The Weight of Peaks
The Lower Gardens market woke before the sun did, the way it always had for as long as anyone in Peakis could remember. Vendors hauled their carts up from the storage caves beneath the terrace walls while the sky above the city still held the bruised purple of night, and by the time the first proper light spilled over the eastern peaks, the market had already swelled into its familiar roar—hawkers calling prices, chickens shrieking in their crates, the clatter of copper pots being stacked into towers that never quite stopped wobbling.
Lira loved it and hated it in equal measure, the way she loved and hated most things about her city.
She moved between the stalls with a basket balanced on her hip, though she had no real intention of filling it. The basket was a prop, a piece of armor that let her walk unbothered through crowds where a young woman alone might otherwise draw the wrong kind of attention. She used it to linger near the dye-sellers, whose bolts of cloth hung in ribbons of saffron and indigo above their heads, and near the incense merchants, whose smoke curled up in grey threads toward the terraces above, where the upper city sat glittering and remote, a jeweled crown…