target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter Twenty-Eight
To test a spell that predicts the future, try to murder the man selling it; if you can, it can’t. That, at least, was Leandra’s rationale for poisoning the smuggler’s blackrice liqueur.
On a secluded beach, they knelt and faced each other across a seaworn bamboo table. Above, a clear night sky crowded with stars and two half-moons. To Leandra’s left, a grove of slender palms, crosshatched moonshadows, short green grass. To her right, an expanse of dark seawater and lush limestone formations known as the Bay of Standing Islands.
Leandra’s catamaran rocked between two such limestone formations that rose narrow from the bay but widened into craggy rock, vines, and ferny cycads. “Mountains on stilts,” her illustrious father had once called the standing islands.
Across the table, the smuggler cleared his throat. Leandra, using several intermediaries, had agreed to meet him on this beach east of Chandralu. Both parties had asked that names not be used; however, as was the way of such meetings, neither party had asked that homicidal duplicity not be used. So Leandra picked up the smuggler’s porcelain bottle of blackrice liqueur. Calmly she poured the ambercolored spirit into his wooden cup.
He was watching her every action, but it was too late. She had already drawn a needle from her sleeve and held it against the bottle’s neck so the liqueur poured over its poisoned point. Then she filled her own cup, knowing the toxin had washed off.
The smuggler was a handsome man of middle years—flawless black skin, black goatee chased with silver, wide nose, large eyes. He wore a blue lungi and loose white blouse as if he were of the Lotus People, but his posture was laxer, his speech quicker than was polite in Lotus culture.
Also notable, the smuggler had wrapped a cloth around his head to conceal the spell he was selling. In places, a crimson glow shone through the headwrap. Because Leandra perceived some divine languages as red light, the glow suggested that the man was what he claimed to be—which is to say the kind of man that filled Leandra with hatred so molten hot that it would transform any sensible woman into an eye-gouging, throat-biting whirl of violence. Fortunately, Leandra was not a sensible woman.
She lifted her cup with one hand and flicked the needle away with the other. The smuggler did not hear it strike sand. “To your future,” she said.
“To your future,” he echoed. Blank expression.
With one draft, Leandra downed her blackrice liqueur. It was a fragrant, gratuitously alcoholic substance. The Lotus People called it mandana and drank it when conducting religious ceremonies or business transactions. Having lived in the Ixonian Archipelago for thirteen years, Leandra had drunk gallons of the stuff without becoming accustomed to it. She wondered if anyone ever did.
The mandana traveled down her throat as liquid and up her sinuses as harsh, flavored vapor. Every inch from her stomach to nosetip burned as if scrubbed with astringent. Taste came last and started sweet like chewed sugarcane but then curdled into something that approximated honeyed monkey vomit.
Throughout the miniature alcoholic ordeal, Leandra kept her expression pleasant. Fortunate that she did; the smuggler was studying her. She wasn’t much to see, short and frail, wearing a long-sleeved dress