Page 10 of The Fifth Life of Alicia
She’d had excellent taste. I hadn’t been much of a dress girl in my last life, but I couldn’t wait to dive into her wardrobe.
My dress today resembled a blouse and skirt more than anything, with a white off-the-shoulder bodice with short floaty sleeves and a light blue skirt that clinched in at my waist. The hem of the skirt was embroidered with a pretty floral pattern, and Bella had affixed a matching blue flower accessory to my hair.
I looked every inch the noblewoman, which was why I’d requested two cloaks from Bella earlier today.
I didn’t want to be recognised where I was going.
Not until I needed to be, anyway.
I got into the carriage with the helping hand of the coachman and took my seat. Bella quickly followed me, pausing only to relay my instructions of where to go to the coachman.
He glanced at me with surprise but said nothing as he secured the carriage door. Really, even him looking at me like that was cause for admonishment in this world given how strict the social hierarchy was, but I just wanted to get this show on the road.
Acting like the perfect noblewoman was going to be hard as it was.
“Are you sure that’s where you want to go, my lady?” Bella asked, fidgeting with her pouch in her lap. “It’s quite out of the way and not where you usually go.”
I nodded. “There’s something I need to find out. Do you have the cloaks?”
She opened the basket next to her and handed me one. “It seems dangerous.”
“Would I ever put you in danger, Bella?”
“Of course not.”
I smiled. “Then relax and trust me. I promise you that where we’re going is perfectly safe.”
“Yes, my lady.”
I understood her apprehension since the area that I’d instructed the coachman to take us to wasn’t the kind of place nobles walked around freely, but it was vital I went there today.
I had the one thing I needed to survive here—vast knowledge of this world. Information here was traded, and to get such a thing, one went to information guilds. They took on many shapes and sizes. Some were disguised as fancy tea houses, some were trading companies, and others were just downright hidden.
The ‘downright hidden’ type was where I was headed.
Illusion was the most infamous of all the information guilds in the empire. It could get the kind of info that others could only dream of with unimaginable speed and discretion. While it was fronted by a tea house, it was a rundown, shabby space in the poorer side of the town that not many people knew about—and even fewer knew of what it hid behind a magical passageway.
In the book, Alicia happened upon the guild master, Ezra, after she’d already married Kalon. She and her knights saved him from bandits, and he promised to pay her back whenever she needed it. She’d eventually called that favour in to get information on Lillia to destroy her.
It was almost impossible to get a meeting with him, and he kept his identity shrouded in mystery. Even Alicia hadn’t known that Ezra was the guild leader—she’d always been under the impression that he merely worked there. His appearance in the book had been fleeting, and I couldn’t remember him ever showing up again. Even when Lillia and Torin had visited later on, he’d only allied with them from the shadows, speaking to them via one of his men.
This time, I would be the one making the first move.
Information was the key to changing my fate. I knew meeting him would be hard, but I had a trick up my sleeve.
I knew exactly who Ezra was and what he did in his free time, thanks to the book, and I was counting on that to get me the meeting I wanted.
I wasn’t above a little blackmail.
The carriage came to a stop, and I met Bella’s eyes. “Are we here?”
“I think so,” she replied, eyeing the door.
Two knocks rapped at it. “We’ve arrived, my lady,” the coachman said.
“Put on that cloak,” I instructed Bella. “And don’t say a word, do you understand?”
“Of course.”
