EMBER’S POV

The warmth that flooded the shop a moment ago thins, just slightly, and the two of them lean over the cracked page together, and that silent forty-one-year conversation passes between them again, except this time there’s no delight in it.

This time it’s careful. Almost wary.

“We don’t carry that,” Penelope says.

“You don’t carry it, or you can’t get it?”

“We don’t carry it.” She straightens, and her pale eyes have changed, studying me now in a different way, a way that lifts the hair on my arms. “That’s not a Western herb, girl. That’s not anything compounded this side of the world. It’s old. It’s eastern....