House of Winter

Chapter 24, Part 1

SANNA

"With hair this dark, you're a Kaio girl," the shopowner said. Her Norrlish had a strong Kaio accent, but hearing the Norrlish language was the closest to home that Sanna had felt in weeks.

Sanna glowered at her own reflection in the dirty mirror hanging in the shopowner's small room above her shop.

She'd approached the harbourside town without her wolf Sigrún or Jinni. The town was built in a haphazard manner along the harbour, with most of the buildings connecting to a pier. There was a street with market stalls, and Sanna had walked through the small crowd of Kaio people with a scarf wrapped over her hair and her eyes lowered, hoping that no one thought she looked out of place.

She'd spotted the woman trading silver. Her wares were spread out on a cloth over a table outside her house, and she kept a trained eye on anyone walking past. Sanna had approached the woman and held out her silver wolf necklace in silence.

The woman had said something in Kaio to her, but Sanna hadn't understood, until the woman had cocked her head, narrowed her eyes, and then asked her if she spoke Norrlish.

"Sredsibirsk traders often speak Norrlish," the shopowner explained. When she grinned, Sanna noticed that one of her front teeth had been replaced by a silver tooth. It gave her grin an unhinged quality.

"My family has traded minerals with the Norrlish for generations, until the Burning King forbade it. My parents taught me Norrlish when I was young, because they thought the trade restrictions wouldn't last this long. You're Norrlish, aren't you? In Sredsibirsk we often see children like you."

Sanna refused to say anything about her heritage. "How much for the necklace?" she asked.

"It's worth more than I can give you," the woman admitted. "I don't have the coins, and I'm guessing you don't want to trade for more silver."

Sanna bit her lip.

"What do you need?" the woman asked.

"I need information about the refugee camp."

At this, the woman took a step back. "That's all?"

"Well," Sanna said, gripping the necklace to her chest. "If you can tell me about the refugee camp, perhaps we can work out a trade."

The woman ran her tongue along her silver tooth. Then, in a practised move, the woman swept the cloth from her table, so that all of her silver wares were pulled up into a sack of the cloth. She hitched the jingling sack over her shoulder and said, "Follow me. I have tea."

Sanna followed the woman from the street into her shop. It was a workroom, Sanna realised, with tools for working metal. There was indeed tea, in a kettle that hung above a hook on the fire. The woman steeped it and poured two mugs, then offered Sanna a seat.

"They've been here about a week," she said, as they sat down. "A few of us have taken food to them, and we've managed a few words with them. One of the old sailors speaks Vastien, so he talked to them. He said they were trying to flee the Lombardian ships and they got caught in a storm and then attacked by sea monsters. They don't have any dragons, you see, so their ships weren't protected. I thought all Vastien fleets had a good pair of dragons to protect from sea monsters. Even our Fire ships have at least one water starrling on board with a dragon. But this lot are just from some tiny Vastien island. They just had fishing boats, nothing strong enough to survive a long journey."

"But there is a dragon in the camp," Sanna said.

"Well, yes, that dragon came later," the woman said. "It didn't wash up with their fleet. It arrived last night."