Satisfied that her greedy stomach would soon be filled with the treats she had squirreled away, Lyssia made her way over to a section of the Mart where goods besides food were laid out for inspection. Most tables were a jumbled mess. No craftsmen made only one good.

The people here were just as eager to offer her gifts, but they were also more quick to look her in the eye and reached for her hand when they offered her a blessing. Her efforts at appearing approachable were paying off. She was pulled in multiple directions by hands eager to claim her attention.

"Drottine Lyssia, I have something lovely over here. True silver. Try it on."

"My lady, a gift for you. It is made from the softest lamb wool."

"Drottine, my family and I are about to sit down for a meal. We would be honored to have you join us."

"Oh no...I'm not...Thank you, but I can't…"

Lyssia feared for a minute that she was going to be overrun with well-wishers. Perhaps it had been better when she was surrounded by people too nervous to approach her.

"Please, we have more than enough. I made the stew myself this morning."

She was trying to step out of the path of the woman who seemed about ready to drag her to her family’s dinner table. Lysia had managed to wave off everyone else, but this woman was persistent. She was flitting around Lyssia like a magpie who had found a shiny treasure. It did not help that she wore a dainty half-mask over her eyes that flared up on the edges like wings. It was not hard for Lyssia to imagine it had a beak as well.

"Drottine."

Lyssia turned to see who was trying to claim her attention now. The woman who had approached her from behind was gray-haired, two head shorter than her, and had a face that was more familiar to Lyssia than her own.

"Seaka," she sighed in relief.

Seaka muttered something under her breath and then chuckled softly. Lyssia frowned and started to lean down toward her, but Seaka turned her back on Lyssia and addressed the magpie-woman with a pointed glare.

"If I were you, I would not forget who this girl is. She might forget, but we cannot."

Lyssia ducked her head at Seaka’s words. They sounded too close to what her father had told her, and she wasn’t ready yet to let her mind return to the stead.

The magpie-woman shook her head as though waking from a dream and dropped into a curtsy so deep her knees creaked in protest. "My apologies, Drottine. Please forgive me. I hope you do not take offense."

Lyssia frowned at the way her voice shook at the end. She held up her hands, keeping them close to her body but palms out in a forgiving gesture. "Of course not. But I have some…" Lyssia's eyes followed Seaka as she took off down the path without even a last parting glance. "...some business to attend to with the Lach. Excuse me. Vas heill et adhuil," she murmured, patting the woman's shoulder as she passed her.

"Yes, and to you, too, Drottine. Vas heill!" Her voice was full of warmth again, but she did not move a muscle until Lyssia was well past.

"Lach Seaka! Seaka, wait!"

Lyssia thought at first that the old woman couldn't hear her, but then she saw Seaka throw a glance over her shoulder and pass into the shadows behind a rose-colored tent. Lyssia quickened her pace.

"For you," Seaka said without preamble when Lyssia stopped before her. She held out a pot identical to the one that sat on Lyssia's desk.

"Thank you, but I don't need any more yet."

"You will." She waited only long enough for Lyssia's hand to wrap around the pot before taking off again.

Lyssia fumbled with her bags, trying to work the pot into a corner where it would be safe. By the time she caught up with Seaka again, she was babbling away as though Lyssia had never left her side.

"...good food. But I have a hard time listening to the prattle. I can't. You...you understand?"

She peered at Lyssia sidelong, and Lyssia nodded. "Yes. Uh…Watch out." Lyssia took her arm and guided her around a gaggle of children that crouched over something in the middle of the path.

"I can't do it. But was there something you meant to ask me, Drottine?"

"No, I...I only wished to know how you are. Do you have many clients? You have been away from the stead for a while. I have missed you."

Seaka patted her hand, carefully extricating herself from Lyssia’s hold. "There there now. No need to carry on. I'm fine."

"Good." Lyssia let the conversation lapse, eyeing the path Seaka was leading them down. Lyssia had heard what people at the stead whispered when Seaka visited. She is too old. She is losing her mind. She is becoming grouchier by the day. But no one refused her services, because she was the most knowledgeable healer in the western half of Ivana. Perhaps in the eastern half as well.

Lyssia did not put much stock in what people said though. Seaka was a constant fixture in so many of her childhood memories. In her well-informed opinion, Seaka was the same as she had always been. A little grouchy, a little scatterbrained, but brilliant and kind and someone whom she loved.

Lyssia bit her tongue and refused to ask the old Lach if she knew where she was going, but she could not stop the rush of relief she felt when she heard someone call out, "Mistress Lach!"

A man rushed out of a tent to their left and stepped into their path. "Mistress Lach! You have brought the remedy for my mother?"

"Yes, yes. I have it." Seaka patted the satchel at her waist, but the man wasn’t looking at her.

He had recognized Lyssia, and he shifted to give her his attention. "Drottine."

"Karlsman." Lyssia gave a polite nod of her head and deliberately turned back to Seaka.

"Are you ready to discuss price?"

"I don't know how much we...but it doesn't matter. We need the remedy."

"Don’t worry. We will work something out."

Seaka reached out to pat his arm, much like she'd patted Lyssia's hand earlier when she felt Lyssia had gone on too long. She and the man started for the back portion of his tent, which had been sectioned off with a blanket drape. Lyssia started to follow them but hesitated before stepping through the narrow doorway.

"Drottine-saedhirte."

Princess Sweetheart.

Lyssia turned to face the woman who had left her seat in the front of the tent and was shuffling toward her. She was bent over a short pine cane. Her gray hair fell wild like a winter river over her shoulders, hanging just shy of the floor, but someone had taken the time to braid a section down the middle and weave shiny blue and brown beads into it. Her face was even more lined than Seaka's, but when she tipped it up to squint at Lyssia's eyes, Lyssia saw that she had earned twice as many laugh lines as frown lines.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Drottine...Erinasdaughter."

Lyssia's throat constricted around her response.

"You are she. Are you not?"

"I---" Lyssia swallowed and tried again. "I am. Though I am not called by that name often."

The woman nodded thoughtfully and placed a hand over her heart as if she understood more than Lyssia said. Then she sighed and leaned into her cane.

"May I help you back to your seat?" Lyssia asked.

The woman said nothing but placed her other hand on Lyssia's arm and followed her back to the tent. She had been perched on a bench, not a chair, and she did not let go of Lyssia's arm when she sat. Lyssia had no choice but to sink down onto the bench beside her.

The woman leaned to the side to grab ahold of her grandson’s ear and pulled him down to whisper something in his ear.

“For you, daughter of the mountain.”

The boy returned with a black bag tied with a drawstring, which the woman motioned for him to open. Her hand disappeared into the bag and withdrew a long silver chain.

Lyssia gasped in awe before she would see what was engraved on the circular pendant. The stamp of Ilvana had been carved into the brilliant medal surface, and around the tallest peak curved a creature akin to a thick snake with a long tail, four clawed feet, and a pointed snout.

“A Drakun. For strength. For wisdom. For you.”

“Oh no. I...I couldn’t,” Lyssia said automatically, but she was already reaching out to touch the minuscule Drakun.

Her hand closed around the pendant quickly, and she stuffed it into her bag before she could stop herself. “But I will trade for it.”

She withdrew her last necklace - a long piece that she had spent hours designing from the smoothest gray pebbles she could find, polished and strung together with a gray-blue peregrine feather hanging straight down in the middle.

Her head hung as she looked at it. It was not near as well crafted as the necklace she had just accepted. She wanted to shove it back into her bag and hurry away to hide her embarrassment. But the woman held out her hand, and when Lyssia laid the necklace on her palm, she closed her fingers around it and clutched it to her chest.

The next moment, it was hanging around her neck. Lyssia watched her arrange the drape of the necklace with a curious smile on her lips.

"Thank you. Vas heill, Drottine-saedehirte."

"Karlswoman, I also have this." Lyssia fumbled for her bag of coins. She extracted three copper coins with holes stamped in the middle of them and offered them to her.

"No. No. It is enough." She ran her hand along the necklace of stones, refusing to accept the coins.

Lyssia examined the stubborn tilt of the woman's chin as she weighed the coins in her hand, thinking. Then slipping all but one back into her bag, she plucked four strings from the loose edge she had been feeling blindly all day on the inside of one of her bags.

The strings were too short for a necklace, but she twisted them together to form a loose cord, slid the coin onto its length, and tied it around the grandson's wrist.

"For good fortune," she said, pressing her fingers against the coin and feeling the boy's racing pulse. He stared at the coin and ignored Lyssia until his grandmother poked him in the back with her cane and he remembered to bow his head and thank her.

Lyssia went to check on Seaka but she had already left to complete another errand. The woman's son was smiling and relaxed, so he must have struck a good deal with Seaka.

Lyssia turned away from the tent then and her eyes landed on a table laid with a variety of cheese rounds. Her breath rushed out of her and she paused with her hands fisted in her skirt waiting, waiting, waiting…

No magical tingling enveloped her. The heavens did not open and pour a rain of contentment down upon her. She began to feel silly for standing there staring intently at a hole in one of the cheese wheels, and she giggled to herself.

That warmed her throat pleasantly, so she laughed again, louder. She retrieved the silver necklace and threw the chain around her neck, clutching the pendant to her heart. It seemed that contentment had snuck up on her a long time ago. Perhaps even before she had tried to sneak away, when her cousins welcomed her to their table, or when she had heard Azerian and their young friend playing together on the road to Mart.

She had been so intent on focusing on what was going on around her and ignoring her own thoughts that she had not recognized that emotion for what it was, nor the happiness that now bloomed to life as she felt the Drakun pendant settle in the hollow of her breastbone.

She giggled again and opened her eyes, coming eye to eye with a younger couple who stood close by, watching her with obvious worry. Lyssia smiled ruefully at them and shrugged, and they returned her gesture with slow smiles of their own.

"Vas Eda-Yute!" Lyssia exclaimed at the same time the man did. She bobbed a curtsy and hurried off before anyone else stopped to join them. She was thankful that her pink cheeks were hidden.

It was a difficult decision to make after her recent revelation, but there was nothing to do then but carry her acquisitions back to her horse and find her cousins. She had seen them loitering at the edge of her vision, occasionally turning to find them crossing her path but never getting too close. She had no doubt they would find her soon, so she let her feet roam along a new path that would lead her in the direction of her family's tent.

It was easier to wave aside gifts now that her bag was full, but they weighed her down and slowed her pace. The Drakun pendant knocked against her heart with each step. She would have to get used to the sensation, but it did not feel entirely uncomfortable.

She was still searching for the top of her cousins’ bright yellow tent when Azerian approached her from behind and took hold of her arm. Her heart jumped up into her throat at the unexpected contact and stayed there when she looked up and saw that his face was uncovered. He held two expressions in equal balance: mischief and care.

“You’ve found him?”

Azerian didn’t answer but guided her down a row of tents that led to an open area. Lyssia followed his gaze. Roakev was sitting around the edge of a marked-off area. It was the site of Jarl Steiner’s old sheep pen. The border was still marked with a chipped but evenly laid stone wall that stood only a foot off the ground. The dirt inside was churned and prepared for performances.

It was empty at the moment, but Lyssia was sure that this was the direction she had heard music from not long ago. It was not only meant as an area for musical performances but as a location to air out grievances. Men and women could arrange to enter the arena during Martdays and settle their disputes or grudges through combat. No steel weapons were allowed, and Azerian, who generally had more freedom to roam than her and more experience with the Mart, had assured her this was a tradition that was strictly upheld in honor of Ilvana’s history.

Once they had been a people who lived by the sword. Once Ilvana had been champions of conquest. Until the time of the Drakun Kongren. Now the people of Ilvana may have teeth and spines of steel, but they live through and by the peace they have formed with the land.

It was odd how passages from text or song could spring suddenly into her mind when she wasn’t even thinking about them. That cryptic passage was one of the few descriptions she had been able to find of the Old Age in the texts stored in Skald Bjarke's study. As the picture of the rolled book laid open before her faded from her sight, she felt a tug toward the stone arena. It was a pen maintained to hold in anger instead of animals, she thought and was surprised at the idea's appeal. She was generally not a fan of the displays of bravado that broke out often on the exercise yard when the Jarlssons were in residence.

Lyssia took a step forward, but Azerian pulled her back and turned her in the opposite direction. At the end of the row of tents was one set slightly apart. The tent itself was made out of a bright white cloth that stood out amongst the riot of color that surrounded it. Other, smaller differences marked it as a foreign-made design, but the color was enough to make her pause.

She did not see the man that Azerian had described, but a woman with pale yellow hair and wearing a heavy fur coat sat on a stool leaning up against the pole that supported the tent opening. She was working on something small and angular with her hands and smiling absentmindedly at passerby.

“That’s the trader’s tent?” she asked in a small voice.

“Try to contain your enthusiasm.”

“Sorry. I just...I…”

“Lys…” He stepped around to face her, worry creasing his brow. “Do you want me to take it?”

“No. I’ll do it.” She slipped a hand into the bag attached to her belt, pulled out the rolled letter, and clutched it to her chest along with her purse of coins. “He’ll recognize your name?”

“Yes, he will. And yours.”

Lys glared at him, and he held his hands up in a gesture of peace. Quick as a wasp sting, she hung her bags over his wrists, ignoring him when he winced and cried, “Hey!”, and danced away.

“...I’m going to meet him. Take a honeycomb. Stay here. Watch Roakev.”

His expression brightened at the mention of the honeycomb. “We’ll be here waiting for you.”

Lyssia nodded and started across the short distance between walking paths. She had almost reached the tent with the blonde-haired woman lounging out front when a commotion broke out behind her.

“You will fight!”

Lyssia whirled at the shout. Her heart beat triple time as she sprinted back toward where she had left Azerian. Oh Az, what have you done?