can wear, and ride down the block in a horse-drawn carriage rather than walk. Only the very rich can afford such things, so they use these extravagances to demonstrate to others the height of their status.”

“But everyone already knows you’re rich.”

“You’d think that, but there is one very important person that everyone wishes to impress. Someone who rarely gets the message of a person’s true worth. People will go to any lengths, like eating gold, to convince this person that they have value.”

“And who is that?”

“Why, ourselves, dear.”

Such an odd woman.

They had abducted her in a desperate gamble to change things. But it didn’t seem to be working. And if something didn’t happen soon, everything would fall apart. So many depended on Mercator, and she felt like she was letting them all down.

Things will improve. I’m going to make it better. That’s my responsibility as matriarch of the Sikara. I owe that to my grandfather and his father before him.

She had told Seton that spring was coming, but Mercator had failed to explain what that could mean. Villar will have his way, all because I . . . because I . . .

This isn’t helping.

She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. She felt weak, even a little dizzy. Her stomach ached. She looked at the duchess’s door and frowned. Maybe it was time to eat.





At first, Genny believed the poor quality and extremely small portions of food had been a tool to weaken her, make her more pliable and easier to control. She had since revised that theory. They’re doing it out of spite.