Page 68 of Legacy of Glass
“When I heard that,” Markus continued. “It got me curious, it did. As it might have done for anyone. So I asked around a bit.”
“And did you hear anything?” Julius asked.
Olivia also leaned forward. She had come to the market intending to ask Markus about that very topic—since he always seemed to know something about everything. But she couldn’t believe they had started on the topic without her needing to say anything.
“Well, now, that turned out to be mighty interesting,” Markus said. “Mighty interesting.”
He fell silent as another customer approached. The woman was seeking wares to take away with her, and she didn’t linger, leaving them alone again with Markus.
“Well?” Julius asked, clearly struggling to contain his interest.
“Rumor has it,” Markus said, “that in the last five years there has been a whole string of abductions—always girls between ten and eighteen.”
Olivia gasped, and Julius put a hand on her knee, out of sight of the general marketgoers. She looked down at it and then back at him. He wasn’t looking at her, but from the tension in his frame, he was clearly trying to warn her of something. But what? Was she not permitted a dramatic reaction to such a shocking piece of news?
Schooling her face into a calmer expression, she nodded with polite interest. Julius’s hand lifted from her knee, and she had to stop herself staring at the spot where it had rested.
“How many have been taken exactly?” Julius asked, although his tone and face suggested they were talking about the merest commonplace.
“Now, that’s hard to say.” Markus fetched a new cloth and began wiping the stall again. “Hard to pin down details, it is, since the families have all left the city.”
“What, all of them?” Julius asked. “Are you sure?”
Markus threw him a sharp look, and Julius murmured a hurried apology. Olivia looked between them again, her bewilderment growing.
“Why have I not heard of this before?” Julius asked instead. “If girls are being steadily spirited away from beneath our noses, surely my father has been informed.”
“As to that…” Markus hesitated. “I think you might find it hasn’t come to the palace’s ear. Even I hadn’t heard enough to join the dots together until I started looking.”
“But how is that possible?” Julius asked, taking another distracted drink.
“Perhaps because all the girls have been safely returned? Not a scratch on them, I heard.”
“They were returned?” Olivia forgot her confusion in her relief at that piece of information. “All of them? That’s very good news.” She was thinking of Marigold as she said it, although she was glad for the other girls as well.
“Depends who you ask,” Markus said cryptically, unconsciously echoing her own response to Bess on the beach.
“Were they all ransomed, then?” she asked. “What did their families have to give up?”
Markus gave her an approving smile. “I always thought you were a right one, lass. Good instincts. Aye, that’s the question.” He looked at Julius. “It was no easy feat getting answers, but my curiosity was well and truly awakened by the time it got that far, so I’ll confess I chased the matter down, despite no exact orders, so to speak.”
Orders? A startling possibility occurred to Olivia—one that might explain the strange mismatch between Markus’s manner and the intelligence she had recognized underneath.
“What did you find?” she asked, keeping her suspicions to herself for the moment.
“It’s what I couldn’t find that interested me,” he said. “There was plenty of talk of ransoms, but not a single account did I hear of any coin changing hands.”
“What sort of ransom could the abductors have demanded if not gold?” Julius wondered aloud.
“No one would tell me direct,” Markus said. “Most of them probably didn’t know. But I have a noggin of me own.” He tapped his head. “Every one of those poor girls was the daughter of someone running a small to medium-sized business—successful ones, mind you. Ones on the verge of expansion.”
Julius’s brows drew together. “And after the abductions?”
“Every one of the families moved out of the capital, leaving managers to run their businesses, and all thought of expansion was forgotten.”
Olivia’s eyes widened. It matched Bess’s story exactly.
“A business rival, then,” Julius breathed. “But why didn’t they make their complaints to the palace? I can understand if they were afraid to do so while the girls were still missing—I’m sure all sorts of threats were made. But after they had been recovered, they could have gone to the guards. With such a specific ransom, they must have had some suspicion who was behind the abductions.”
