The birds outside tweeted in a way that drove Jule’s patience to its end and she shot up in bed. She tossed the covers off and marched to the window. She slammed it, making the birds on the outside ledge take flight.

  “You motherf—”

  “What??” Ellio yanked awake at the sound, tumbling out of his bed and landing with an annoyingly loud thud between the two beds. “What happened??”

  “Nothing, Ellio!” Jule snapped. “Go back to bed!”

  He blinked at her from the floor, taking in the small room and what she was doing. “Did… something wake you up?”

  He grated on her nerves. “Nooooo, Ellio, what could possibly make you think that??”

  Ellio and her stared at each other a moment before he picked himself off the ground, brushed off his trousers, and sat back on the edge of his bed. “I sense some sarcasm.”

  A jittery annoyance overwhelmed her. “Fuck off! I was sleeping! And! The! Birds! Wouldn’t shut up!”

  He waited until her nerves simmered and she had time to get even further frustrated with her apparent overreaction. “You’ve never liked being woken up. I know.” He slipped back into bed when she didn’t respond. “I stayed up until this morning reading over those books,” he pointed to a stack of books on the table, “which you asked for, by the way. And I’m just now finally getting some sleep. So please, Jules.”

  Her foot tapped in rapid succession, slowly dying down as Ellio refused to entertain her further. “Fine! Sleep! Enjoy your peace now that I’ve shooed the birds away for you!” She pulled her dress over her gown, slunk her socked feet into her boots, grabbed her bag, and stomped towards the door. “You could at least thank me!”

  She slammed the door shut behind her. She breathed a few times, regaining her composure. Okay, perhaps she overreacted. She opened her eyes and pushed her glasses back up her nose and came face to face with two men who froze in the walkway, staring at her.

  “Lovely…” she cleared her throat, settling her tone. “Lovely morning, huh?”

  “Hmm, is it?” One laughed uncomfortably, shoving the man in front of him forward. They scampered off, laughing once they thought they were out of earshot.

  Well, it didn’t matter. Their reputation was already shot the moment Azhar decided to dance on the table in the great hall a few nights prior. It was fine, anyways. They’d leave Haasundra the moment they got a lead on the cure. The merchant group of Thelccea only arrived the day prior and weren’t opening their market to the public for at least a few more days. Once they did, she planned to find at least something or someone there that knew what she needed.

  For now, she’d take to the bookshops. They’d raided the library the last few days and found about as much help as they had in Winolin’s. Which was, well, basically nothing. She questioned why she’d even left Monx at this rate. The academy’s library was far more expansive than either library she’d seen here in Lanria.

  She grabbed a roll of bread from the guildhall’s kitchen and hurried out onto the streets. Even though it was early morning, the streets were already alight in activity. Fishermen sold their catches on the side of the street, competing with each other for less and less daud until someone finally took up their offers. She whirled around them and wove in between carts and crowds of people.

  An old man swept in front of a shop door. Above it hung a sign for books. She spoke to him briefly before entering the shop. He followed in after, setting his broom down behind the desk. She drew a finger across a familiar line of books; the same ones she’d seen in Winolin’s bookshops.

  She glanced at another shelf, finding a few local titles for various fields such as fishing and agriculture. A few books on sirens stood out, but she ultimately passed them over as they had little to do with her current mission.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  But where… where were the books from foreign lands?

  Another shelf yielded the closest results. A few books focused on language learning, though they were about learning Anu languages and not the other way around. A crude attempt to teach old Anu made her laugh a little. Her ability to read old Anu was how Taiga caught her in the first place. And he’d been right; if that book showcased the average ability to read Old Anu in Lanria, she had, indeed, stuck out like a sore thumb.

  “Excuse me.” Jule wandered to the counter.

  The old man looked up at her from his book. He said nothing, so she continued. “Do you have any books from abroad?”

  He blinked at her, glanced around the shop, then stared back at her. The silence made her uneasy, and she breathed a sigh of relief when he finally spoke. “Are you serious?”

  She paused. What did she say that could be mistaken for anything else? “Yes?”

  He groaned, folding the top corner of the page of his book and closing it. “Not from Haasundra, I take it?”

  “That obvious, huh?”

  “You mean aside from,” he waved towards her clothes vaguely before sighing. “We get a few of you occasionally, coming to the port looking for ‘exotics’ you can’t get elsewhere. Well, I’m sorry, but you ain’t going to find anything illegal in any local shop.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, processing the information. “Illegal?”

  He stared back. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “The…” he paused awkwardly, “the trading of books and written word is forbidden with nations from across the ocean.”

  Jule said nothing. The book peddler in Winolin said they couldn’t get permission for foreign books. Was it because the flow of these text was this tightly regulated? “Let me guess, only somewhere like Pall has permission to carry these books?”

  He nodded. “They go through strict screening with the Gale Order. And the easiest place to monitor those sorts of things is in Pall.”

  Why, then, did they even come to Haasundra?

  She groaned. The old man leaned back in his chair. “Look, girl, if you’re just looking for your little bit of danger, then—”

  “I’m not. I’m a scholar. I’m studying…” Well, she clearly couldn’t tell the truth. What did Taiga tell her? Something strange but believable enough to not be questioned further. “The… effects of natural disasters on magical creatures. I was looking to broaden my scope.”

  The old man narrowed his eyes at her for a moment before opening his book again. “If you don’t mind word-of-mouth, you may find more luck and… resources… from visitors to the port.”

  “Visitors.” There was the large merchant group that she planned to snoop around anyways. “Got it, thanks!”

  She left out the door before the store owner could say anything further. She thought back to the Thelcceans at the restaurant. Those people may not have spoken Anish, but surely there were some foreigners that lived in the port city. Those people may have stories or knowledge from abroad while speaking their tongue.

  And if she was lucky, they smuggled some books in, too.

  Jule smiled. Surely, right?

  When she returned to the guildhall, some smaller stone building compared to the luxurious one of Winolin, Jule walked up to the commissioner. Being the one in charge of accepting and paying out missions, they’d know best where foreigners lived in the city.

  “Foreigners?” A woman lounged back in her chair, balancing a pen between her nose and pursed lip. “Where they live?”

  Jule stifled annoyance. Did everyone in Haasundra have a habit of questioning every single thing she said? “Yeeeessssss.”

  Her lips curled down a bit at Jule’s response. “You’re from Winolin, right? New here. I suppose you might not know.”

  Jule rolled her eyes. Something else she did know, hmm? Next, someone was going to tell her that they breathed differently in Haasundra. Or that every resident was required to own three ducks. For purity’s sake, what else could she possibly not know?

  “Know, what??” She asked after an excruciatingly long pause.

  “Foreigners aren’t permitted to live here.”

  She blinked. “What? This is a port city. With the highest influx of trade from abroad on this side of the continent. What do you mean, there’s no foreigners living here? Trade groups would—”

  “They haven’t been allowed to settle in Lanria in a couple centuries, aside from a handful with patrons. And none of those live in Haasundra.”

  Patrons… Taiga said those were nobles giving special permission to a small group of outsiders. Jule and Ellio officially had a patron themselves; Duke Grephons. Getting in touch with another seemed… well, outside their ability. And one not only willing to talk to them but also have the exact information they needed was improbable at best. And either way, an absolute waste of time.

  What was going on in Lanria? No, she knew well enough. She just didn’t want to think about the implications of it. Queen Nolara had reigned for hundreds of years. And at some point, she’d put her country into extreme isolation of outside influence while masquerading as some great and powerful nation to those outside her realm of control.

  Jule sighed. She wasn’t some revolutionary. This wasn’t even her country. And well, Monx certainly wasn’t perfect either. Maybe what Lanria needed was exactly what Queen Nolara did. They were wealthy and stable, unlike most surrounding countries. She dismissed her concerns. For now, she’d wait for Thelccea’s merchants to open their market and make sure she found someone there she could talk to.