Chapter Eleven

Frosted Reflections

Elias’s last workweek of the year had been an agonizingly cold one, and he’d been left with no choice but to finally purchase a new coat. The heavy wool jacket’s earthy color was ironically claylike, but the tailored coat fit him better than anything he had ever owned. Perhaps more importantly, its upturned collar protected his neck from the city’s biting wind tunnels.

It was certainly the nicest garment he possessed—Bertrand’s hand-me-down white tie suit included—but such beauty came with a cost. The purchase had set Elias back even further from his goal of saving half his pay. Perhaps, he eventually conceded, the problem was the goal itself. Perhaps a better goal was to simply make more money.

Elias sighed a cloud of cold mist as he strolled down empty streets on his way home. It was hard to appreciate life’s small pleasures when big dreams occupied so much space. Alas, he knew no other way to be, and so the cost of his new coat weighed on him as heavily as the coat itself.

It had been left to Elias to close Fairweather Provisions that evening, a responsibility that included updating the books for Bertrand and locking away a rather profitable week’s worth of relics in the shop’s ironclad safe. Elias was surprised no one had ever broken into the business, but the Trader’s Guild ensured Hightown was well patrolled at all hours and temperatures (Lowtown was apparently another story). Also, burglary of a certain degree was a capital crime in Sailor’s Rise. As relics were God and king in the city-state, stealing was considered the worst kind of sacrilege.

Though night had fallen hours earlier—earlier than he was used to—the city’s countless oil lamps kept winter’s real darkness at bay. It had taken him a few months, but Elias finally realized he missed something about Sapphire’s Reach. He missed seeing so many stars.

On calm nights that beckoned wandering souls to the empty plains outside his hometown, stars had been his map of the world. There was a star that hovered over Acreton, just as another hovered over Sailor’s Rise. Every kingdom and every republic, every city and every town—each had a star shining above it.

There was so much to see in Sailor’s Rise, and yet so little when one looked up.

Elias looked up anyway. He was still thinking about Jalander’s letter and the mystifying questions it raised, questions that had hooked and now tugged at the edges of his mind, questions he had tried to dismiss as delusions. He knew deep down they were anything but, if only he could solve that stupid riddle.

He stopped in the middle of an empty plaza where the water fountain had frozen over. The full moon’s frosted reflection shined faintly on a window of thin ice. Naturally, he threw a snowball at it to see if the moon might break, but it was his snowball that turned to powder.

Elias passed through this plaza daily, but never had he seen it empty like this. His mother once said she never truly saw a place until she saw it empty. She had painted, his mom: landscapes that had always seemed more detailed than they revealed themselves to be upon closer inspection. On top of everything else, she had also taught her son how to draw, though they were opposites as artists. Whereas she found beauty in the mundane, Elias drew what could only be dreamed of.

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But not all answers were found in the stars. Take the alleyway in front of him. He had never noticed it before, hiding halfway between the glow of two distant oil lamps. Now that it had his attention, he struggled to look anywhere else. There was something about this alley, drawing him into its shadows.

Elias walked forward. Even with a good coat, he was still freezing out here, and more so with each passing minute. He balled both fists and crossed his arms as he moved beyond the reach of the plaza’s flickering lights. Perhaps there was real darkness in Sailor’s Rise, after all.

The winding alley turned sharply before twisting toward yet another direction. The entire backstreet felt unintentional, simply the space left over between crowded buildings. And yet many doors entered into the strange alley—apartments, small specialty shops. Indeed, the price of rent was steep in Sailor’s Rise. Faint light emanated from the occasional snow-cushioned window.

Another turn. Another twist.

Suddenly, Elias thought of the letter’s bewildering riddle. If you ever wish to speak, you need only follow the serpent’s path, it had read. A serpent’s path. A snaking alley. Could it be? He felt a tad foolish for entertaining the thought.

And then, to his surprise, Elias reached the end of Hightown.

The path turned sharply again, hugging the city’s sheer edge like a mountain trail. Elias could see wooden docks on either side of him, extending into the sky like futile roads to heaven. He was halfway between them from his current vantage point. Lowtown, meanwhile, was a distant sight down the mountainside, its cramped wooden buildings spilling over one another like brush in a forest of support beams, the docks of Sailor’s Rise its ever-present canopy.

Elias’s path was a few feet wide, but absent any railing, he kept as much distance from the cliffside as possible. It was not a fall he would likely survive. There were no oil lamps to light this rather perilous trail, though the full moon revealed itself once more, shining coldly over a sprawling mountain landscape.

He stopped to appreciate the view. How would she have painted this scene, he wondered? Some riddles would just have to remain unanswered. But there was one in particular he would solve tonight: the riddle that had led him here. When he turned back around, Elias finally found the thing he had been searching for.

The nondescript building looked like many others in Sailor’s Rise, like one more four-story stone apartment complex. Beside a white wooden door at the end of the structure, however, was a small silver plaque. The sign’s embossed symbol looked to Elias like a serpent coiled around the sun, or perhaps it was a luminous moon. Maybe it was something else entirely.

He approached the sign, squinting to read five words beneath the symbol. School of the Serpent Moon, they read.

Elias ascended three shallow steps and stood before the arched door.

He still wondered why that symbol looked oddly familiar. When he lifted his hand to knock, the answer was once again right in front of him.

His mother once explained to her son that his ring previously belonged to his father, that wearing it connected the three of them through the tragedy of time. The ring had a signet, but a large dent obscured its meaning.

There was no obscuring it now.

Elias ran his thumb down its silver scar and saw, beneath that old battle wound, a serpent coiled around the moon. He gave the ring on his finger a twist before knocking two steady knocks.

No one answered immediately. Elias nearly turned back, questioning whether it was too late for strange visitors to come knocking. And then he heard footsteps, the creaking of floorboards. The sounds stopped. An uneasy silence settled upon him like the weightless embrace of a fatal fall.

The door opened. Before him stood a man with dark skin, braided black hair, and eyes greener than eyes should be.

“Elias Fisher,” the man said.

“I go by Elias Vice now,” Elias replied. “Are you Jalander?”

The man chuckled a satisfied chuckle. “I knew you would find me.”

Elias furrowed his brow. “How could you possibly know that?”

Jalander beckoned him inside. “Because, Elias, you are a collector.”

Elias practically scoffed. What in heaven or hell could he afford to collect on his salary?