Valyne was starting to seriously question her life choices.
Not because she was riding into a foreign kingdom alone, or because she'd been given a mission with as many details as a blank scroll, but because she was stuck on a Synod trader ship, full of Shadows who treated personal space the way some people treated taboos: they acknowledged it existed and then wisely ignored it.
The ship itself was functional, sleek, and disturbingly quiet, like it was carved from midnight and built solely for moving suspicious goods and even more suspicious passengers. The wood groaned in all the wrong places, the crew spoke in all the wrong tones, and the entire thing smelled vaguely like someone had boiled leather and smugness into the hull.
