The market at the eleventh hour was a different animal from the market at dawn.
The morning vendors had their rhythm by now, the stalls running at full capacity, the noise a specific layered thing — haggling voices, the crack of cleaver on block, the specific high ring of metal weight measures hitting stone counters. The smells had accumulated into something dense and warm. Spiced oil and smoke and the sweet thing Vane still could not name that came from the third row's southern end.
Mara had been in it since the ninth hour.
He found her at the dry goods section, standing in front of a stall that sold eastern spices in small ceramic containers arranged by region of origin. The vendor was a woman in her sixties with the specific quality of someone who had been answering questions about her products for forty years and had developed strong opinions about the quality of the questions.
Mara was asking good questions.
