A wooden ladle scraped the bottom of an iron waste bucket with a sharp, rhythmic rasp.
Old Barnaby Holt stood over the metal pail in the small kitchen annex of Booth Nine, stirring a foul-smelling gray sludge. His one good arm moved with the fierce concentration usually reserved for refining high-grade breakthrough pills.
“More cinnamon,” Barnaby grunted, tossing a handful of brown dust into the slurry. “And pass me those charred skins from the hearth.”
Mina picked up a clay platter heaped with blackened sweet-potato peels, tipping them into the bucket.
Kaelen Vance lay stretched across two wooden benches near the pantry door, his head pillowed on an empty flour sack. He held a cup of warm clover tea in one hand and three torn strips of coarse paper in the other.
“Make sure you shred Lady Marianne’s confession,” Kaelen said, handing the parchment scraps to the old alchemist. “If Doran only finds the fight scene by the river docks, he might think it’s a water-aspect formula.”
Barnaby snatched the shredded pages from Book 3 of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride and jammed them into the sludge with his ladle.
“Using romantic trash as alchemy bait,” Barnaby muttered under his breath, shaking his head. “If my old master saw me doing this to an iron bucket, he would beat me with a fire poker.”
