Chapter Eight
“Ow! Ow! She stabbed me! She stabbed me!”
My attacker is screaming behind me like a child.
No, not just like a child.
They are a child.
“I’m dying. I’m dying! Help! HELP!”
The child bends over, clutching his stomach. He’s a boy or maybe a short-haired girl, skinny and no older than twelve or thirteen. His ratty tunic is rapidly turning from tan to blood red.
I look around the alley, but no one is there. The market is close. I’m not sure anyone could have heard him over the noise.
I should run. The guards will be here soon, and how am I going to explain stabbing a child in an alleyway when I’m supposed to be getting dressed for dinner in the palace?
But if I leave him, he could die. Judging by the position of the quickly growing patch of blood, I’ve missed his kidney, but I know a wound like this can still kill a man if not treated quickly, let alone a little boy.
Oh gods, what have I done?
“Hold still,” I say. I’ve got to try to stop the bleeding. I can’t cauterize the wound like Adria, but I can slow it down enough to get him to a nature-born healer or an alchemist. I pull a handkerchief from my pocket and try to press it on him.
“Keep away from me!” he yells. Then he shouts again over my shoulder: “She stabbed me!”
“Quit your yelling, foolish boy, and hold still as she says.”
I jump at the voice. It’s the low, gravelly voice of a grown man, but I hadn’t heard anyone coming.
I really need to learn to watch my back.
I turn to the voice and try to explain. “I didn’t know it was a boy; he had a knife at my—”
“I saw,” he says to me and pushes me out of the way. “What have I told you, boy?”
The boy just whimpers as the man leans down to look at the wound.
It’s clear from the man’s attire he isn’t a guard. He wears a worn tunic as well, though his is much nicer than the boy’s. It’s made of a rich brown fabric and belted, with a sword sheathed at his waist. Its pommel is plain and unpolished, possibly the standard-issue sword of Selaran soldiers.
The man and the boy must know each other. They’re probably in whatever I just stumbled into together.
When the man looks up at me, I nearly gasp.
His entire face has been badly injured. It’s healed now, but a violent slash runs from his left brow all the way across his cheek and his mouth to his chin.
He wears a patch covering his left eye, undoubtedly lost to the same wound.
His nose has been fractured in at least two places, and the skin on the right side has the melted look of a severe burn.
War wounds, I’m certain of it. There are those among our own people who look like this, who had to make do with battlefield medicine and dwindling elixirs near the end of the fighting. With injuries this severe, he’s lucky to be alive.
“I suppose you’d like this back,” he says, and he gently pulls my dagger from the boy’s stomach.
The boy cries out and squirms in pain.
I take my dagger from the man, wiping the boy’s blood off with my handkerchief, but my eyes are fixed on the boy. He’s bleeding heavily now—removing the dagger was a mistake. I nearly open my mouth to tell the man he’s killing him, but he holds his hands over the bloody wound.
I don’t smell burning, so he must be nature-born, but I’m not sure nature magic, as powerful as it is, could heal a wound like that quickly enough to save his life.
I also wonder why the man, if he has nature magic, didn’t use it to heal himself from his own wounds, although maybe he wasn’t conscious to do so until too late.
“It hurts, it hurts,” moans the boy, but by the time the man removes his hands, the bleeding has stopped.
“Go on, boy. And don’t let me catch you with that knife again.”
To my astonishment, the boy gets right back on his feet. I’ve had wounds healed by a nature-born before, and it’s typically slow and painful. It can take days for an injury to heal without an alchemical elixir to speed the process.
The boy stumbles away from us. He’s favoring his wounded side a bit, but no more than if I’d punched him rather than stabbed him.
“How can he walk?” I ask the man. “The wound went deep.”
“You didn’t hesitate, did you?” says the man, not answering my question. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”
I suppose I’m surprised as well. I should have run ages ago. I should run now.
The man sizes me up, and I do the same. He’s a good bit taller than me, but not enough to tower over me, although that appears to be due to his hunched left shoulder more than anything else.
I can’t tell how old he is, but I don’t see any gray in the brown hair that’s visible beneath his flat cap. I’d guess thirty, maybe less.
He doesn’t seem threatening, but I can’t imagine anything good he could have been doing with a child in a darkened alleyway.
I start backing away from the stranger. Just because he helped the child doesn’t mean he won’t hurt me. “I’m just going to the market. I swear I didn’t know he was a child when I stabbed him—”
“I know. Nico thinks he’s a shadow rogue. I’ve told him it’s going to get him killed one of these days.”
The man grins. It’s a little hard to recognize beneath all the scars, but I’m fairly certain it’s meant to be friendly.
“I didn’t mean to be in your way. I’ll just let you get back to, you know, whatever—wait, did you say shadow? He’s a shadow-born?” He’s so young. My own magic didn’t settle until I was sixteen. Nico is thirteen at best. It’s not impossible, but it’s rare.
“One of a few in this neighborhood,” says the man. “And the best at keeping up with the gossip.” He flips a coin in his hand. “For a price, of course.”
He pockets the coin and then holds out a hand to shake. It’s covered in healed cuts, some of them quite deep. “Soren. Thank you for staying and trying to help him.”
“It was nothing,” I say. It truly wasn’t, considering I’m the one who stabbed him in the first place.
I don’t offer him my name, and he doesn’t ask for it. He does have one question for me though.
“Your accent. Nithyria?”
I nod slowly. It’s not going to be possible to conceal my background here entirely, especially not when I’m dressed in our leathers. There aren’t many Nithyrians in the capital, although that will be changing soon. Many of our people will be arriving for the festival.
Some of them might be bringing a few sharp objects along with them.
“I’d be careful in the market. There are some merchants who aren’t fond of your people.”
“I will,” I say. “I’m sorry again for the trouble.” I turn and walk towards the market, slightly worried that once my back is turned to him, he’ll pull a knife on me like Selarans are wont to do.
He doesn’t though. I’m halfway down the alley before he calls after me. “I could show you around.”
I stop and slowly turn to face him. Is this some kind of a trick?
He approaches then slows when I don’t reply. He holds up his hands to proclaim his innocence. “I don’t bite, I promise. I can show you which vendors to steer clear of.”
I pause. I don’t know why he would help me after what I’ve done to his…spy? His friend? I’m not sure, but I don’t read anything nefarious in his intentions.
What I do notice is his eyes lingering on my body.
I did say I was looking for someone to get into trouble with. I’d imagined a fire-born, but a nature-born would do. And I’ll admit that I find something appealing about his scars and the way that he helped the boy. And even if it doesn’t end up going that way, it would be nice to have a guide.
“Alright,” I say. “Lead the way.”
I give Soren a fake name—Hazel, a name I’d called one of my dolls when I was younger—and a somewhat ridiculous background story.
“I’m a traveling acrobat. I’m with a troupe performing in the Great Festival.”
I say this because it’s what I wanted to do the most as a child. A troupe of traveling performers came to the castle once a couple of years before the war began, and I begged my mother to let me leave with them the entire time they were in town.
Their lives seemed perfect. They went from town to town, all over the kingdom, and sometimes all over the world, and all they did was make people happy.
I had always been fearless of heights, and my balance was pretty good.
I thought I’d make a great acrobat. Though she refused to let me leave with them, Mother did let them teach me some of their routines.
It's enough to make a great lie.
“Will you perform in the palace?”
“I hope so,” I say. “That’s if we can manage to do well enough in the competition.”
I don’t actually know how the arts festival or competitions are going to work, but I doubt Soren does either.
It turns out he’s a merchant who imports rare items from overseas.
It’s a competitive business, and so he keeps tabs on his competition with the help of the boy and other shadow-born.
He knows these alleys well. I tell him he’d make a fine shadow-born himself, and he laughs far harder than my joke warrants.
And then he gets that look in his eye that tells me I was right when I noticed him looking at my body.
I like it.
When we turn the last corner into the market, I’m afraid the crowd might swallow me whole.
I’ve never seen so many people in my life. The markets in Kalla are tiny compared to this. There must be at least a thousand people in the square, maybe several thousand.
It’s noisy and crowded and there are a million different smells in the air.
Fish, meat, strange herbs and spices I can’t place, some of them genuinely disgusting.
When we pass one stall, the smoke that comes from it is so strong I cough violently.
I can barely see anything over the crowd, and I can barely hear Soren even as he stands right next to me.
I love it immediately.
“This way,” says Soren. He takes my hand and cuts through the crowd with a finesse that could only come from years of experience, leading me to an area that’s a bit more open.