"If one more person tries to sell me a 'guaranteed lucky' fish head, I'm setting this whole street on fire," Pearl muttered, ducking under a string of drying nets that smelled like they'd been dead for a decade.
"That seems disproportionate," Malachi said.
"Does it?"
Larther's Landing hit all of us at once, the second we came down off the last hill and the road turned to cobblestone. Smoke and salt and frying oil. Voices in six different accents shouting prices over each other. Ships packed so tight along the harbor they looked like they were holding each other up, masts crossing overhead like a forest that had forgotten how to be a forest. Streetlamps flickered on as the sky went orange, each one glowing with the same soft, steady magic-light, and somewhere close by someone was playing a fiddle badly enough that I almost admired the confidence.
"We need a room," Kai said, raising his voice over a cart rattling past. "Before I fall asleep standing up."
